Language goals and frustrations

Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here.

Today, I want to talk about language learning goals and frustrations, but before I get into the subject I want to thank everyone that sent me those nice birthday greetings. It's very nice to hear from all of you. It's nice to feel that somehow I'm connected to a great community of people who share a common interest with me, which is language learning. I haven't been able to reply to all of you, but I do appreciate it very much. It's also encouraging to find out that quite a few people actually listened through to the middle of my video where I mentioned the fact that it was my birthday. For those of you who are curious, I am now 68. Now, I had lunch earlier this week with a college professor who is head of a language department in a university and he told me that a majority of students who enroll in Asian languages quit after the first year, which I was kind of surprised to hear.

Then I did some research on the Internet and, in fact, I wrote a blog post about this at my blog. You'll find the link to my blog in the description of this video. I discovered that the attrition rate -- the dropout rate -- on all kinds of language programs is very, very high. This is true whether it's online learning… They had an example in Australia where 94% of kids taking Mandarin Chinese in the school system didn't complete the program.

In the end, it ended up being Mandarin speakers teaching Mandarin speakers Mandarin because, in effect, the only kids that stayed in the program where Chinese immigrants who already spoke Mandarin. I guess they needed an easy credit. We have the same situation here. Getting back to this professor and our discussion, I said but why do they quit?

He said well, they discover how hard it is. It's a lot of work so they don't want to do it. During our conversation he also expressed some dissatisfaction with the recent trends in language acquisition that are moving away from grammar and it's more, as he put it, touchy-feely communication and stuff like that. Well, there are lots of fads in language instruction.

I'm not a great fan of the role playing. They have a thing in Canada called task-based language learning where they sort of create these false scenarios where you pretend you are the checkout person in a store or whatever it might be and people play roles. I don't believe in that. As you know, I believe in a lot of listening and reading as much as possible to subjects of interest. This becomes easier as you progress in the language and at some point you start speaking and, hopefully, you speak in situations that are meaningful to you and not artificial situations. That, to me, is an ideal scenario. What was interesting to me was this professor with this enormous dropout rate was mostly upset about the fact that students weren't prepared to put in the hard work, that language instruction was methodology or pedagogy was moving away from this traditional emphasis on grammar.

I thought to myself, I wonder whether at that university trying to figure out how to reduce the attrition rate -- the dropout rate -- whether that in fact would not be a worthwhile subject of inquiry. I should add that one of the comments, I think on Facebook where my blog article about this dropout rate appeared, was a student who said that he was studying Russian and the teacher came in on day one and said class, you're going to be doing a lot of writing, a lot of memorizing and that's the only way you're going to learn.

He found this message quite discouraging. So I thought to myself, how do we encourage people to stay with a program? Beyond that, what is the goal? What is the goal of someone taking an Asian language, Russian, Spanish, whatever it might be in a university, a school and so forth, what are they trying to achieve. The assumption with this sort of role playing is that they want to be a checkout girl in a supermarket or they want to develop some very specific skills for specific functions.

I've always felt that that was not really that useful because, even if you have a script for a specific function, you can't control what's going to come at you and so, actually, you need a much larger knowledge base in order to be able to cope with these apparently simple tasks. So what are the possible goals in a university program?

Well, universities offer programs in things like music appreciation, gender studies, art, the history of art. I mean these programs are not necessarily aimed exclusively at the person who is going to become a curator at an art museum or a music critic for a newspaper, it's just general education. Now, I have often been critical of the way we fund our universities because a lot of this general education, if the person is genuinely interested, that person can acquire much of that education on their own as is, of course, the case also with language instruction. But getting back to the idea of goals, if the goal say in a Russian program is to make the person stay with it, enjoy it, get a sense of the language, get a sense of the culture, be able to access some of the works of the culture, I think all of those things would be very meaningful.

To try and enforce the absolute correct production of all the cases and the aspects of verbs in Russian upon someone who has had going into it essentially no exposure to Russian, seems to me guaranteed to discourage the majority of students. A small minority who are very motivated will pursue it and will also go out and get the other input that they need. It just struck me that the goal at the university should be how do we retain these people?

How do we make it interesting for them? How do we provide them with something that they can take away from this year, or eventually, hopefully, four years, that's going to be beneficial to them? Those that after two or three years really want to hone their Russian skills, at that time it's not too late to go in there. For those that really want to be translators or interpreters fine, do something for them, but the emphasis on correct production of the language and forcing on them a lot of rote memorization, writing exercises and so forth when the majority of them are not going to be using Russian in any case and with the result that the majority quit, that strikes me as not a very good approach. Furthermore, a university program like here in Canada, students pay around three to $5,000, depending on which program and which province they're in, whereas the cost of a university education is probably around $30,000.

I mean the universities charge foreign students $26,000 and claim that they cover their cost. I don't believe them. I'm assuming that it's at least $26,000. At any rate, it's not worth quibbling. Typically, students have five courses in a year. Therefore, if one of them is a language course, that course costs someone, the taxpayer or someone, four or $5,000 and if the majority of students quit, then for the majority of students, that four or $5,000 is simply thrown away. Now, since the taxpayer picks up 80% of the bill, I don't think students should be allowed to take these languages courses, unless they have demonstrated that they have the willpower, the commitment, the interest, to actually stay with it and the best way to do that is to give them some kind of self-learning system like LingQ.

But not just LingQ, it could be anything. Rosetta Stone, it doesn't matter, Assimil. Demonstrate first that you are interested enough in this language that you are going to stick with it. Once you've demonstrated that, then you are allowed to apply for the language program. Now, of course, if the students are paying their own shot then that's fine, they can pay for it, but if the taxpayer is paying for it there should be some requirement.

We once dealt with a company in France, a large company that offered language training to their employees, but only to those that had for six months stayed with some kind of distance or online or self-learning program to demonstrate their interest. I think this only makes sense, but again, it comes back to the goals. What are we trying to achieve? I think in my own case, Russian, Czech, the languages that I've been learning, dabbling in Korean and stuff like that, I'm doing it for my own enjoyment to access the culture, to broaden my horizons and my perspectives, to go to the country and communicate.

I don't have to nail down every case ending in order to derive significant benefit. Maybe students should be asked, what is your goal? Why are you studying this language? Is it because you're interested in the culture? In which case, we don't need to be so heavy-handed on enforcing absolutely correct production of the language, especially if it turns out that that discourages learners. So I think wherever languages are taught, given the high dropout rate, frustration rate, attrition rate, the number one consideration should be how do we keep people motivated.

How do we keep people with the program? If people put in the time and if they are motivated, they will learn. They will learn. They may not become perfect, but under the existing system most of them drop out. So it seems to me, time for another approach. Dare I suggest LingQ? Thank you for listening, bye for now.