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Back to Basics. Bled Slovenia 21-25 October 2012. Welcome. This seminar marks 18 years of annual professional seminars designed to standardize military language education and training in support of NATO exercises, operations and staffing. Theme: Back to Basics. Adaptive Active Formal
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Back to Basics Bled Slovenia 21-25 October 2012
Welcome • This seminar marks 18 years of annual professional seminars designed to standardize military language education and training in support of NATO exercises, operations and staffing. • Theme: Back to Basics
Adaptive • Active • Formal • Functional/Communicative • Internalized • Affective Dr H.H. Stern OISE BILC 1976 12 July, Québec “What is new in Language Training?” Strategies of exceptional language learners
Learning Strategies • Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day; Teach a man to fish and he’ll feed himself for a lifetime • Corollaries • Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish and you will not have to listen to his incessant whining about how hungry he is. • Teach a man to fish and he will spend every available moment sitting in a boat drinking beer. • Teach a man to fish and you no longer own him.
Rebecca Oxford Andrew D. Cohen Anna Uhl Chabot Learning Styles (eg, Baran) Questionnaires (eg, SILL) ESL Learning Strategies Learning taxonomies (eg, Bloom) Learning Strategies
Listening Speaking Reading Writing Levels 1-3 Skill Sets
Listening • Predict • Guess • Relate • Focus • Ask • Respond • Review
Speaking • Seek opportunities • Memorize songs and stories to recite • Imitate videos with gestures • Exaggerate sounds, words and phrases privately • Ask for help • Do not take yourself too seriously
Speaking • Minimal responses • “Scripts” (social phrases) • Dialogues and discussion about language • Purpose and audience • Narratives • Reports Teaching Strategies
Reading • Skim • Read closely • Make notes • Vocabulary, phrases • Pace yourself • Ask questions • Summarize
Writing • Describe • Point of view • Audience • Selection of detail • Narrate • Sequence • Reporting speech/action/attitude • Imitate • Inform • Analyze • Summarize and précis
Learning materials • Authentic (within reason!) • Graduated • Measurement tools • Current • Relevant • Personalized • Varied Relevance Motivation Retention
Set Goals • How do I get to the Opera from here?
Teacher Training • Do you provide PD in “language learning strategies” to you teaching staff? • Do your teachers engage students in identifying their own language learning strategies? • Do you aid students in developing and exploiting their metacognitive skills?
Basics • Goal: provide stimulating opportunities for selected military members to develop general and specific linguistic proficiency and to maintain that proficiency • Means: professional guidance and assessment • You learn more quickly under the guidance of experienced teachers. You waste a lot of time going down blind alleys if you have no one to lead you. • W. Somerset Maugham(1874 - 1965), The Razor's Edge, 1943 • Outcome: interoperability within • NATO (and . . . . )
Food for thought • It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech. • Mark Twain (1835 - 1910) • To listen closely and reply well is the highest perfection we are able to attain in the art of conversation. • François de La Rochefoucauld (1613 - 1680) • The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think. • Edwin Schlossberg (1945 - ) • Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. • Sir Richard Steele (1672-1729) • To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting. Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797)
Caveat • There is no magic bullet/pill/method • Critics of LLS emphasize motivation, application, and autonomy as keys to effective learning • A quiver with one arrow, however, is soon empty
So he's like I want 300 officers to reach 4444 in three months! And I'm like, Yes sir!