Back to Basics

1. Back to Basics Bled Slovenia 21-25 October 2012

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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.

5. Sometimes the easiest strategy isn’t the best:

6. Rebecca Oxford Andrew D. Cohen Anna Uhl Chabot Learning Styles (eg, Baran) Questionnaires (eg, SILL) ESL Learning Strategies Learning taxonomies (eg, Bloom) Learning Strategies

7. Listening Speaking Reading Writing Levels 1-3 Skill Sets

8. Listen

9. Listening • Predict • Guess • Relate • Focus • Ask • Respond • Review

10. 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

11. Speaking • Minimal responses • “Scripts” (social phrases) • Dialogues and discussion about language • Purpose and audience • Narratives • Reports Teaching Strategies

12. Reading • Skim • Read closely • Make notes • Vocabulary, phrases • Pace yourself • Ask questions • Summarize

13. Writing • Describe • Point of view • Audience • Selection of detail • Narrate • Sequence • Reporting speech/action/attitude • Imitate • Inform • Analyze • Summarize and précis

14. Commons

15. Learning materials • Authentic (within reason!) • Graduated • Measurement tools • Current • Relevant • Personalized • Varied Relevance Motivation Retention

16. Set Goals • How do I get to the Opera from here?

17. 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?

18. 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 . . . . )

19. 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)

20. 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

21. Reality check

22. So he's like I want 300 officers to reach 4444 in three months! And I'm like, Yes sir!