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

Dr H.H. SternOISEBILC 197612 July, Québec

“What is new in Language Training?”Strategies of exceptional language learners

1. Adaptive2. Active3. Formal4. Functional/Communicative5. Internalized6. Affective

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.

• Sometimes the easiest strategy isn’t the best:

Learning Strategies

• Rebecca Oxford

• Andrew D. Cohen

• Anna Uhl Chabot

• Learning Styles (eg, Baran)

• Questionnaires (eg, SILL)

• ESL Learning Strategies

• Learning taxonomies (eg, Bloom)

Skill Sets

• Listening Listening • Speaking Speaking • Reading Reading • WritingWriting

• Levels 1-3

Listen

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

• Minimal responses

• “Scripts” (social phrases)

• Dialogues and discussion about language

• Purpose and audience

• Narratives

• Reports

Speaking

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

Commons

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

Reality check