By: Nathan C. This is a situation where nearly every high school student arrives at; sitting down and choosing your classes. Almost everyone chooses a foreign language at least once, and for some, it is not just a mere choice but rather a necessity. With pressure from many college applications wanting students with two and some three years of foreign language courses, most have to start their freshmen year. With almost everyone needing to take a foreign language class at least once, that raises the question: what is the point of taking the class besides just meeting graduation and college requirements? Well… to learn the language of course!
However, the way these foreign language classes are traditionally taught ends up being inadequate at teaching a level of proficiency needed for actual communication within the world, and ends up with most students leaving the class with a basic understanding of the language.
A major reason many of these classes fall short of teaching fluency is the complete lack of an immersive environment. Professionals, professors, and those who have learned foreign languages all agree the best way to learn a foreign language is: immersion. Immersion of a language wraps in all the different aspects of a language allowing one to better reach fluency and explore various contexts.
Unfortunately, creating a truly immersive environment is incredibly difficult to implement within a simple classroom. This ends up leading these language classes to focus more on just the grammar and vocabulary of languages rather than the actual usage in different settings and contexts.
Even if teachers spoke the target language most of the time during class to help immerse students, as Brenna Martinez at the Daily Aztec states,”you would still only be receiving about four hours of input every school week” and according to The Linguist, it takes 100s of hours to even reach basic proficiency, looking at that-- the math is not adding up.
Another significant part of learning a language is practicing the language and interacting with others. While these foreign language classes give tests on listening comprehension and speaking tests, these are just tests. From my experience speaking tests usually consist of around 20 questions and answers and then two out of the 20 are chosen and you must answer the 2. This means you can pass these by just memorizing, not actually understanding.
Listening tests play some audio that you must pick up on what's happening. However for both of these tests they aren't designed to test if you can actually speak or listen, most listening tests require you to just pick up on a few key words but not understand anything else they are saying which is fundamentally impractical in the real world. A common factor between both of these tests is very little actual practice is done within class. Sure you can study the speaking test or listen to audio but that's completely out of class and not assigned at all.
According to Psycnet those learning foreign languages must engage in conversation, “that requires them to negotiate meaning and use new language forms” and that just simply isn't happening! Once these speaking and listening tests are last week's work none of it sticks and it isn't an effective way at reaching proficiency in these languages.
Furthermore these classes have way too much emphasis on passing tests rather than actually learning how to communicate in the target language. In my experience we would have one test every single week on a new subject which ended up causing too much of a focus on the actual test. Pauliina Peltonen details in Fluency revisited that true fluency requires communicative competency and with too much of a focus on testing, it completely neglects that.
So, what can be done as a solution towards this? I think classes with more emphasis on communicating in the language rather than rigorous conjugation sheets and vocabulary and grammar rules would be miles more effective. I believe that adding days where students or teachers may only speak in the target language could help towards this, or activities where students are given a situation and have to navigate it by talking to each other only in the target language.
Foreign language classes need to be set up as less traditional classes but a place to immerse yourself in both the culture and language and attempt to learn as authentically as possible. While obviously vocab sheets, conjugation charts, and learning grammar rules are effective and sometimes necessary other things must be added to better help students achieve fluency, such as what is mentioned above may be the solution. All in all, while high school foreign language classes may be good at teaching students the basics, it's evident changes need to be made to allow students to reach fluency.