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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
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