Learning Paths
THE CHALLENGE OF PLURILINGUAL EDUCATION:
PROMOTING TRANSFER ACROSS THE LANGUAGE
CURRICULUM
Luciano Mariani
Paper given at the
TESOL-Italy Convention –
More
languages are being introduced in our schools, both as curricular and as
optional subjects. Perhaps the most recent example is the second foreign
language at middle school level. But there is also a whole range of native
languages in our classes – the result of the raising number of immigrant
students, which also means that Italian itself is changing its status as a
language of instruction. However, my main point in this paper will be that,
because English is in most cases the first foreign language, its role can and
should change in a plurilingual curriculum.
Perhaps the
first perception of students and parents, but also maybe our own perception as
teachers, is that more languages equals more subjects.
More languages means, of course, more teaching hours, more
slots in the weekly timetable, with these slots often becoming shorter.
At the same
time, we perceive that we need to save time and energies – human and materials
resources are scarce, and we need to avoid a learning overload, to avoid the
risk of breaking up the experience of language learning in the head of our
students into several watertight compartments, to make language learning more
efficient and ecological.
As we move
from the teaching level to the learning level, we can start
asking ourselves more basic questions, like
•
how does the learning of several languages
change language learning? Is learning more foreign languages qualitatively
different from learning just one foreign language? Which leads us to ask,
•
how can we profit from the presence of several
languages in the curriculum?
I think it
is very important to start from the mental images of a plurilingual curriculum
that people build up in time - in other words, from the implicit theories that
we develop as a result of our own personal and professional experiences.
Perhaps the most common idea is that languages develop side by side, as if each
language were proceeding on parallel tracks – separate tracks which will never
meet.
This I
would like to call multilingualism: we learn several languages, but each
has a different and separate role and status. But if we talk of plurilingualism
instead of multilingualism we are not simply playing with words.
If we talk
about a plurilingual person we are not just talking about someone who can use
more than one language – we are also adopting a different image, one in which
several languages and several cultures interact and end up creating a global,
complex competence - . a competence, which includes
the L1 or the L1s. This competence changes and evolves as the person goes
through new linguistic and cultural experiences.
The Common
European Framework is very clear about this:
“The
learner of a second or foreign language and culture does not cease to be
competent in his or her mother tongue and the associated culture. Nor is the
new competence kept entirely separate from the old. The learner does not simply
acquire two distinct, unrelated ways of acting and communicating. The language
learner becomes plurilingual and develops interculturality.”
Although this
is in theory all very clear, I have a feeling that in concrete terms, when we
think of what is actually going on in actual classrooms, we still rely quite a
lot on mental images, on beliefs and attitudes which are not really consistent
with this idea of plurilingualism. So I would like to briefly examine some
reasons why it is important for all of us, teachers of English, to re-discover
what we have in common with our colleagues teaching other languages, what we
are all together actually doing when we work with our students on
languages and with languages.
I can start
from the title of an article which was published many years ago, in 1989, by
Francois Grosjean.
The title of this article was, “Neurolinguists, beware! The bilingual is not two monolinguals in one
person”. Grosjean meant to challenge the idea that a
bilingual person is not simply the sum of two monolinguals. The experience of
learning and using a second, third or even fourth language changes the whole
language system in our mind. And this, not just in terms of quantity,
that is, the amount of new knowledge and skills that we add to out former
stock, but in terms of the quality of the whole system.
Many years
ago a well-known Canadian linguist, Jim Cummins, had already sketched out two
different ideas of bilingual learning. On one hand, he said, we have the idea
of separate underlying proficiency. In this case we view the mind as if
two languages were housed separately within it, in two separate watertight
compartments with a limited storage capacity. The two languages seem to work
against one another. When some new language is added to one side, this causes
an imbalance on the other side, and therefore loss of some of the other
language. If we accept this view, knowledge and skills cannot transfer from one
language to the other – it is as if blowing into the L2 balloon will inflate
the L2 balloon but not the L1 balloon, and viceversa.
On the
other hand, Cummins suggested – and still suggests – the idea of a common
underlying proficiency: in this case the two languages are stored in the
same tank, so to say, so that they do not work separately, even if they use
different channels to produce concrete acts of speech, concrete performance.
This theory
is often presented in the form of icebergs. The icebergs are separate above the
surface - that is, two languages are visibly different in outward conversation.
Underneath the surface, however, they are fused so that the two languages do
not function separately. At the bottom of the iceberg there’s a sort of central
processing system through which the two languages work.
Perhaps we
can make an analogy with the working of a computer: we can use many different
programs or applications – for example, for word processing, for recording
films, for drawing objects – but these programs need a central processing
system, say, Microsoft Windows or Apple’s Mac OS, which is the overall system
which allows the applications to work.
If we
accept this view, things obviously change: experience with either language can
promote development of the proficiency underlying both languages – provided, as
Cummins stresses, that those basic conditions for learning to take place are
met - that is, adequate motivation and exposure to both languages, either at
school or in the wider environment.
To give you
another image of the same concept, let me quote Vivian Cook: “Learning an L2 is
not just the adding of rooms to your house by building an extension at the back
- it is the rebuilding of all internal walls “.
If we view
plurilingual learning in this way, then it makes sense to talk about transfer
between languages – but before we go on to talk about what we can plan to
transfer, I would like to come back for a minute to the iceberg metaphor and
offer some examples of the kind of language patterns which operate above and
below the surface of the water.
Let’s start
from the level of morphology and consider what is technically called pre- or
post-modification, which as we know works in different ways in different
languages – towards the left in English or German, towards the right in Italian
(train departure times - gli orari
di partenza dei treni – Straßenverkehrsordnung
- il codice
della strada). We are also
well aware of how confusing this may be (one thing is cheese pizza, another
things is pizza cheese – and the use of English words in Italian creates funny matchings, like the sign WASH CAR in a service station,
instead of CAR WASH, or the advertisement of a sun lotion called DEFENCE SUN,
as if we were to buy some sun with defence properties!). And yet, these
language patterns actually provide different solutions to the same deep-level
issue, which is the need to mark meanings through word order.
To make
another example, let us consider the textual level. Linkers, as we know, take
on different forms and different surface syntax in different languages:
Nonostante sia molto anziana, lavora ancora – Although she’s very old, she’s still
working.
I like rock
because it's exciting.
Ich habe kein
Geld, deshalb kann ich nicht ins Kino gehen – I have
no money, so I can‘t
go to the cinema.
Yet linkers
serve the same deep-level purpose as discourse markers – as if they were
signposts which help us to travel through a text and help us to recognise the
logical relationships in a sentence – like, for instance, cause and effect,
contrast, purpose, time sequences and so on.
Let me
offer one last example, this time at the pragmatic level: even phrases which
are on the surface very different, like
E' una specie di sedia, piccola – It’s a kind of low chair.
C'est une
personne qui coupe tes
cheveux – It’s a person who
cuts your hair.
It is used
to take photos.
share a
deep-level function: for example, they help us to “adjust the message”,
that is, to find other ways of expression when our linguistic and communicative
competence is not up to the meaning we want to express – in this case, when we
do not know the word for “sgabello” - stool, “
coiffeur” - hairdresser – and “camera”.
This leads
us to consider what happens below the surface of the water, to explore the
changes that take place within the iceberg – to distinguish between the results
of using single languages (the products) from the process of
language learning itself. As language teachers, we need to recognise these
processes so that we can help our students to make the most of them.
So the two
main questions that I will try to address in the rest of this paper are,
•
what exactly gets integrated, restructured,
transferred? and,
•
which instructional conditions
facilitate these processes?
To start
approaching the first question, let’s think of reading. We often encourage
students to guess the meaning of unknown words by using all the clues that they
can find in the text: for instance, by looking at how words are built, how they
are made up of roots and affixes. Note that to do this, one must actually know
what roots, prefixes and suffixes are; one must know what their purpose
is, how words can be changed. So, for a start, we have some knowledge on
language, on how language works, on how language is used to convey meanings.
This of course includes both specific knowledge for specific languages
(the system of affixation which is used in English or in French) and general
knowledge about languages (the concept of root, the concept of
prefix, the concept of suffix).
This
knowledge might remain quite abstract if we didn’t know what to do with it, if
we didn’t know that these prefixes and suffixes can be used to understand
words, especially to deduce the meaning of words by looking at the way they are built.
These elements can become strategic, in the sense that they can help us
to find and use a strategy to solve the problem of an unknown word. . If we can
use this knowledge, if we are able to recognise prefixes and suffixes and to
remember their value, then we have a skill, a know-how,
the ability to make use of knowledge
But is this
enough? Maybe not. If we want to be able to turn
knowledge into strategies we also need to be convinced that it is
possible to guess the meaning of words – we need to be ready to admit that
reading does not mean passively waiting for the text to reveal itself – but
rather, that the reader can and must do its part. In other words, we need to be
convinced that meanings can be explored through making and testing hypotheses –
and we need to be ready to do this. So there is something deeper and hidden
underneath the use of knowledge and skills – there are beliefs and attitudes,
something which has to do with our motivations, our own readiness to learn, to use
strategies, to be active in our own learning.
I think we
are now better equipped to explore the areas where we, as teachers of English,
can try to promote this transfer between languages. To sum up, I think we can
try to promote the transfer of
•
knowledge,
both specific, that is, relevant to the individual languages, and general, that
is, relevant to language in general terms: what we need to do is work in
the area of language awareness;
•
skills, in
the sense of the ability to turn knowledge into strategies to solve problems:
what we need to do is work in the area of learning awareness;
•
and
finally, beliefs and attitudes, what we might call readiness to
learn, which is both a cognitive and an affective issue: what we need to do is
work in the area of learner awareness – in this case, raising our
students’ consciousness of their own strengths and weaknesses, of their own
personal profile as language learners.
We are well
aware that if we do this we are trying to achieve something more that the
simple sum of individual parts – knowledge, skills and beliefs and attitudes,
when woven together, create a new competence – learning to learn –
perhaps the most ambitious aim at school today, but also one I think we cannot
afford to ignore.
We can now
turn to our second main question, which is, how can we as English teachers
promote the integration of language learning in a plurilingual curriculum? How
can we make the best of a syllabus which offers more languages, including
Italian and other L1s? In most cases, we know that English is the first foreign
language learnt at school, and will be more and more so in the future. So
English has a special role and status as a sort of bridge language towards
the learning of further languages. How can we teach English in a way that
promotes, for example, French, German or Spanish as our students’ second or
even third foreign language?
The basic
question here is, how can we promote transfer across
the language curriculum? We might say that transfer is basically the application
of previously acquired knowledge and skills to new situations. For transfer to
take place in reading, for example, it is essential for us to be able to
clearly see that the reading task we’re doing today shares similar features
with a previous task which we successfully carried out in the past, so that we
can proceed by analogy. Of course it is also essential that we clearly see the
elements of difference between tasks. So, for transfer to take place, we should
be in a position to answer questions like, How
is this task similar to others I’ve already done? How is it different?
What we can
do to help learners ask themselves these basic questions can be summarised in
three instructional steps: EXPERIENCE – REFLECTION - REACTIVATION.
First, experience. Learners need to be faced with a problem and go through the process of
problem-setting and problem-solving. For example, let’s assume we have four
different magazine articles in four different languages – they cover the same
event (for instance, an important football match) or at least the same topic
area (for instance, sports). For the sake of clarity, let’s call these articles
TOTTI, BECKHAM, ZIDANE and SCHUMACHER. These four texts may be at different
levels of complexity.
Let’s
assume we start work in class with the English article, the BECKHAM one, and
let’s imagine we engage in some sort of interaction with our students,
something like,
•
we
have a magazine article here, and we want to find out some basic information,
things like, where and when the match took place, who won it, who scored the
goals, and why this victory is important
•
there
will probably be a lot of words we don’t know
•
do we need to understand everything, given our
purpose in reading this article? What are the words that we definitely need to
understand?
•
how can we deal with “new” or “difficult” words?
Let’s try and see, for instance,
•
how
these words are made, maybe if they are made with pieces of words that we
already know …
•
which
position they hold in the sentence: perhaps we’ll find out that one must be a
verb, another one must be an adjective …
•
let’s
see if we can get some help by looking at the words that come before and after
…
•
let’s
make a hypothesis, and then let’s go on reading and check if we were right or
if we need to go back and try something else …
So we go
through the task in this way, or a similar way, and once we get to the end,
when we check the results of our job, we move to our second step in transfer,
that is, we add a moment of reflection. This is a crucial time, because its is
here that we and our students can go beyond this particular task, and begin to
ask ourselves if what we’ve just done, our concrete experience, can be useful
tomorrow, on another task, in another situation. So, once again, let’s imagine
we engage in this sort of interaction with our students,
•
which words in the text were harder to understand?
What helped us to cope with problems?
•
maybe the way words are made? Maybe certain parts of
words, the beginnings and the endings? Shall we call these prefixes and suffixes?
•
maybe we were helped by taking a look at a whole
sentence, and perhaps at the sentences that came before and after? Shall we
call this the context?
•
again,
perhaps we were helped by what we already knew about the topic … this we can
call our own encyclopedia …
•
did we make and check hypotheses by using clues?
Shall we call this the “Sherlock Holmes strategy”?
•
what else helped us? Did we ask the teacher? Did we
talk to our classmates? Did we use a dictionary?
• and how did we feel? Anxious? Relaxed? Just OK?
By doing
this, by asking our students to think and talk like this with us and their
classmates, we are building one essential condition for transfer, that is,
going beyond the single task and generalize its process. In this way we are also
going beyond English and into the deep structure, we are gaining insights into
the working of language in general, we are developing knowledge, skills and
attitudes in language learning.
To make
this link between languages even clearer, we can of course focus our students’
attention on some specific features of the text we’ve just read, and relate
them to Italian, for example
•
we
can introduce the concept of “international” words – which can also have an
Italian equivalent – and the concept of cognates or “true friends”:
•
we
can also highlight the concept of word families, based on the use of prefixes
and suffixes, both in English and in Italian:
•
and
we could also focus on compound words and word order, and reflect on the fact
that English qualifies meanings by adding elements to the left while Italian
usually add elements to the right:
So this was
our second step, reflection on experience. Let’s move on to our third and final
step in transfer – reactivation. Now of course this can be done once again in
English, but … here we get to the main idea of this paper - it could just as
well be done in French, German or Spanish. Our French, German or Spanish
colleague could now start work where we left it, she
or he could build on the database of knowledge, skills and attitudes that we
have already tried to develop in our students – the same students, the class we
share.
Our German
colleague could take over our work and start working on the German article. So
let’s imagine once again the sort of interaction that she/he might develop with
our students, more or less like this,
•
we’ve
got an article here, and we want to find out some basic information
•
do you remember the kind of problems you had when
you read BECKHAM? How did you cope? For example, what did you do with “new” or
“difficult” words? What else did you do? What helped you? Prefixes,
suffixes the context … your own encyclopedia …
•
how did you call the reading strategy based on
clues? Sherlock Holmes? Shall we try and see if Sherlock Holmes can help us in
the same way this time too?
Again, when
she/he checks the outcome of the task she/he can discuss if the problems with
SCHUMACHER were the same as with BECKHAM, if the same strategies worked or if
students had to look for different ones … What worked well with both English
and German? What worked with English but perhaps not, or not in the same way or
not so well, with German?
She/He
could also highlight the links between languages in much the same way as we did
with English and Italian – but this time our students can use their knowledge
of more than one language:
·
she/he
could focus on true friends:
·
she/he
could take up again the issue of word families, highlight the system of
prefixes and suffixes in German and compare it with the English and the Italian
ones:
·
and she/he could also consider word order in
compound words – is it the same in German and English? Towards the left or
towards the right?
So this is
what we might call the transfer cycle – experiencing problems and
solutions in one language, reflecting on them, and then reactivating our
knowledge, skills and attitudes with a different task – but not necessarily
in the same language. The grading and sequencing of tasks and
languages, that is, where to start and how to proceed, is of course a matter of
local conditions. We might start with TOTTI, capitalise on our students’
knowledge of Italian and then proceed to BECKHAM. Or we might start with ZIDANE
and then move over to BECKHAM …
What I have
just said implies that language teachers working with the same class, including
the teacher of Italian, decide to work together. Am I talking about an ideal
world? I don’t know. But perhaps it’s worth ending this paper
with what I think are three essential conditions for this to happen:
•
the
first condition is, recognising the fact that the function of a plurilingual
curriculum is not only to teach several languages, but also, and most
importantly, to teach students how to learn languages, at school and
throughout their lives, and to learn how to use language across the curriculum
– in other words, this means relaunching the idea of
language education – educazione linguistica;
•
the
second condition is, making this an explicit aim of our school policy, a
priority to be officially recognized and developed throughout the school
community – not just among teachers and students, but also among parents and
administrators;
•
the third condition is to build a school and
classroom culture based on teacher collaboration. This is of course
crucial. Our students cannot perceive the learning of several languages as a
global experience unless we, their teachers, share a common background. This
means much more that agreeing on a list of grammar points or lexical areas or
communicative functions to teach in the same class. It can mean that, but above
all it means a need for us to share our own knowledge, skills and attitudes.
With a vision in our minds …
“Let’s learn more languages – to speak a common
tongue”
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Webliography
·
http://jaling.ecml.at
Il progetto Janua Linguarum
del Centro Europeo delle Lingue Moderne di Graz ha
sviluppato modelli di language awareness/éveil au langage.
·
www.eurocom-frankfurt.de/
Il progetto EuroCom I
sette setacci si propone di promuovere la competenza ricettiva
sfruttando gli elementi di parentela tra le lingue.
·
www.ecml.at\mtp2\LEA\HTML\LEA_E_mat.htm
Il
progetto Language Educator Awareness si propone di sviluppare la
consapevolezza plurilingue e pluriculturale nella formazione degli insegnanti di lingue.
·
www.coe.int\t\dg4\linguistic\Schoollang_EN.asp.html
Il progetto
Languages of School Education intende
esaminare finalità, risultati, contenuti, metodi e approcci per le lingue di istruzione nei curricoli europei, e le loro relazioni con
le lingue straniere.
·
www.lexically.net/ala/
Association for Language Awareness.
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