Skinny Puppy Across Borders
by Ellen Wormwood
From the perspective of foreign language teachers, the importance of what they are teaching is clear, and they know the ultimate goal of the sometimes tedious grammar and vocabulary exercises: a student capable of connecting with people in another language and thereby gaining access to their beliefs, their history, their ideas and their world.
From a student’s perspective, however, the importance of learning a foreign language may not be nearly as evident. Why does CLA require them to spend so much time learning a foreign language? What does being a well-rounded member of society have to do with speaking a foreign language? And exactly how do those tedious classroom exercises open up new possibilities to them anyway? As teachers, we sometimes don’t articulate our purposes for our students in a concrete way, but even when we do it can be easy to lose sight of the end-goal while wrestling with the pluperfect subjunctive.
Some CLA instructors have begun, using TandemPlus class-to-class exchanges, to address that disconnect between learning a foreign language and the reason for learning it. More than 250 of their students participated last year in language exchanges that allowed them to post voice messages to counterpart students in universities in France and Spain, and more than one hundred are participating again this semester. The exchanges allow the students to put their classroom learning to use by participating in real language exchanges with their peers. In sending and receiving those messages, they come to a greater understanding of why they are learning a foreign language in the first place.
To make sure that their language partners overseas understand them, the students need to use a wide range of the skills they have been practicing in the classroom. When they receive a voice message from their counterpart saying that their own message wasn’t clear, our students realize that they can’t rely on their teacher’s or their classmates’ familiarity with their often Americanized vocabulary, accent, or grammar to get their point across; they and their partners must work together to negotiate meaning. Being able to make this leap from “class-talk” to communication with a peer who is a native speaker carries great rewards for the students. As Lydia Belateche (French) observes, “The hugest, biggest benefit for the students was having the proof that a real, live French person could understand THEIR French…”
Andy Wiesinger and Frances Matos-Schultz (Spanish) both concur that there is great satisfaction for the students in communicating with a “real” person. Andy’s students report that they may do the workbook exercises grudgingly as part of their homework, but are likely to enjoy posting to their counterpart because “now there’s a real person talking to me.” As Brandon Mchie, a 1003 student, says, “you want to learn about [your overseas partner], to work with someone who is in a similar position…you can take things one step further in your language learning because it’s more personal – you help them and they help you.” Or, the satisfaction just might come, as it did for one of Andy’s students, from the delight in finding out that her partner enjoyed the same obscure punk rock group, Skinny Puppy, as much as she did.
Instructors and students agree that there are great benefits to the exchanges, but there are challenges as well. The counterpart students must have access to technology which allows them to post voice messages regularly, and all of the participating instructors emphasize the importance of working with overseas classes whose teachers are committed to the project and whose students are motivated to post regularly. Frances Matos-Schultz saw her own students “checking every day to see if they had a reply from Spain, as if they were waiting by the mailbox,” and the disappointment that ensued when students on either side don’t respond affects their partner’s desire to post. We have been fortunate in our counterpart instructors overseas, Michel Legault at the Université Technologique de Troye, and María Lera and Nuria Mendoza at the Universidad Nebrija in Spain, all of whom have worked hard to make the exchanges run smoothly from their end.
Now that the technological aspects of the exchange have been worked out and we have established a good working rhythm with our overseas partners, the TandemPlus program is working with the Center for Teaching and Learning Services to develop exercises that will help students learn how to analyze cultural differences: “How do I respond when they say we’re all fat?” “Is my language partner flirting with me when he ends his message by saying, ‘I send you hugs’?” “What should I say when they tell me they’ve heard that most Americans carry a gun?” “Why are they sending greetings to my parents when I’ve never even told them about my family?”
For Trina Whitaker (French), the exchanges have the potential to help students learn something real about what it means to be a global citizen, something that they can’t get from a textbook. As the program develops and expands, Trina would like her students to leave her class with a sense of what it means to be a member of a specific culture, an ability to see things from another point of view, and a sense of what it means to be an individual rather than a stereotyped symbol of a culture. When that happens, the point of learning a foreign language will be clear to students as well as instructors.