Craig Dodge Taiwan

John Keating: Language was developed for one endeavor, and that is - Mr. Anderson? Come on, are you a man or an amoeba?

[pause]

John Keating: Mr. Perry?

Neil: To communicate.

John Keating: No! To woo women!

That is a quote from one of my favorite movies: Dead Poets Society. The movie is about a progressive English teacher who inspires his students not only to love poetry and language, but to get the most out of life.

Carpe Diem...Sieze the day! Make your lives extraordinary. The powerful play (of life) goes on and you can contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

With all due respect to my hero Mr Keating, the purpose of language is to communicate, although wooing women (or men, if you prefer) is a kind of communication. We use language as a way to share thoughts, ideas, emotions and information with other people.

Follow up:

What got me thinking about this movie was because I was having a discussion with a few different people about language learning and how can I be a more effective language coach/teacher/facilitator. What should the focus of my meetings with students be? What approach should I take? What, after all, is the ultimate goal?

The first "foreign" language I studied was French. My first-year class in college followed a traditional method of starting with simple vocabulary and grammar and building on it. While I suppose it had it's benefits, I always used to think I wasn't learning a language, but a secret code not really used in the real world. It was like studying some cryptic formulas, like math. It didn't seem real. After my first year of study, however, I went on a summer study program in France for 3 months. After only about 2 or 3 weeks, something clicked. It wasn't about studying grammatical structures or lists of vocabulary words, but having a need to communicate to survive. My French ability improved more in that 3 months than in a whole year of university study and began my belief that the focus of language learning should be on communication, not grammar rules.

I had a similar experience learning Japanese and Spanish. I studied Japanese for a semester before going on a year-long work/study program in Japan. While in Japan, it was daily living that taught me more language than in any classroom. I never did study Spanish, but by living in Miami where Spanish is the native language of more residents than English, I became fairly conversational. Just like my French learning experience, focusing on communicating rather than studying rules helped the most.

So here I am in Taiwan, where English is taught a lot like math or science; all in Chinese and usually with formulas and lists to memorize. There is little or no time in school dedicated to communicating in English. This is not what language is all about and the evidence is in how much trouble people have to communicate in English even after having studied it for 6 to 10 years or even longer. It's not working!

My preferred approach to classes, therefore, is to focus on communicating. I believe in providing content-rich material to serve as the foundation for discussions. Grammar and vocabulary is introduced in the context of the subject being discussed, to enrich communication, not serve as a formula to memorize. Not everyone agrees with this approach, but it's what worked for me in my own language learning.