Questions from ACTFL

Jason Fishbein

John Hancock had some good questions in response to my ACFTL posting. Because these are interesting and important topics, I’ll post for everyone. Comments and corrections are welcome!

Italian Courses:
All teachers will ask about the language they teach when they come to the booth—as they should. We also had questions regarding Hindi, Japanese, Portuguese, etc. Italian seemed to come up more often than the others. It's still a very small market compared to the languages that we do offer. For us to develop courses for such languages, we need to do more research and weigh the feasibility and investment. For now, it’s important that we build greater market share and penetration with our current courses yet still keep an eye on trends and market demand.

Consumer Purchase Options:
Other than Powerspeak, we currently don't offer consumers the option to purchase courses; however that will likely change in the near future. It's important that we concentrate our efforts on the institutional market but as the demand from individuals grows, we will offer and distribute courses to the consumer market. My best estimate for a timeline is sometime toward the middle to end of next year. Don't hold me to it!

Explicit vs. Intrinsic Learning
When it comes to explicit vs. intrinsic learning, one of our teachers can probably answer this much more knowledgeably but I’ll give it my best shot. Explicit is in reference to the Competency course and it's teaching and learning methodology. It's much more structured in nature with very clear definitions of what is right and what is wrong. It also involves memory through repetition. Some teachers may say that this is not a natural way to learn, but others are strong advocates, especially when it comes to language learning. They feel it builds a strong foundation for students.

Intrinsic describes the Fluency course. I think of intrinsic learning as something that comes from within or from exposure to a language in it's natural environment. There's less emphasis on the teacher telling you exactly what to do and less dependence on things such as verb conjugation and pronoun cases. These are introduced in a way that the student may not even realize they are learning them. That's a more immersive approach. Educators describe this unstructured method as more rewarding and self-motivating for the student.

Neither one is better than the other. They are simply different ways to learn and in the end, what matters most is that students gain second language acquisition. At a certain point in the learning process, especially at the more advanced levels, it's difficult to distinguish—as it should be—whether a student took an explicit or intrinsic path to fluency.

Calling volunteers to answer the following:
• Are our elementary courses a blended learning environment?
• What kind of professional development do we offer?