OPINION LOTE courses builds barriers

Language courses at SPHS fail to provide sufficient communication skills.

The South Pasadena High School languages department needs to transition from past standards of reading and writing comprehension to a communication based curriculum. In order to be prepared for language use beyond school, students must possess an array of knowledge that they can use to adapt to any scenario.

Students often take a languagse for three or more years of high school, and must complete at least two years of the same language to graduate. According to “ACTFL-Language Connects;”; learning a language is not only beneficial in the workplace, the process also improves cognitive function and focus. In addition, language learning strengthens the brain against dementia and degenerative neurological conditions.

Curriculum for language learning has been evolving ever since the traditional grammar-translation method that emerged in the early 1900s. This learning style is composed of vocabulary memorization and rule explanations. Learners generally struggled with communicating creatively and effectively.

Elements of the SPHS curriculum are reminiscent of this method and are usually guided through textbook and worksheets. While it moves away from the grammartranslation method, it is still not completely aligned with an end goal of communication. The large emphasis on reading and writing hurts students who do not learn best from literary techniques, but instead connect most with an auditory, visual, or kinetic style. The interactive benefits of non-traditional learning styles enable more types of learners to engage with material.

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is not a curriculum, but rather a general direction of teaching that has an end goal of student communicative proficiency. According to Pearsonhighered, CLT courses are generally taught almost exclusively in the target language, use non-academic resources from the target culture (magazines, novel, etc.), involve student interaction among students, and are fluid in adapting to each student on an individual basis.

A study conducted by the Canadian Science Center involved an experimental CLT group learning English —, taught throughusing interviews, role-playing, and problem solving. The CLT group did significantly better than another group learning English taught using traditional methods.

The SPHS curriculum echoes both the grammar-translation method, CLT curriculum, and others, but remains mostly comprehension based. The very metric used to measure student growth, language finals, are often a dreaded slog through mind-numbing amounts of questions that induce stress and unnecessary mental fatigue. Rather than testing a student’s ability to think critically or use their language foundation in creative ways, they encourage memorization of vocabulary lists and grammar rules. These designs are a flawed evaluation of fluency as they do not measure the student’s ability to interact with another individual.

The fact remains that some skills cannot be taught through the confines of worksheet and textbook activities, such as pronunciation, an often rushed skill that students are expected to master but is not explicitly focused on as a main element of a course.

While in higher courses students and teachers do communicate mainly in the target language and integrate greater amounts of projects and speaking assignments, learning is built on traditionally structured foundations of memorization developed in 1/2 and some 3/4 classes. APs are generally the class that is the most speaking based, but without the attendance of many of the student body, the skills learned through real life scenarios in this program do little to remedy the deficit left in speaking ability.

Boos & Bravos

Tiger’s cheers and jeers for the month of January

BOO to people who use laughing emojis instead of crying ones and skulls. What are you? Mentally stable?

BOO to Jake Sully. Why are you, a 10 foot blue alien, kind of hot.

BOO to Beyonce's exclusive Dubai concert. Celebs already have it all, why are you inviting Kendall Jenner?

BOO to Discord. Yes, I'm talking to you, Jayden.

BOO to people who come back from COVID without a mask. Who do you think you are anyways?

BRAVO to Google Translate. You will always be the Spanish Dictionary in my heart.

BRAVO to Congress for being Swifties. Ticketmaster really needs to calm down.

BRAVO to to everyone who filmed the Beyonce concert. Taking down capitalism, one concert at a time.

BRAVO to Cars. Life is a highway.

BRAVO to my phone at 1%. It has more will to live than me, fr.