Managing the tools, managing oneself?

Further to our wee email exchange on the use of word-processing tools in writing, I've been pondering about your suggestions regarding the use of on-line translation tools. I've been discouraging the students from using them as, although they're fast improving and often give accurate translations for straightforward stuff, they encourage laziness, eliminating as they do the necessity to think about and understand the language the students are producing. On the other hand students seem more motivated when using them. Suddenly it's much easier to be able to say what you want to say rather than waiting for the teacher to tell you what she thinks you should know or might find useful.

I wonder if some of our students wouldn't maintain an interest in language learning for longer if we just went with the flow and accepted that these are tools which are readily available in real life, at any moment. Just thinking of my students who are going on the exchange to Nice at the end of the year and who can hardly string a sentence together, having no deep interest in how languages work, they could easily call up the language they need in almost any situation via their smart phones. It's all about communication, after all. It might not help them so much with listening but even there they could negotiate meaning around problems of comprehension. We can no longer insist, it seems to me, that everyone demonstrate their understanding of how languages work, when there are such obvious short-cuts to communication at hand.

Thankfully, there will always be some students who are curious about how the language works so that old fossils such as myself who love grammar will feel vindicated by their curiosity. I'd have to say, though, that the patience of the majority for mastering structure seems to be decreasing exponentially as they see that they can get by without it. Maybe this is the moment when the focus will shift from language mastery to intercultural communicative competence, even if it is electronically assisted!

It makes me think that language teaching is at a cross-roads. How many people these days know how to do the basic mathematical functions of addition, subtraction, division and multiplication? How many people still know their times tables?Not too many, I'll wager. For me they're the most valuable thing I've retained from my maths days and I use them all the time but if I preferred to use a calculator I would have to admit it's no longer necessary to know how to do them in my head. The other obvious analogy is GPS. There aren't too many people who would prefer these days to use a map to orientate themselves. They trustingly put themselves in the hands of their GPS and let it lead them (sometimes astray). The result is that fewer and fewer people have map-reading skills because they don't seem so necessary any more. Could we be getting to the same point with languages? Maybe on-line translation tools will end up opening language 'learning' to a wider range of students. Maybe we should be focussing more on tasks involving pronunciation, although even here they can get the correct pronunciation at the click of a button.

With my junior classes I've been getting them to make powerpoints and little movies about themselves and using puppets for dialogues. A colleague brought me along another bag full of 'friends' so we now have about 16 assorted creatures who seem to be relishing their stardom. Students appear to really enjoy doing this and some have produced much more sophisticated stuff than we could have expected from students before these tools were available. Differentiation happens naturally as people work in different ways, at different rates. Some work slowly and meticulously and include lots of detail. Others dash something off really quickly and want to get onto the next item on the agenda. Some take the line of least resistance and produce the minimum. The exceptional ones are always focussed and show a good understanding of the task. They go the extra mile, including a lot more than is expected. It's a really good way of evaluating the key competencies as well as giving rein to their creativity. Over the last few days of the term we'll be watching some of these together and eventually they'll all be loaded onto MyPortfolio. We had some problems with files being more than 50MB which we'll have to resolve. For the moment, with interim reports looming I've just had to get them to airdrop them to me which is the simplest short-term solution.

I have no doubt my ponderings will set off some reciprocal ponderings from the North. It'll be interesting to see what you think. Am I right or am I right?