The purpose of my Fulbright Distinguished Teacher project was to uncover best practices of classroom instruction and teacher assessment of second language acquisition, with specific focus on the development of oral proficiency. By establishing connections with Moroccan middle and high schools, both public and private, my goals were to interview educators about successful methods and strategies for promoting oral fluency; to talk to students and observe their use of their second language; to create a video library of speaking samples to be used as anchor videos for teacher-training in my home district; and to facilitate links between Moroccan and American schools for future opportunities for students to conduct natural, spontaneous conversations with one another in their mutual learned languages. The topic is especially relevant to my school and school district because we have recently changed the benchmarks by which we assess student progress in our World Language courses. Now we focus on oral proficiency standards, and are are asked to teach skills to develop communicative competence, and specifically for the ability to conduct spontaneous, un-rehearsed conversation.
As a result of my observations, conversations, and readings, I believe that I have found four primary reasons that Moroccan students have such a strong ability to learn spoken foreign languages quickly and with good accent, compared to American students. Simply put, it is clear that Moroccans are much more fluent in spoken language after a similar length of instruction than Americans.
The first broad generalization is about important cultural differences between Morocco and America. On the most obvious but very important level, this includes not only meeting and interacting with people who speak other languages, but the availability of foreign language media. I often interviewed students in Morocco who told me that “language is easy,” that they practice by speaking with native English speakers, or—often— they have learned or perfected their English “by watching movies! ” In fact, a high school student in Kenitra told me, “It doesn’t matter how much English you learn in school; what matters is how many movies you watch in English.” However, for better or worse, there is little motivation for American students to seek youtube videos or movies in another language. Rather narcissistically, our view of pop culture is English-centric, and that significantly lessens the opportunities that American students might have to learn accent, locutions, vocabulary and slang that would make them actually conversational.
The second dimension is a linguistic one. Moroccans have the incredible good luck, I think, to be born into a world where they hear around them , from infancy, the sounds of what seems like every human language! Children here seem to swim in an incredible linguistic pool— Darija or a Berber language and Classical Arabic from the Koran before they begin school, allowing them to hear and discern and pronounce many more phonemes than most Americans. Adding Standard Modern Arabic and French in primary school with native or nearly native-speaking teachers is additionally enriching. Finally, most Moroccan children are learning their fourth language before the age at which American students can begin to learn their second. All research shows that the earlier the exposure to a language, the easier it is to learn in a near-native fashion. Such important formative language learning years are lost to Americans because we don’t begin foreign language instruction until students are 13- or 14-years old, for the most part.
Third, there is a big difference between Moroccans and Americans when it comes to adoption of the proper sounds of a foreign language. I was immediately struck when I arrived in Morocco that Moroccan students really do a fantastic job of learning and using an excellent accent and prosodic contour when speaking a foreign language. In terms of oral proficiency, an understandable accent and proper stress of syllables alone mean that Moroccans are much better and comprehensible speakers of French, as an example, than are American students after similar levels of instruction. This was the first thing that stood out to me as I began to observe Moroccan students using French in classes from collège to université.
Along with this, and perhaps as a partial explanation, I have noticed something I’ll call an issue of adolescent psychology. Moroccan students seem to care that they learn the proper use of prosodic features, and that they “sound” like English or French native speakers. American and European students do not want to give up— really— their own accents. I have heard an Italian say, “I can make the “th” sound, but I don’t want to; it’s ugly”— and she continued to pronounce every th as t. A foreign exchange student told me that he “didn’t want to lose his accent” — as if speaking English in a way that was more understandable would subtract from his own identity. In my experience as a classroom teacher, I have found that American adolescent boys in particular have been extraordinarily resistant to using the French R sound or proper intonation of French phrases. Over the years, I have found a an unwillingness to give up the phonemes of American English in order to sound like someone from another country, and consequently, Americans still sound American when they are speaking another language. Adolescence is a time of defining one’s identity; for whatever reason, Moroccan youth seem much more confident and less tied to a particular language and set of phonemes to mark their self-identity.
The fourth dimension is the pedagogic one, and I observed two different strands of it: teaching strategies that seem to be effective at teaching oral language, and the systemic issues of education in Morocco that necessitate “pluralingualism” in the classroom, and which are completely different from the situation in the United States.
As far as instructional techniques are concerned, there are three strategies that were present or evident in nearly every classroom that I visited: The “Fill in My____ Blank” style of teacher talk is a kind of call and response technique that allows teachers to make a point repeatedly and assure that students are following by asking them to supply the essential word in the sentence, correctly used and pronounced. I observed this technique repeated from middle school to university classes, in French, English, and Spanish languages. In it, teachers ask for students to supply the missing word from their sentence, and then re-word, re-work, and re-state the sentence with the student-supplied word until until it is clear that students are following, understanding the concept, and pronouncing the new word correctly. It works for introducing both vocabulary and grammar concepts.
In secondary classrooms, I witnessed an emphasis on copying written passages in the target language, memorizing verses of poetry, passages of prose, or entire dramatic works. One of the teachers explained to me that the purpose of copying and memorizing passages was to instill a sense of proper sentence structure and build vocabulary. While it is not my purpose in this research to study that aspect, memorization of passages did appear to be a powerful technique to perfect pronunciation and locutions. American classrooms have swung far away from teaching the techniques of memorization in general, and perhaps this is popular in Morocco because of the importance of memorizing the Koran. In any case, there was a marked difference between Moroccan and American students in the enthusiasm for performing this kind of task, and in the quality of the spoken language associated with it.
Most significantly in this area, almost all of the teachers that I saw, in all levels of classes, stayed 100% in the target additional language all through class. It’s very difficult for a teacher to stay in the target language 100% of the time unless the teacher is truly fluent him or herself, and in the US teachers are often NOT highly fluent themselves. However, few researchers dispute the efficacy and importance of speaking only the language to be learned in a foreign language classroom. There is a strong emphasis on this in my own school district. What I saw in Moroccan classrooms suggests that not only does this allow for all student/teacher interaction to be in the target language, but it also creates an atmosphere in which a good deal of the student/student interaction is naturally and spontaneously in the target language as well. I am truly inspired to change my teaching habits and be far more intentional about my own refusal to speak English in class!
Finally I would like to address the issue of the motivation to learn foreign languages. In Morocco, the mastery of French has implications for university study, employment, and social position. That may not be the case for English, but nevertheless, many students tell me that they like English more, and that they feel more comfortable using it for conversation. I think this says a great deal about both the place of English in the global environment and the differing strategies with which the two languages are taught. The first case highlights a challenge for American foreign language teachers: English really is the lingua franca of the world, and the worldwide web, and we have to be much more creative in inspiring interest in our courses than to simply assume that students need a foreign language to graduate. However, the second and more important lesson is more universal: that English, which seems to be taught in Morocco with a communicative competence approach rather than the second language approach with which French is taught, gives students a better sense of success. Being able to communicate with someone else about a matter of mutual interest is always more satisfying than being able to use verbs correctly in the subjunctive.
So, if in the United States we want results like the impressive results that I saw in the English classes of Morocco, if we want to produce students who can conduct natural, spontaneous conversations in a foreign language after one, two, or three years of study, what do the results of my project tell us?
Admittedly, there are several challenges that are really daunting: first, there is no widespread culturally accepted need to learn a foreign language in the United States. The closest thing we have as a mandate is the requirement of universities to see two years of successful foreign language study on a high school transcript. But this often produces an environment in which students and teachers want to focus on the very specific, concrete details of vocabulary and grammar study, not the messy, risk-taking, hard-to-take-a-test-on-it skill of actually expressing original and meaningful thought.
Second, because of our English-centric sense of media culture, our students must work much harder to find daily contact with songs, movies, videos, and websites that are “cool” in the language that they are learning. Moroccans want to learn English not only because there is a coolness factor, but also because they can use it in interaction with other people on a regular basis. For a variety of reasons, Americans don’t have a the same ready convenience and desirablity of meeting and talking to people in other languages.
Looking at some of the other dimensions, I note that there are many languages that are spoken in the United States; in spite of what is commonly thought, there is a linguistic bath in the United States that we could expose our children to more often if we wanted.. We could make a more concerted effort to celebrate linguistic and cultural diversity. We could take better advantage of the fruitful early learning years. Do I think we have the political or financial will to do these things? No.
Happily on the other hand, in the dimension of pedagogy, I think that there is a lot that we could do to get better results in our classrooms. First of all, we have already begun (at least in my school system) the paradigm switch to teaching and learning for communicative competence, and especially for oral fluency. This change requires that teachers approach lessons and assessments differently, and I think that I have learned some useful things to share with my colleagues on this count. I am going to put into place some of the teaching practices I saw in Moroccan classrooms.
As part of the Project portion of my Fulbright grant, I videotaped spontaneous conversations that I conducted with Moroccan students. Interestingly, I found little assessment of spoken language within the context of the Moroccan schools that I visited. When I videotaped students doing the oral proficiency speaking assessment that we use in my school district, their teacher also videotaped them. She had never attempted to do anything like this sort of speaking task, and was very impressed with her own students when she saw how well they were able to answer spontaneously and participate in conversation with me. She shared her impressions with her colleagues and the English supervisor in the school district, and our hope is that this type of speaking assessment might be implemented in her school district as well.
In addition, I have established relationships with teachers in five schools who wish to work with me in order to establish ongoing connections between our students in Maryland and theirs in Morocco. Using What’sApp as a plaform, we hope to engage our students in one-to-one spontaneous conversations with each other about specific topics. I think this will work particularly well with French students, for whom French is being taught as an additional language to students in both countries. Although I had originally imagined that we might have a level playing field if I could connect novice high speakers in each country, I now suspect that the Moroccan students will have a better command of French than students of the same age in the US; however, there will still be a great opportunity for practice, growth, and risk-taking for both groups. The teachers and I will work with our own students to prepare them for the basic parameters of the conversation (general topic selection, useful vocabulary and verbs) and to match students as conversation partners. It is my hope that these connections with educators in several cities in Morocco and our mutual intention to bring our students together in spontaneous communication to improve language skills on both sides and share cultural perspectives with each other will be fruitful. I believe that students in my home district will benefit not only in terms of real-life practice with language, but in widening their global knowledge, and that we will be able to share “non-Hollywood” Amercian culture with Moroccan youth as they share the culture of a Muslim country with American youth.
As a result of my observations, conversations, and readings, I believe that I have found four primary reasons that Moroccan students have such a strong ability to learn spoken foreign languages quickly and with good accent, compared to American students. Simply put, it is clear that Moroccans are much more fluent in spoken language after a similar length of instruction than Americans.
The first broad generalization is about important cultural differences between Morocco and America. On the most obvious but very important level, this includes not only meeting and interacting with people who speak other languages, but the availability of foreign language media. I often interviewed students in Morocco who told me that “language is easy,” that they practice by speaking with native English speakers, or—often— they have learned or perfected their English “by watching movies! ” In fact, a high school student in Kenitra told me, “It doesn’t matter how much English you learn in school; what matters is how many movies you watch in English.” However, for better or worse, there is little motivation for American students to seek youtube videos or movies in another language. Rather narcissistically, our view of pop culture is English-centric, and that significantly lessens the opportunities that American students might have to learn accent, locutions, vocabulary and slang that would make them actually conversational.
The second dimension is a linguistic one. Moroccans have the incredible good luck, I think, to be born into a world where they hear around them , from infancy, the sounds of what seems like every human language! Children here seem to swim in an incredible linguistic pool— Darija or a Berber language and Classical Arabic from the Koran before they begin school, allowing them to hear and discern and pronounce many more phonemes than most Americans. Adding Standard Modern Arabic and French in primary school with native or nearly native-speaking teachers is additionally enriching. Finally, most Moroccan children are learning their fourth language before the age at which American students can begin to learn their second. All research shows that the earlier the exposure to a language, the easier it is to learn in a near-native fashion. Such important formative language learning years are lost to Americans because we don’t begin foreign language instruction until students are 13- or 14-years old, for the most part.
Third, there is a big difference between Moroccans and Americans when it comes to adoption of the proper sounds of a foreign language. I was immediately struck when I arrived in Morocco that Moroccan students really do a fantastic job of learning and using an excellent accent and prosodic contour when speaking a foreign language. In terms of oral proficiency, an understandable accent and proper stress of syllables alone mean that Moroccans are much better and comprehensible speakers of French, as an example, than are American students after similar levels of instruction. This was the first thing that stood out to me as I began to observe Moroccan students using French in classes from collège to université.
Along with this, and perhaps as a partial explanation, I have noticed something I’ll call an issue of adolescent psychology. Moroccan students seem to care that they learn the proper use of prosodic features, and that they “sound” like English or French native speakers. American and European students do not want to give up— really— their own accents. I have heard an Italian say, “I can make the “th” sound, but I don’t want to; it’s ugly”— and she continued to pronounce every th as t. A foreign exchange student told me that he “didn’t want to lose his accent” — as if speaking English in a way that was more understandable would subtract from his own identity. In my experience as a classroom teacher, I have found that American adolescent boys in particular have been extraordinarily resistant to using the French R sound or proper intonation of French phrases. Over the years, I have found a an unwillingness to give up the phonemes of American English in order to sound like someone from another country, and consequently, Americans still sound American when they are speaking another language. Adolescence is a time of defining one’s identity; for whatever reason, Moroccan youth seem much more confident and less tied to a particular language and set of phonemes to mark their self-identity.
The fourth dimension is the pedagogic one, and I observed two different strands of it: teaching strategies that seem to be effective at teaching oral language, and the systemic issues of education in Morocco that necessitate “pluralingualism” in the classroom, and which are completely different from the situation in the United States.
As far as instructional techniques are concerned, there are three strategies that were present or evident in nearly every classroom that I visited: The “Fill in My____ Blank” style of teacher talk is a kind of call and response technique that allows teachers to make a point repeatedly and assure that students are following by asking them to supply the essential word in the sentence, correctly used and pronounced. I observed this technique repeated from middle school to university classes, in French, English, and Spanish languages. In it, teachers ask for students to supply the missing word from their sentence, and then re-word, re-work, and re-state the sentence with the student-supplied word until until it is clear that students are following, understanding the concept, and pronouncing the new word correctly. It works for introducing both vocabulary and grammar concepts.
In secondary classrooms, I witnessed an emphasis on copying written passages in the target language, memorizing verses of poetry, passages of prose, or entire dramatic works. One of the teachers explained to me that the purpose of copying and memorizing passages was to instill a sense of proper sentence structure and build vocabulary. While it is not my purpose in this research to study that aspect, memorization of passages did appear to be a powerful technique to perfect pronunciation and locutions. American classrooms have swung far away from teaching the techniques of memorization in general, and perhaps this is popular in Morocco because of the importance of memorizing the Koran. In any case, there was a marked difference between Moroccan and American students in the enthusiasm for performing this kind of task, and in the quality of the spoken language associated with it.
Most significantly in this area, almost all of the teachers that I saw, in all levels of classes, stayed 100% in the target additional language all through class. It’s very difficult for a teacher to stay in the target language 100% of the time unless the teacher is truly fluent him or herself, and in the US teachers are often NOT highly fluent themselves. However, few researchers dispute the efficacy and importance of speaking only the language to be learned in a foreign language classroom. There is a strong emphasis on this in my own school district. What I saw in Moroccan classrooms suggests that not only does this allow for all student/teacher interaction to be in the target language, but it also creates an atmosphere in which a good deal of the student/student interaction is naturally and spontaneously in the target language as well. I am truly inspired to change my teaching habits and be far more intentional about my own refusal to speak English in class!
Finally I would like to address the issue of the motivation to learn foreign languages. In Morocco, the mastery of French has implications for university study, employment, and social position. That may not be the case for English, but nevertheless, many students tell me that they like English more, and that they feel more comfortable using it for conversation. I think this says a great deal about both the place of English in the global environment and the differing strategies with which the two languages are taught. The first case highlights a challenge for American foreign language teachers: English really is the lingua franca of the world, and the worldwide web, and we have to be much more creative in inspiring interest in our courses than to simply assume that students need a foreign language to graduate. However, the second and more important lesson is more universal: that English, which seems to be taught in Morocco with a communicative competence approach rather than the second language approach with which French is taught, gives students a better sense of success. Being able to communicate with someone else about a matter of mutual interest is always more satisfying than being able to use verbs correctly in the subjunctive.
So, if in the United States we want results like the impressive results that I saw in the English classes of Morocco, if we want to produce students who can conduct natural, spontaneous conversations in a foreign language after one, two, or three years of study, what do the results of my project tell us?
Admittedly, there are several challenges that are really daunting: first, there is no widespread culturally accepted need to learn a foreign language in the United States. The closest thing we have as a mandate is the requirement of universities to see two years of successful foreign language study on a high school transcript. But this often produces an environment in which students and teachers want to focus on the very specific, concrete details of vocabulary and grammar study, not the messy, risk-taking, hard-to-take-a-test-on-it skill of actually expressing original and meaningful thought.
Second, because of our English-centric sense of media culture, our students must work much harder to find daily contact with songs, movies, videos, and websites that are “cool” in the language that they are learning. Moroccans want to learn English not only because there is a coolness factor, but also because they can use it in interaction with other people on a regular basis. For a variety of reasons, Americans don’t have a the same ready convenience and desirablity of meeting and talking to people in other languages.
Looking at some of the other dimensions, I note that there are many languages that are spoken in the United States; in spite of what is commonly thought, there is a linguistic bath in the United States that we could expose our children to more often if we wanted.. We could make a more concerted effort to celebrate linguistic and cultural diversity. We could take better advantage of the fruitful early learning years. Do I think we have the political or financial will to do these things? No.
Happily on the other hand, in the dimension of pedagogy, I think that there is a lot that we could do to get better results in our classrooms. First of all, we have already begun (at least in my school system) the paradigm switch to teaching and learning for communicative competence, and especially for oral fluency. This change requires that teachers approach lessons and assessments differently, and I think that I have learned some useful things to share with my colleagues on this count. I am going to put into place some of the teaching practices I saw in Moroccan classrooms.
As part of the Project portion of my Fulbright grant, I videotaped spontaneous conversations that I conducted with Moroccan students. Interestingly, I found little assessment of spoken language within the context of the Moroccan schools that I visited. When I videotaped students doing the oral proficiency speaking assessment that we use in my school district, their teacher also videotaped them. She had never attempted to do anything like this sort of speaking task, and was very impressed with her own students when she saw how well they were able to answer spontaneously and participate in conversation with me. She shared her impressions with her colleagues and the English supervisor in the school district, and our hope is that this type of speaking assessment might be implemented in her school district as well.
In addition, I have established relationships with teachers in five schools who wish to work with me in order to establish ongoing connections between our students in Maryland and theirs in Morocco. Using What’sApp as a plaform, we hope to engage our students in one-to-one spontaneous conversations with each other about specific topics. I think this will work particularly well with French students, for whom French is being taught as an additional language to students in both countries. Although I had originally imagined that we might have a level playing field if I could connect novice high speakers in each country, I now suspect that the Moroccan students will have a better command of French than students of the same age in the US; however, there will still be a great opportunity for practice, growth, and risk-taking for both groups. The teachers and I will work with our own students to prepare them for the basic parameters of the conversation (general topic selection, useful vocabulary and verbs) and to match students as conversation partners. It is my hope that these connections with educators in several cities in Morocco and our mutual intention to bring our students together in spontaneous communication to improve language skills on both sides and share cultural perspectives with each other will be fruitful. I believe that students in my home district will benefit not only in terms of real-life practice with language, but in widening their global knowledge, and that we will be able to share “non-Hollywood” Amercian culture with Moroccan youth as they share the culture of a Muslim country with American youth.