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Date:         Wed, 27 Jan 1993 09:43:00 EST
From:         RDK1@PITTVMS.BITNET
Subject:      Re: fl

  Being the author of the chapter that Andrew Cohen referred to (in the volume
Foreign Language Acquisition Research and the Classroom, edited by Barbara
Freed), I feel that I have to respond to some of the messages that have
come through SLART lately.
  There is no doubt that a great many people have sat through years of "foreign
language teaching" and have not benefited from it, at least not in terms of
language proficiency (and usually not in any other respect either). It is
also undoubtedly true that many people have greatly benefited from a
prolonged stay overseas. Moreover, it is even true that some people who
never acquired any proficiency in the classroom, did develop considerable
fluency abroad. Yes, the same people, sometimes in the same language even.
  To infer from all this that acquiring proficiency in the classroom is nearly
impossible, and that not acquiring it abroad is also nearly impossible,
however, is a non sequitur. A lot of what goes on in language classrooms
is more akin to what goes on in chemistry or history classes, or in some
cases to what goes on in correctional institutions, than to any form of
language development, because people are just doing time. The students are
waiting for the end of class, the end of the school year, the diploma,
being set free. On the other hand, most people going abroad have quite a
stake in their developing proficiency. Not learning the language can be
a threat to their self-image, their prestige, their image, even their
economic and in rare cases their physical survival. Trying to suggest
that fundamentally different learning processes take place because of
the mere difference in environment, is in my opinion completely misguided.
  The learning processes are determined by specific interactions between
individual aptitudes and attitudes with specific environmental conditions
(input, social pressure...). All of these do not alter the basic fundamental
processes of language acquisition, but greatly influence how much of that
acquisition can take place. We have to ask ourselves questions like "what
features of focus on form and what features of input are beneficial or
detrimental to what sorts of learners at what point in their development"
(to say the least). Repeating the layman's view that you have to go to
the country to learn the language without looking at the variables involved
and their interaction is not going to help our profession, to put it mildly.
  I agree that a lot of what goes on in some language departments in high
schools or colleges in this country is somewhere between ludicrous and
useless, but that absolutely does not imply that language teaching is useless
and should be replaced by a semester abroad.
  Maybe it would be good to talk to some Europeans who learned two or three
foreign languages to a high degree of accuracy and fluency without ever
spending a week in the "native environment" to see what the real variables are.
In my opinion, it certainly is not a matter of classroom vs. overseas.

Robert DeKeyser
University of Pittsburgh
rdk1@pittvms
rdk1@vms.cis.pitt.edu