Mason’s Language Program is Holding Us Back

By Broadside Opinion Editor Arthur Gailes

I’m not good at languages. There are some people who can hear a few words in another language a few times and intuitively process what they mean. In my experience, those people are in the minority. For everybody else, Mason’s foreign language program is failing us. The curriculum is poorly made, the teachers are too handicapped by the system and the classes aren’t flexible enough to accommodate different learning paces.

The biggest fault with our second language program is one that plagues American schools in general: we try to teach language like it’s science. We get out our vocabulary cards and our grammar rules and we try to memorize the translations of words and the structures of sentences. By doing so, we add an unnecessary barrier between learning the language and speaking it.

When we teach language to children, we don’t give them flash cards, we surround them with language, and they absorb the meanings of words naturally. When we think of words, we don’t have to think about what they mean; we know what they mean without thinking. To teach foreign languages as English translations is to ignore how languages are actually processed in our minds.

Languages are better taught in kindergarten, where school administrators don’t feel the pressure to have their classes be more “academic.” When teaching children, we don’t worry about making classes formal, or maintaining the almighty lecture format. We tell them to stand up and engage in the experience of learning.

But because of our heavy-handed departments, we get standardized and watered down language programs that don’t reflect the way our minds work.

This comes from the way we think of the process: we need to eliminate the mentality that we are teaching second languages. The very idea implies that we are treating foreign languages as second to English. It is the wrong way to think, and results in too many students knowing exactly what words mean and being unable to speak the language.

So instead of teaching us, just talk to us. Don’t tell us what a word means in English, tell us what the word actually means. When it comes to learning a new language, we are all children, so treat us like it. We don’t need to be programmed as if we’re computers; we need to be walked through the process of language acquisition. George Mason is very proud of its progressive attitudes, including those towards learning as opposed to simply studying languages, so it’s bewildering that our actual program is stuck in the same rut as those of our middle and high schools.

The other problem that takes place here is the elimination of 101 classes for the six credit 110 course. Again, if you’re good at languages, it’s perfect – you save a full semester of language while still learning all the same material. The 110 course should definitely be a part of our curriculum. But completely eliminating the 101 course is ridiculous because it places people who struggle with language in an untenable position, and we don’t have any choice but to take it if we want to graduate.

Education always suffers when we take teaching out of the hands of teachers, and that happens as much in the language program as anywhere else. Of course, because language learning relies so much on intuition, this hurts second language students perhaps more than anybody else. It’s a flawed attempt to take the human factor out of learning, and instead of making things more effective across the board, it brings us all down to the lowest common denominator.

We spend so much money on frivolous advancements here. We always have new computers, new equipment for our classrooms, new books, new buildings, even new treadmills. So it makes no sense for us to turn around and be regressive in the way we actually teach the classes. That’s the most important part of college (except perhaps drinking), and it’s time for Mason to treat the substance of education as seriously as it takes its style.