The Middle Matters

As the Middle School’s new French and Chinese teacher, I feel it fitting to begin this post with a bonjour chaleureux and a hearty 大家好!

My first few months in the Middle School at Germantown Academy have been blissful and inspiring: this is a special place, and I am honored and delighted to be here. In a time when many schools have become dishearteningly shortsighted about the benefits of teaching foreign language, GA is different. This is a school that really seems to “get it,” and seems to understand how exposure to and mastery of another language constitute, not just an asset in an increasingly global professional world, but also a powerful tool of self-discovery, expression, and connection.

I came to GA after teaching at universities in Ohio and France, and my experiences with older students have profoundly influenced my approach to the middle school language classroom. The college students I worked with frequently lamented their inability to converse meaningfully in French, and many of them had been studying it since elementary or middle school. When I probed for more information about their instruction in French, I noticed a pattern. They had learned in classes that were teacher-centered and in situations where teachers spent most of their time talking to students, not speaking with them. My classes don’t look or sound like this. When my middle school students head off to Upper School and then to college, they will not speak about their time in the language classroom with the same regret.

Developments in second language acquisition have prompted a shift away from our understanding that learning a language means memorizing vocabulary words and churning out verb paradigms–that type of teaching is frightening, uninspiring, and ineffective. I teach with conviction according to the communicative language method, which is wholly revolutionary in its simplicity: if we as language teachers want our students to speak, we’ve got to give them the chance to speak! We must model healthy language-learning behaviors for our students and must approach language and culture with a spirit of curiosity and play. By its very

nature, learning a foreign language implies taking risks and making mistakes, and a good language teacher teaches and evaluates learners accordingly, accounting for mistakes and rewarding students who dare to take risks. To that end, we must make classrooms spaces where students feel safe, uninhibited, and empowered.

These reflections on the art of teaching foreign language have informed my teaching philosophy and translate into classroom practices that make my students’ time with me rich and rewarding. I teach nearly entirely in the target language, which is the first and most important way to maximize student exposure to the language and also models the expectation that they must understand and use it themselves. I camouflage grammar and vocabulary with lessons about current events and pop culture and structure these lessons such that the students naturally acquire a particular aspect of the language as a result of engagement in conversations about topics that are important to them. Effort and creativity trump memorization and parroting. My students play an active role in the learning process—I’m certainly there to provide guidance, but I facilitate where others instruct. To illustrate, my French C classes recently learned vocabulary about urban spaces and how to navigate a city. They explained the advantages and disadvantages of life in the city, discussed which types of people live in different types of cities, and, this week, are launching pretend political campaigns to compete to become the next mayor of Philadelphia. These lessons build on themselves and culminate in an activity that will showcase the students’ ideas and creativity. I set the context and structure the class, but they give it substance.

The brilliance here is twofold: as my students exchange with each other in the target language, they are growing in their language skills and also growing in their knowledge of themselves and each other. French and Chinese serve as the vehicles for this powerful new self-knowledge.

The character traits and behavior modeled and cultivated in the foreign language classroom reinforce the broader work that we are doing in the Middle School, and my classes reflect GA’s mission in a way that reminds me why I got into language teaching in the first place. My students demonstrate courage and confidence as they take risks; they demonstrate compassion as they support their classmates and learn patience with themselves; and they demonstrate collaboration as they listen to each other and interact meaningfully and with authenticity.

I speak on behalf of my other language colleagues at GA when I say that we are teaching, not just tools to navigate a language, but tools to navigate life. After all, though we are in the business of transmitting language skills, we also have a hand in the raising of human beings.