Languages from a Distance

The way content is organized is what will begin to blur the differences between DL and classroom scenarios. If the same or similar content is accessible in both, then what is the difference between the two?

Perhaps the direct feedback aspect. Working on that one!

Yes, I will try to teach culture. I’ll do my best because after all: culture is why we study foreign languages in the first place, right? We were charmed by the culture and never lost our taste for it. We yearn for it still.

But I can’t simply tell the story of culture and expect students to understand. They have to experience it themselves. It’s so hard to remember that.

I think we must include it at every turn. And be sneaky about it.

Embed it in the curriculum. Without any intro.

Explanation and elaboration can come later. But only after the fact.

April is not yet here, but the showers have begun. I feel inclined to include some of my favorite lines from the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (translated into Modern English):

When April with his showers sweet with fruit
The drought of March has pierced unto the root
And bathed each vein with liquor that has power
To generate therein and sire the flower;
When Zephyr also has, with his sweet breath,
Quickened again, in every holt and heath,
The tender shoots and buds, and the young sun
Into the Ram one half his course has run,
And many little birds make melody
That sleep through all the night with open eye ……

With much work, successes, and setbacks in between, I feel compelled to write again. Most of all, it’s about thinking. I need to think. And so I will write…again.

I was flipping through cable channels the other night and suddenly hit upon something that immediately made me stop. Pink Floyd’s “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” was resonating out of my TV speakers. What was this? I sat dumbfounded for a moment before I realized what I was watching. A music video? MTV? No, it was the Weather Channel. Just a routine forecast for the week. Only this time instead of the usual generic, soulless elevator music, David Gilmore’s haunting four note riff : tum – tum – tum – tum” of “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” was the accompaniment. I was mesmerized and watched the remainder of the forecast segment–probably with my mouth open. A commercial came on and snapped me out of my trance but I waited patiently to see what would come on afterwards. The forecast returned. But this time we were back to the weather channel of old. The dream was over.

I remember scoffing back when André Agassi made the famous statement: Image is everything but I finally have to give him credit for recognizing how the human psyche works. Packaging counts.