CCCFLC Conference 2019 was held on October 19th at Rio Hondo College in Whittier.

CCCFLC Conference 2018 took place at East Los Angeles College (ELAC).

The CCCFLC 2016 Conference was held at Santiago Canyon College in Orange, California, on October 22.  Please share your thoughts about the Conference with your colleagues by commenting below. Next year’s Conference will be at on a Saturday in October at College of the Canyons in Valencia, which is a few miles north of Los Angeles.

I teach elementary Italian at two community colleges in two different districts. In district A the course is worth five units and the semester is compressed into 15 weeks. That class therefore meets for two hours and fifteen minutes two times a week. In district B the course is worth only four units and meets for one hour and fifty minutes twice a week over an 18 week period. The students and I can make so much more progress in the course in district A. Those additional 25 minutes per class are key. Why? Because building a language from the ground up takes lots of in-class time. Our non-language faculty, administrators and boards seem sometimes not to understand or appreciate the fact that language courses are performance courses. Students have to understand the material, learn the material, practice the material and internalize the material to be able to perform the task of speaking creatively, by which I mean say what they want to communicate, not merely repeat sentences they’ve memorized. Learning a language is not accomplished by merely memorizing some vocabulary and a few key sentences. That will not result in knowing the language. Students have to have ample in-class time to internalize, communicate and be creative, i.e., be able to compose original sentences within the framework of what they’ve learned in class. For the great majority of students, learning to do this is not going to happen outside of class. Solo work on a website, as far as I can tell, does not contribute much to student creativity. That is why a 4-unit class shortchanges the students. Teachers and students are expected to do more these days without being given more in-class time. Everyone should keep in mind the evolution of language teaching/learning over the last 50 years: In the 70’s we taught grammar with just enough vocabulary to illustrate the grammar, the students took notes, repeated, spoke to us once in a while (never to one another), went home and did their homework, then took the exams and finally the final. In the 80’s, in addition to all of the above, we were expected to flood the students with passive vocabulary and also give them time to do independent dyad or group activities in class. In the 2000’s we were told to add a lot of culture to that already rushed scenario. In order to attempt to accomplish all this in the same time frame, something had to give. I hear some instructorsare currently trying to teach the grammar and vocab using culture as a medium. Or maybe they teach culture, and the grammar and vocab are there to facilitate the learning of the culture. I’d have to experience such classes for myself to know what really goes on, how effective it is and if the students would be able to speak the language if their class time were spent in this manner. Because students’ being able to speak the language creatively must remain our ultimate goal. What’s more, to enable students to use the language for communication here and now, time must be spent on the vocabulary of daily life, i.e., the things we have and do and want and think, etc. That’s what students are most likely to talk about in the language outside of class. I’m not going to get that to happen by presenting units on Italian opera and the Renaissance, glorious as they are! Tracy Terrell once told me, “Students will be able to do outside of class what they do during class time.” Accordingly, to my mind it is obvious that all elementary language classes need to meet at least five hours a week and concentrate on communicating using the vocabulary of everyday life to for the ability to speak the language creatively to occur. Please let us know what your thoughts on this weighty matter are.

Here’s what I think, and I came up with quite a list! Do these things work for you? What would you omit, modify or add?
From my experience and observations, a dedicated, effective language instructor…
is the one who sets the tone for the class
creates a positive, open, friendly, fun-loving atmosphere in the classroom
inspires many or most of the students to want to learn the language
maintains control of the class firmly and gently
is flexible when necessary
treats each student with respect and dignity
makes learning interesting and fun
makes students feel welcome
makes students have such a positive experience that they want to come to class
gets to know each student by name (in time!)
gets to know each student’s capabilities, limits and needs (if possible!)
tries to insert humor into the lesson whenever possible
encourages each student to do his or her best
never mocks, berates, criticizes, belittles, ignores, or punishes students
never takes out his or her personal problems on the students
is lavish with praise
shows (appropriate) love and concern for every student

Is it possible that any instructor has not read the comments on his or her classes on the web site ratemyprofessors.com? My students (and my own three offspring) tell me they and everybody they know nearly always check out potential instructors on RMP before enrolling in those instructors’ classes. Do you check RMP from time to time? If you do, are the students (except for the occasional troll) usually accurate? Does it ever inspire you to continue a certain practice or attitude that is appreciated or praised by the students or modify or eliminate those that they might criticize? Do you think chairs and administrators can resist the temptation to look at RMP? Even though it’s not permissible to use RMP as a basis for disciplinary action, do you think the information might inform their opinion of you as an instructor and be used subtly to your advantage or disadvantage? Can one opt out of RMP?

Here’s what I do. On the first day I enter the classroom right on time, smile at the students, put my stuff on the table and write my name and other info on the board. Usually the students are silent; they don’t know each other yet, and for some of them this is their first time in a college class. Then I turn around, smile at the students again and say “Buongiorno!” and motion for them repeat “Buongiorno, professore!” I reiterate in English what I wrote on the board and then I call roll. I smile at each student and ask him or her why he or she is taking Italian. If a student is at a loss for words, I ask “curiosity, you love languages, you need credits, your life would be empty if you didn’t know Italian?” They all chuckle. This sets the tone. I’m in charge, serious about them learning Italian and well organized but they can see right off the bat that I’m fun-loving. And they find out immediately that they are not anonymous faces in a full room. Each one has name and a voice. Each one is special. After roll call I ask, “Do you guys want to read the syllabus now, or shall we do some Italian?” The answer is invariably “Do some Italian!” and I start the Lezioni Preliminari that I have thoughtfully prepared over the years. I tell them to get out a pencil and paper and get ready to write down everything I write on the board. As I write I pronounce the Italian and translate it bit by bit, and ask them to repeat every so often. When I’m done with the first chunk of language I ask them if they have any questions. Then I say, “OK, now stand up and have this conversation (the one we just wrote on the board) with at least five different people! By the time you get to the fifth person you’ll know it by heart!” They are amazed, but they do it. All of a sudden the classroom is noisy and raucous as 50 nineteen-year-olds get busy introducing themselves, smiling at each other, shaking hands, saying “Sorry, gotta go now” and going on to the next person. The conversation is all in Italian, but it goes like this:

—Good morning, sir/ma’am.
My name is Dave Pardess.
What is your name?
—My name is Joe/Lisette García.
(We shake hands while we say…)
—It’s a pleasure.
—The pleasure’s mine.
(I look at my watch and make a sorrowful face.)
—Well, I have to go now.
—Me, too.
—Good-bye.
—See you later.

We do as much of the Lezioni Preliminari in this fashion as time allows. About fifteen minutes before class ends, I pass out the xeroxed Lezioni Preliminari packets so they can see and read what we’ve done in black and white. I distribute these packets free of charge so we can get right to work the first week of class. I tell them to make sure they buy the text materials at the student store by the beginning of the next week. I take care of adds right after class, and invariably at least one student tells me “This class is so much fun. I can’t believe I learned so much in one day. I can’t wait for the next class. Thank you so much, professore.”
At the next class meeting we have fun doing more of the Lezioni Preliminari and then we read the syllabus (except for some technical info) as a class. In fact, the students do all the reading by taking turns, and “snaking” around the room. I also have students fill out a student info sheet, which I collect to get to know more about each one and how to contact them if the need arises.

This is how I understand it. Please correct me if I’m wrong. One of the old fashioned methods—the Grammar-Translation Method—was originally used for teaching Latin and Greek, both of them highly inflected languages. The idea was for students to learn some grammar and some vocabulary so they could read and translate into English a literary text written by one of the Classical authors and then go on to do the same for other such texts. At that time, knowing Latin and Greek was the hallmark of a cultured, highly educated European or American. Modern French and German were originally taught using the Grammar-Translation Method because it was felt that the goal was to be able to read French and German literature in the original. If a person wanted to learn to speak the language they could hire a tutor or go live, work or study for a while in the country where the language was spoken. A few people were auto-didacts, i.e., people who could teach themselves a language and how to communicate in it. Before World War II, universities in the western world taught all foreign languages more or less using the Grammar-Translation Method. During the war, American military personnel were taught phrases in French, German, Italian, etc., to help them function in European countries. I still have my uncle’s government issue French Phrase Book. After the war, it was felt for the first time that language learners should be taught to speak the language while learning to read and write it. To force instructors to give spoken language top priority, the Audio-Lingual Method or Aural-Oral Method of the 60’s was mandated for most American high schools. Although the totality of my high school French was traditionally taught, I learned German and Spanish with textbooks from the Holt, Rinehart and Winston aural-oral series such as Verstehen und Sprechen and Entender y Hablar. After I caught on that it was all memorization I aced every test and my high school GPA began to soar! I was such a fanatic that I bought personal copies of all my language textbooks at a local bookstore in San Pedro and also all the A-LM (Harcourt, Brace and World’s Audio-Lingual Materials) textbooks that they used in the Palos Verdes USD, and I still have all of them! When I got to UCLA the college versions of the Audio-Lingual method were being used in a few departments, but not in the Department of French. UCLA professors Oreste Pucciani and Jacqueline Hamel had written Langue et Langage, an all-French textbook based on the theories and practices of Pucciani’s high school French teacher Ferdinand de Sauzé, which had been dubbed the Direct Method. The Direct Method was in vogue at UCLA and at Cal and Stanford (Jian and Hester’s Découverte et Création) for decades. In Direct Method classes the instructor never uttered a word in English. English was totally banned from the classroom from day one. Students had to answer instructors’ questions in French and then go up and write their answers on the board. The textbooks were grammar driven and logically ordered so that students were always learning new grammar and vocabulary based on that of previous lessons. It worked for many students, but not all. Several of my fraternity brothers frequently asked me for help with grammar and vocab. Direct Method works for French because of the huge number of cognates French and English share. It is more of a challenge to teach the other Romance languages via DM. I have the German version, Deutsch durch Deutsch, but I don’t think it was a big seller. Even though English and German are both Germanic languages, the big words in German are usually opaque to English speakers. Compare the French word ‘conversation’ with the German equivalent ‘Unterhaltung’. I took a summer course at UCLA on teaching via the Direct Method and the instructor assured me that it was the best way to teach any of the world’s languages. I sensed that that was bogus right off. Just try explaining Japanese SOV syntax and turn-of-phrase to English speakers in Japanese with no recourse to English. What a waste of time! Right up until the 1980’s, American universities tried to get through all the verb tenses in European languages in the first year, which left little or no time for students to talk to one another in class. Oreste Pucciani once said something like “Oh, no. We don’t want them to talk to each other in class; they’ll teach each other their mistakes!” Those who wanted to speak the language were provided with an optional year of conversation classes they could take while continuing second-year study of the language. In the mid 1980’s the Communicative Approach of Tracy Terrell (UCSD), partially based on the theories of Stephen Krashen (USC), swept the nation. Students were expected to study grammar before coming to class so they could spend class time doing Activities. To keep students’ anxiety levels down, instruction began with a rather long Silent Period, during which students could absorb the language with their Affective Filters (or “guards”) down and mostly respond physically instead of verbally to the instructor and textbook (Total Physical Response or TPR). After the Silent Period students could speak, but their utterances were not to be corrected (at least directly) by the instructor. The goal was to get students to speak the language even if they weren’t sure their grammar was perfect. Communicative Approach textbooks contained a huge amount of vocabulary. Tracy Terrell’s reasoning was that since most students take only one year of a language, they cannot be expected to speak error free, and that exposing them to a lot of vocabulary would make it possible for them to understand the answers of native speakers. Some of my good students told me that they were frustrated because they were never quite sure what they were saying was correct and were therefore hesitant to speak. After a year or two of teaching via the Communicative Approach, I decided to do my own thing, and I got vastly better results. The current in-vogue approach seems to be Flipping the Classroom, which means that students learn on their own by studying grammar, vocabulary and culture online before coming to class and doing mostly group work during class time with the instructor acting largely as consultant. I have tried this student-centered approach in two community college classes. For Spanish 1 it seemed to work kind of OK, but I suspect it was because many of the students had already had a year or two of high school Spanish. Most of them did not prepare for class. In Italian 1 it was a train wreck for multiple reasons, and I made the decision to switch methods mid-semester. I, for one, do not appreciate being forced to use any methodology I determine will not bring superior results. We are not university Teaching Assistants who are required to use current departmental methodology to teach mostly highly motivated students. I think we need text- and maybe cyber- materials that will give us the freedom to best serve the needs of our CC students.

—Should a textbook be grammar driven? Could a textbook possibly be culture driven?
—As a linguist I shudder at the thought of a textbook being culture driven. What a mess!
—Should the presentation of grammar topics be logically sequenced?
—Definitely. I couldn’t believe it when I heard Stephen Krashen once say not to teach each verb tense separately but rather to use forms from any tense at any time for any purpose. Can you imagine the confusion and frustration most of our students of Indo-European and Semitic languages would experience if we did that? (I am told that Chinese verbs have neither conjugations nor tenses. Yes!)
—Do students prefer that every section of a textbook be in the same format or do they prefer that the formats of presentations and activities be “changed up”?
—I don’t think it really matters. I say use the format that best makes the grammatical structure clear and easy to learn
—How important is contextualization, i.e., enabling students to use what they’ve learned to converse or compose at length on a given topic?
—I think contextualization is a great way to present grammar interwoven with vocabulary. I look back at textbooks in which every example sentence in a given section just illustrated the grammar at hand. If you read the sentences one after the other they are all separate thoughts; they don’t tell a story. I think contextualization makes more sense.
—What topics do first-year students find interesting and fun to talk and write about?
—Here are some topics I use to introduce the grammar—especially verb tenses and modes—to elementary-level students: describing their language class, instructor and classmates; describing family and friends and their activities; student life; plans for the future; their house or the house of their dreams; everything about food; interpersonal relationships; the daily routine of an adult; what they did over break; their family history; how they feel about things in the present; what people want or don’t want to happen now or in the future; how to tell people what to do and what not to do; how they feel now about things that happened in the past; how they felt in the past about things that happened in the past; daydreaming about the present and future; hindsight about things that happened in the past; what a person could, would or should do, what a person could have, would have or should have done, etc. If you teach a Romance language you can probably sense that these themes follow a logical sequencing of the verb tenses and modes.
—Should there be lots of example sentences and mini-conversations in a textbook?
—Definitely. Some of our students that have trouble seeing patterns in language have compensated by becoming awesome memorizers, and they have to have something to memorize.
—How important are photographs?
—I love them. As a student I was inspired to go to Europe by the black and white photos in my first French book, Le français, by Frédéric Ernst and Sylvia Narins Levy.
—How important are drawings? When I used Dos Mundos and Deux Mondes for the first time back in the mid-80’s I found artist Sally Richardson’s line drawings charming and amusing and sometimes useful for in-class activities. But artwork should never be so extensive that it draws attention away from the language.
—What kinds of activities do students find interesting and fun?
—Interviewing each other, i.e., asking each other personal questions seems to be the most direct way of stimulating conversation. I’m not sure they like a constant diet of it, though.
—How important is personalization, i.e., enabling the students use what they have learned to talk to each other about themselves, their families and their friends?
—Well, since that’s what they know and care about and what they’re probably going to talk about a lot in the future, I think it’s very important and a great medium for the learning of vocabulary and grammar
—What should an end-of-book vocabulary contain and how detailed should it be?
—I think there should be both a The Language-to-English vocabulary and an English-to- The Language vocabulary. Some books exclude the latter and I find that irritating. I think the vocabularies should include example sentences in cases where further clarification of meaning is necessary
—What should the appendices contain?
—Among other things, well organized but compact listings of regular verbs, regular verbs with spelling changes, frequently used irregular verbs like ‘to be’ and ‘to have’, and irregular verbs, and instead of showing all the tenses and modes of any given verb on one page, the divisions should go tense by tense. Do all verbs in the present tense first. In another section do all of them in one of the past tenses, and so on. And since these lists are going to be used for reference and not for teaching they can be listed more compactly by stringing the forms rather than putting them in the traditional boxes. Here’s an example of a perfectly adequate listing of the forms of the present indicative of the Italian verb andare (to go): andare: vado, vai, va, andiamo, andate, vanno
—Does having to turn the book sideways to read the tables annoy you?
—Big time! And the tiny sans sérif type is hard even for young people to read.
—Should topicalized “Extra Vocabulary” be included in the appendices?
—I think so, because, for the food chapter especially, lists of meats, fowl, fish, vegetables, fruits and other foods can go on interminably. So to have more complete lists grouped by category in one of the appendices for reference purposes would shorten the food chapter to a more manageable size so you can get through it in less time.