Instructors of Foreign Languages Perspective Term Paper

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Also, culture can have a significant impact on individual's ability to enjoy and fully engage in the self-directed learning experience, if it was not a part of the student's previous educational context.

Still, collaborative learning in language classrooms is largely deemed essential, given that language itself is a collaborative art: "In both education and language learning, emergent theory and practice emphasize the social aspect of learning. The learner is expected to negotiate meaning with others while helping to direct and reflect upon his or her own learning experiences" (Hughes & Source 1997:529). Team learning in the classroom, creating a challenging yet nonjudgmental environment is ideal, so students can deploy new language concepts in a realistic setting, and understand words and idioms in context, while still scaffolding new learning upon previous concepts. Ideally, the classroom should motivate students to seek out situations to stretch and test their knowledge in the real world, using their newly acquired language.

Self-motivation is often seen as a particularly critical aspect of secondary language learning. One educator observed: "We should also communicate more clearly to the second language learner that he [sic] is responsible for his own learning. This is obviously more easily said than brought about. Students generally expect too much from school and college. Often they perceive these institutions of knowledge as mental filling stations where teachers and professors equipped with 'Niirnberg funnels' are replenishing empty heads. This impression has also been fostered by the proponents of psychological associationism who claim that learning is a process of habit formation. From this point-of-view the learner is seen as a more or less willing but essentially passive stimulus-response organism.

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This school of thought would tend to believe in programmed instruction, utilizing the language laboratory and even computer programs to expose students to carefully structured learning experiences. While this model of instruction may be useful for remedial work and some individualized programs, it does not tap the inquisitive and creative impulses or the insights of a self-directed and self-motivated language learner" (Jahn 1979: 275). The cognitive and practical advantage of self-directed activities in secondary (and primary) language acquisition is its promotion of self-mastery, inquisitiveness, and responsibility.

In an increasingly technologically complex society, self-directed learning is seemed more and more important in the workforce, much like knowing a second language itself. Self-directed learning readiness emerges in the workforce as an important measurable characteristic that is positively associated with other desirable attributes in employees (Guglielmino, Guglielmino, & Long 1987: 309). Whether high intelligence is correlated or caused by previous self-directed learning experiences and the mastery of the ability to engage in such efforts remains controversial, of course, as noted by Jeanne Ormrod (2005) in her contrast between theories of education that postulate the ability to engage in self-directed practice as innate vs. learned. Regardless, the literature suggests that fostering such self-directed experiences to learn a practical skill like modern foreign language acquisition are essential to enable students to feel confident using the language to the maximum level of their ability outside the classroom and can possibly have psychological consequences that spill over into enhanced self-directed learning ability in other subjects and in the workplace.

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