Printer-friendly versionThe fall semester begins. There are 17 undergraduate college students sitting in front of me in a room designed for about twice that many. Some students have the courage to sit a foot or two from the front table and computer podium where I face them. Others (those a colleague calls “the back row boys,” no matter the gender) choose the seats furthest away. Many sit near one or more of their friends and chat with each other before and after class.
The class title is Language Development, and the expectation among many of these students is that the course—including the teacher—will be as dry as unbuttered toast. This is a required course for those who are training to become teachers. I have taught this course before to similar audiences and, unbeknownst to this new group of 17, realize that many of them, dare I say most, are going to connect with the subject matter and with each other more than they ever thought possible.
Why? Because the facts and issues that they will read about and discuss during the next 16 weeks are intimately related to what they have experienced as children, teenagers and now as young adults. The subject matter is also highly relevant to what they will likely come across as teachers and parents. Language is a huge, all-encompassing subject. When I teach about the development of language I also touch on how the brain works, why they know that a person has a different accent and what makes a sentence polite or impolite. Admittedly, I am just calling attention to and drawing out much of what they already know, even if it’s subconscious. But my self-appointed role is to identify those sparks of interest and decency and help them catch fire.
A key to drawing students in is to get them involved at a level that is deeper than just intellectual. For example, in the third week of class we viewed a DVD about the brain. It includes a section about how massive seizures affect children’s development and functioning. In some cases, parents must make the heartrending decision to have their children undergo an operation in which one hemisphere of the brain is removed in order to stop the seizures. I had previewed the DVD and knew that it could have an emotional impact. But I wasn’t sure it had hit home until one of the “back row boys” said to me, “Did you have to show us something that made us cry?”
Bingo.
And because the textbook we used focused on both single language and bilingual development, we talked a lot about how developing two languages can be beneficial for both children and adults and how the opposite, language loss, can have negative consequences. An article by Lily Wong Fillmore entitled, "The Loss of Family Languages: Should Educators Be Concerned?," created awareness among them about how some children in the United States cannot communicate with their own parents and grandparents because these children cannot speak the first language of their families. To my surprise, a significant number of the students in my class had not previously been aware of this dilemma. I was gratified to see that they had little trouble putting themselves in the shoes of those children and other family members. My students developed empathy for those who were affected by language loss right before my eyes.
As the semester proceeded, I recognized other ways that students were engaged. They talked with each other willingly in small groups, mostly on the assigned topics. They asked questions, many of them uncommonly good and insightful. Their responses on tests were interesting for me to read and demonstrated that not only had they ”gotten it” but that they also thought of things that hadn’t occurred to me.
Don’t get me wrong—many of these students in the Language Development class were impassioned about language and the topics we discussed before they ever stepped in the room. I can’t take credit for their interest and growth. But for the others, I could tell that my own knowledge and enthusiasm had lit a fire of intensity that will prepare them for what’s ahead. What more, after all, can a teacher ask for?
Milambiling is a professor in the English Department at University of Northern Iowa.
