Language Teaching gets a Makeover: Context is the key

It may or may not turn out to be the Next Big Thing in language courses curricula. For the moment it is an under-the-radar effective thing that is having a big impact on some modern language classrooms and departments. Its initials are LSP, or Language for Specific Purposes. IFE sat down recently with Paola Buckley, Senior Lecturer and Area Advisor in French in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Southern Methodist University and an innovator and advocate for LSP, to learn more about this intriguing pathway to language proficiency and skill building.

As Paola Buckley points out, many language departments had always been literature-focused, while teaching the skills to communicate effectively took a back seat. Those times changed as new interest and demand have pushed the science and pedagogy of language acquisition forward, even if often still lodged at the other end of the modern language department hallway.

Life in that department is about to change again, according to Paola, for whom LSP is the next step in training students to use a language, by making contexts the central piece. The contexts are professional ones: what people do all day, but in a different language. And how they really interact and express themselves, and what they talk about, and how they really say “a good idea but with some downside, let's kick it around at the next meeting” or “urban policy that ignores the housing shortage will negatively impact public health”. In this way, according to its advocates, LSP drives the acquisition of linguistic and cultural skills, including relevance to many fields: health careers, business, cultural affairs, public policy, social sciences and others. It adds relevance to language learning while complementing Cultural Studies, the other news in modern language departments. The lines between different functions of language departments are creatively blurred by innovative use of LSP techniques. For those who favor these techniques, everybody benefits, especially students.

And, says Paola, that's not all. LSP is a silent revolution, requiring no top-down decrees or campus-wide buy-in. This is not “language-across-the-curriculum” with a need to convince biology profs of the usefulness of language instruction. “LSP is a movement driven by language instructors, younger language teachers”, emphasizing language study as inter-cultural learning, as a way to talk to more people, and as acquisition of a set of transferable skills. That said, engaging colleagues is crucial, which is why Paola and her colleague Aria Cabot, Director of SMU’s Teaching and Technology Center, organized an SMU Research Cluster for faculty, on the theme "Global Literacy and Languages for Specific Purposes: Curricular design for building transferable skills". https://bit.ly/4fVHOT6

Finally, Paola and her many colleagues in language departments across the country are excited by LSP's effectiveness at intermediate levels of learning. If the LSP trend is bottom-up, the use of LSP is moving down catalogue; advocates find the techniques of LSP effective in third and fourth semester language courses. Paola Buckley is teaching a fourth-semester French course using films to structure a series of modules on “French in professional environments”. The secondary benefit here of course – some would say the primary one – is getting early language learners interested in continuing on, even while language requirements are being reduced. The good news? It works. At SMU, French course enrollments, majors and minors are all up significantly.