Homeschoolers studying a foreign language have one HUGE advantage
If you’re a homeschool parent concerned about how to offer a foreign language to your child, I want to encourage you! Learning a foreign language with a teacher at a traditional school is not the only way to learn a language, and it’s actually not even the best way to learn a language.
As a teacher of high school French, I’m very familiar with the way language courses tend to work in school settings. Typically, my students usually fall into one of two categories:
I have to take French so I can get my language credits to graduate and get into college.
I am motivated to learn French for other reasons (I want to go to Paris, I have a natural flair for learning languages, I want to speak to my French grandmother, etc.).
The students in the second category will usually learn language skills, regardless of how good (or bad) their teacher is, and what textbook or method they’re using.
However, it’s that first category that really shapes the way we offer and teach languages in traditional schools. And the unfortunate thing is that it’s the least effective way to truly promote language proficiency for communication.
In Canada and the United States (and probably much of the world), schools tend to be focused on data. They want to quantify how much students are learning, how effective the teachers are, and they especially want to rank students so universities know which students to accept. How can this happen without grades? So, traditional high school French classes are built on a certain progression through grammar concepts and vocabulary lists, because these are gradable. This progression creates a data set.
However, the natural way of learning languages actually has a very long introductory period in which the learner is simply absorbing and making meaning of what he/she is hearing. In fact, if you think about a toddler, he or she spent a really long time without words before engaging in conversations with you. Just like it’s hard to tell what a baby or toddler is thinking before they speak, it’s hard to measure how much a student learning a second language is progressing, if a student is still in the listening and absorbing stage. So schools are uncomfortable not providing scores to their students, or providing class averages to their principles, or other similar data to show that their students are learning. Thus, we have students do worksheets and memorize verb conjugations.
But can they communicate?
This is why homeschoolers have such a huge advantage. Because you aren’t tied to grades and showing specific progress over time, you can follow the natural language progression and allow your students a long period of time for language to sink in. Without requiring instant quantifiable data, you are free to “trust the process” over time, and instead of being hyper-focused on correctness and grammar, you can focus on the truly important elements of language learning: understanding and being understood for the communication!