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[ProfessionalDevelopment 2382] Re: Critical Thinking, Education and Social ActionSteve Kaufmann steve at thelinguist.comSun Jul 20 00:19:02 EDT 2008
David Greene and others, The fact that this program in the church basement was free does not tell me that it was effective. Nor was it free if it required funding from the government. Someone else was paying for it. The people paying for the service had the right to decide on whether they wanted to continue paying or not. All of my experience suggests that with adults, it is far better to ask people to pay. Either pay them to study or ask them to pay. This is actually in their own interest. Fees can be adjusted to the ability to pay. However, if it is free, the degree of commitment declines rapidly. And learning to speak another language takes a lot of commitment. If these people were genuinely committed to learning English they would have done so, with or without this program. Once the issue is presented as an "our rights" entitlement issue, I am sure that there are lots of people who will jump on the bandwagon and demand their entitlement. This does not mean that those people will put the effort into learning English. Language learning is a more individual thing. It is not about political activism in my experience. It requires effort, commitment, emotional as well as in terms of time, and the willingness to shut oneself off from one's own culture to some extent and for a period of time. Having learned 10 languages and watched others learn, I am quite confident, that without there is little meaningful progress in language learning. Steve -- Steve Kaufmann www.lingq.com 1-604-922-8514 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.nifl.gov/pipermail/professionaldevelopment/attachments/20080719/6d252588/attachment.html
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