Daily Excerpt: Working with Advanced Foreign Language Students (Shekhtman) - Preface
Excerpt from Working with Advanced Foreign Language Students (Boris Shekhtman) -
Preface
This little booklet is far weightier than many tomes four times its size. The nuggets of wisdom distilled in it come from more than two decades of extraordinarily successful experience in working with students at the highest levels of foreign-language proficiency. The quality of Boris Shekhtman’s instruction and his insight into advanced students’ learning needs is a subject with which I have had first-hand knowledge year after year.
Many years ago, in 1984, Boris, and a colleague, Natalia Lord, approached me, as their supervisor at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), with a request to develop a course for advanced students. Any student who had already reached Superior-level proficiency at that time and was returning to FSI for a refresher or enhancement course, was treated as a tutorial. However, Boris and Natalia saw the possibilities in grouping these students into small classes and providing direct instruction to them in the classroom.
Fortunately, at the same time, the Dean of the School of Language Studies, Jack Mendelssohn, had a dream. It was the time when the Cold War was quite, well, cold, and a time when Congress was asking, “Why don’t American diplomats speak Russian as well as Soviet diplomats speak English?”
There are, of course, answers to that question which have more to do with assignments, rotations, and career patterns than to do with language instruction. Nonetheless, Jack wanted to try the impossible, and he called his dream for the ideal diplomat to be assigned to Moscow or Leningrad “The New Soviet Man.” An odd name today, perhaps, but what he was referring to were diplomats who could come close to passing for their counterparts.
So, I was in the middle of a happy union: my boss’s dream matched my employees’ hopes. Thus was born the FSI Russian Advanced Course, which has lived on from that time to the present time, known today as the Beyond Three course and which has now acquired a partner in the French Beyond Three course. Thanks to the meshing of dreams and budgets, Boris and Natalia were able to be freed from teaching for six months (over the rather strong complaints of students, who had enjoyed their teaching and wanted more of it) to develop a course that had never been tried before. The goal was to take students deliberately from Level 3 to Level 4 and higher through direct instruction. The amount of time to be devoted to reaching this goal was 6 months of full-time study (30 hours per week). Oh, and the teachers of the course (as well as I, the supervisor) were accountable for the results. Not reaching Level 4, regardless of how much better a Level 3 speaker became at that level, was considered by the institute to be a failure--and FSI does not tolerate failure well.
So, the Russian advanced course became a high stakes game for those in supervisory positions. As for teachers, everyone wanted to teach the advanced course. It was considered a plum and a cake-assignment, at least, until teachers really tried to do it. To their astonishment, instead of students who could easily and quickly learn on their own and instead of an easy classroom where one could do just about anything because the students had high-level skills, they found out what research has subsequently shown: really advanced students have really advanced needs and expectations. They are not an easy population to teach: they know how they learn and what they want. Often, they know what they need. When their wants and needs do not match, the teacher has quite a sales job to do. Further, their needs are such that it would take an omniscient person to teach them in traditional ways. At this point, the teacher truly becomes a facilitator in the broadest sense of that word. At the same time, the teacher becomes a language doctor (diagnosing and treating linguistic problems) and a psychologist (dealing with what often can seem like very demanding students who, however, are delightful and rewarding to work with when their needs are met).
Ultimately, Boris and Natalia carried the bulk of the responsibility for the advanced course, helped out by the braver among their colleagues. In the six years that Boris managed and taught the advanced course, not one student who spent the six months in training failed to reach a Level 4 on an official proficiency test.
Students felt so strongly positive about the course that they became its salespersons. One student made a presentation to the Interagency Language Round table about the course, demonstrating how his own highly advanced proficiency had become near-native thanks to direct instruction. Two other students assisted the teachers in making a videotape of exercises used in the advanced course and discussed how and why these exercises helped them.
Since that time, Boris has continued to bring students to near-native levels of proficiency at the Specialized Language Training Center (SLTC) in Rockville, Maryland. In so doing, he has dramatically reduced the number of hours that students can expect to spend in training in order to reach these levels. His success stories have names that are seen on the pages of the press and in the halls of diplomacy. In the pages of this book are distilled the underlying principles of the approach used at the FSI, then later refined at the SLTC. More than principles, this book provides clear-cut examples of the practices, so that other teachers in other languages can use these as models for teaching their own students. I am sure that the reader will find this book interesting and enjoyable to read. More than that, I am sure that the reader will find this book useful.
Betty Lou Leaver
For more posts about Boris Shekhtman and his books, click HERE.
For more posts about language learning, click HERE.
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