Experiential Module Reflective Essay
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Background Information
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I designed a two week in-country language immersion program for my students as the Experiential Module. This program was part of a 44 week course in the United States. Students who participated in this program spent two weeks in Vietnam with their instructor and peers and then returned to the U.S. to complete their course. This immersion trip took place in weeks 24-25 with students’ estimated proficiency level being S-2 (speaking 2) according to the Interagency Level Description (ILR). During the immersion trip, students visited different cities and interacted with native speakers in order to complete their assigned tasks.
My goal was to design task based activities with the aim to improve students’ oral language competence and to develop their intercultural competence through real and authentic communication. In order to ensure that my course objectives were met, I designed this course referencing to several principles as below.
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Communicative Competence
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As in the National Capital Language Resource Center (NCLRC) (http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/goalsmethods/goal.htm), communicative competence refers to the ability to use the language correctly and appropriately to accomplish communication goals. Four competence areas that make up communicative competence are linguistic, sociolinguistic, discourse, and strategic.
In Vietnamese language, linguistic and sociolinguistic competences sometimes overlap. For example, Vietnamese society highlights the importance of hierarchy where the choice of pronouns plays an important role in any conversation. Learners need to understand which personal pronoun is appropriate to use in a specific conversation so as not to disrespect or offend their communication partners. For example, when a 25-year-old addresses a 65-year-old woman, the appropriate 2nd person pronoun should be “bác.” However, when that same person communicates with a 35-year-old woman, the appropriate 2nd personal pronoun should be “chị.” Although students participating in this immersion program have reached a level of S-2 in speaking, choosing appropriate personal pronouns was still a challenge. This immersion program allowed and encouraged students to interact with a wider range of people, which required them to use different types of pronouns while communicating with native speakers and to have an authentic reason to do so.
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The third competence that plays a role in communicative competence is discourse. This competence area refers to the knowledge of interpreting the larger context and constructing longer stretches of language in order to produce coherent speech. In Vietnamese, as in other languages, the use of appropriate connectors and particles is an important part of stringing utterances together in order to make the conversation sound smooth and natural. Oral discourse is particularly difficult to learn without a lot of exposure to authentic language. It is hard to learn a foreign language at a level sufficient to hold a conversation without actually having had authentic or semi-authentic conversations. Spending time in this immersion program definitely provided students with opportunities to develop their discourse competence.
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The last is strategic competence which measures the learner’s ability to recognize and repair communication breakdown. While interacting with native speakers of a foreign language, miscommunication does happen. Students need to learn how to work around the gaps in their knowledge of language, to correct their mistakes, and to carry on with the conversation. This immersion program offered an opportunity for learners to improve their oral proficiency through authentic communication in and out of the classroom with some explicit strategy instruction. The debriefing session after each excursion was the time for students to reflect and focus on speaking strategies. It gave student time to ask “What did you do? What went wrong with the effort to communicate? What could you have done differently? What would you do next time?”, etc.
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Intercultural Competence
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Another important goal of this immersion program is to improve students’ intercultural competence. Culture, as defined by Corbert (2013), refers to the attitudes, beliefs, and values that are expressed in everyday behaviors. In the real world, different people in different places do ordinary things in different ways because they hold different attitudes, values, and beliefs. According to Sercu (2004), in foreign language education “intercultural competence” always implies “communicative competence,” and therefore it always has a “linguistic, sociolinguistic and discourse component.” The importance of intercultural competence assessment in foreign language education cannot be overestimated. Teaching intercultural competence refers to cultural insights, attitudes, and identity development, with an emphasis on performance and behavioral aspects.
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One example of intercultural difference that students can notice is that Vietnamese people do not say “thank you” as frequently as most people do in western culture. It is considered too formal or too superficial or simply not necessary to say “thank-you” in many contexts, for example, between close friends, or between customers and sellers, etc. This program was not to discourage learners to say “thank-you” in these settings or to adapt to the culture, but rather to help learners understand the local practices and to avoid culture shocks. Learners, through interactions with native speakers, noticed cultural behaviors and practices in order to reflect and compare them to their own, which, in turn, improved learners’ intercultural competence.
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Pragmatic Competence
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In order to sustain a successful conversation in a foreign language, pragmatic competence plays a very important role. Crystal (1997) defined pragmatics as “the study of language from the point of view of users, especially of the choices they make, the constraints they encounter in using language in social interaction and the effects their use of language have on other participants in the act of communication” (p.301). One example of pragmatic competence in Vietnamese language that often causes a total misunderstanding is how to respond to a negative question. For example:
A: Don’t you like pets?
B: Yes. (You are right, I do NOT like pets)
C: No. (You are not right. I DO like pets)
In other words, Vietnamese people respond to the formation of the question rather than the fact, which might be confusing to English speakers. In this immersion trip, students had a lot of exposure to authentic communication which I believed that helped them to improve their language ability.
As defined by Byram, Gribkova, and Starkey (2002) “The acquisition of intercultural competence is never complete and perfect; however, to be a successful intercultural speaker and mediator does not require complete and perfect competence. The components of intercultural competence are knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Intercultural attitudes refer to the curiosity, openness and willingness to relativize one’s own values and beliefs and behaviors, whereas intercultural skills refers to the knowledge of how social groups and identities function and what is involved in intercultural interaction. Intercultural skills are defined as skills of interpreting and relating, discovery and interaction, and critical cultural awareness”. This immersion program aimed to develop learners’ skills, attitudes, and awareness of values, as well as to improve learners’ knowledge of Vietnamese culture. Typically, language teaching classrooms are the places where language knowledge and skills are the focus, whereas cultural knowledge and attitudes are acquired in real life communication. Therefore, in this immersion program I emphasized on improving the intercultural competence of learners.
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Task Based Language Teaching Approach
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This immersion program is developed on the basis of task based language teaching (TBLT). According to Ellis and Shintani (2014), in order to be qualified as a “task” an instructional activity needs to:
1) place primary focus on meaning and not on linguistic form,
2) have a “gap” that needs to be filled by communication,
3) allow students to rely largely on their own linguistic and non-linguistic resources, and
4) define an outcome that goes beyond the use of language.
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In other words, TBLT places a higher priority on communicating a message effectively rather than accurately. Another key aspect of TBLT that I incorporated when designing this program was the main features of tasks as described by Van den Branden (2012). I made sure there was an alignment between the designed tasks and those main features. Tasks need to be relevant to learners’ needs and to be motivating and challenging. There is an emphasis on how task performance should elicit action and interaction which means students are required to use the target language to communicate and get something out of the interaction. Task performance involves communicative language use and metalinguistic reflection. For example, in the lesson about shopping, students were asked to role-play in class. They played the role of seller and buyer, had a conversation with each other, and bought and sold items they needed on a list given by the instructor.
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Fortunately, with this immersion program students had an opportunity to go out in the real world and tested out their learned language in order to see how it worked in a real and authentic social setting. After students had completed their real world tasks, they returned to the classroom and discussed their experience with class. This activity gave them an opportunity to reflect on what and how well they could communicate their messages in the target language.
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Conclusion
I designed this language immersion program with a plan to help students improve their communicative, pragmatic, and intercultural competence. In my opinion, language immersion should be integrated into all language teaching contexts as it tremendously enriches students’ language learning experience which can, in turn, accelerate their language acquisition process.
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