The Role of Nature in Educational Thought and Practice

Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.

(Huston 1952)

It is common in modern America for people to think that what is natural is good for us. Many people try to eat ‘natural’ food, use ‘natural’ products, and whenever possible get ‘back to nature.’ In the field of education, the question of whether and to what extent a natural approach is appropriate has been debated for over two hundred years, and continues today. For example, early childhood educators tend to stress the importance of teaching what is ‘developmentally appropriate’ to the child, even to the point of withholding formal work on basic skills such as letter and number practice. On the other hand, many parents fret over whether their child is learning enough, which accounts for the huge market in ‘kindergarten-readiness’ and other home-study materials, all of which involve attempting to push the child ahead, and betray a lack of faith in the ‘nature knows best approach.’ In my own field, language teaching, a number of – especially commercial – enterprises have made a name for themselves by claiming to have students learn a language ‘they way you learned your first language,’ a notion that has become discredited by psycholinguistic research. And throughout the whole educational enterprise, there is an attempt to align teaching and learning with ideas about the way people learn naturally, such as learning by doing or experiential education, or with theories about how individuals learn, such as multiple intelligences and neurolinguistic programming. By examining where ideas about nature in education came from and how they developed, we can better understand their manifestations in today’s educational world, and to form a clearer judgment about whether we should embrace a natural approach in education, or to ‘rise above’ nature in educational practice.

One of the earliest and most influential thinkers to address nature in education is Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778), who, in his book Emile proposed a ‘negative education’ in which the teacher does as little as possible to corrupt the innocent child with teaching. Rousseau was a romantic who glorified nature, abhorred organized religion, believed that society corrupted man, and idealized the innocence of childhood. Education, for Rousseau, does for children what cultivation does for plants, and “his entire philosophy rests upon this comparison of plants and children.” (Postman 1995 p.174) This metaphor, explicitly propounded by Rousseau, continued in the thinking of later educational thinkers. Rousseau, though, was the one who took this idea to its greatest extreme in his prescription for teaching. In his view, educating the child involved “letting the original benign nature of the child “unfold.”” (Hillesheim and Merrill 1971 p. 24) This meant that the teacher should withdraw and as much as possible let the child learn for himself (Power 1970 p. 478) allowing the mind to be “left undisturbed till its faculties have developed.” (Rousseau 1762 p. 29) For Rousseau, this meant withholding vocabulary, books, and correction, among other things.

As a romantic, Rousseau was part of a movement that glorified nature as a phenomenon ‘out there.’ Much romantic poetry, painting, and music depicted the great outdoors, with its mountains and valleys, rivers and oceans, powerful storms and bucolic scenes. Rousseau’s love of nature and antipathy toward civilization led him to recommend isolating the child from society and raising him in a rural environment in which he could learn by experience from nature. Rousseau’s examples of such experiential learning include the planting and cultivation of beans in a garden to teach a lesson about ownership, and having the child believe he is lost in a forest in order to discover from (bitter) experience how to find one’s way using the position of the sun.

If Rousseau’s recommendations seem extreme, we should remember that in the 18^th century, man’s connection to nature was a Romantic idea and had little scientific basis. In later educational thinking, with the gradual development of psychological thinking, we see a shift from the external view of nature as teacher, toward an internalizing of nature (nature in man as opposed to man in nature), as well as a much more nuanced approach to nature’s and the human teacher’s respective roles than we find in Rousseau. In addition, Rousseau was not a teacher himself, and did not concern himself with the practicalities of his educational scheme. As Power states, “Rousseau was no schoolmaster and showed no interest in becoming one. He expounded theories; their application was left to others.” (Power 1970 p. 495) We should see his educational thinking as a source of ideas to be considered rather than as a teaching methodology to be implemented in its pure form.

Among those Rousseau influenced was Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746 – 1827), who became a source of educational advice and inspiration in his day, and was himself influential in American education. (Power 1970, p. 494) Having read Emile, Pestalozzi attempted to put Rousseau’s naturalistic principles into practice. He bought a farm in which he hoped to run a school, but, it failed, and he later stated that he had not been ready for the practical business of managing children’s education (Power 1970 p. 489) – testimony, perhaps, to the danger of relying on untested educational thinking such as Rousseau’s.

Nonetheless, as Reese (2005) reports, Pestalozzi wrote extensively about the power of nature, incorporating the elevation of the peasant woman and mother with nostalgia for the countryside. ( p.11) The farm incident and these writings suggest that Pestalozzi shared Rousseau’s passion for nature as external phenomenon, but it seems that as Pestalozzi became more experienced, his focus turned inward toward the mind of the child. As a teacher, he realized he could not leave the education of children to nature; he had to teach, and did, developing a methodology in which children engaged in oral repetition while engaged in other activities, as well as an approach to reading which emphasized the sounding out of combinations of syllables (Power 1970 p.491 - 2) By 1801, Pestalozzi could describe his wariness toward reliance on nature in education as follows:

Wherever you carelessly leave the earth to nature, it bears weeds and thistles.

Wherever you leave the education of your species to it, it goes not further than a

confused observation that is not adapted to your power of comprehension, nor to

that of your child, in the way that is needed for instruction. (Pestalozzi 1801 p. 44)

This was a clear rejection of Rousseau’s negative education. On the other hand, we see in Pestalozzi a concern with psychology and human development. He asserted that teaching should come at the correct stage of the child’s development, and not before:

Nature has enclosed man’s higher aptitudes as in a budding pearl; if you break

the shell before it opens on its own, you will find only a budding pearl. You

will have destroyed the treasure you should have preserved for your child.

(Pestalozzi 1951 p. 34)

Further, Pestalozzi attempted to align teaching with how he believed children learn naturally, through direct experience of objects to be analyzed according to their number, their form, and their name. (Power 1970 p. 492) He believed that reading should be subordinate to speaking, writing to drawing, the simple should precede the complex, and the familiar the unfamiliar. (Pestalozzi 1801 p. 39) In other words, though Pestalozzi shared Rousseau’s romantic captivation with external nature, he was first and foremost a teacher and observer of children, and we see in his thinking and practice an attempt to work with the child’s inner nature as opposed to merely trusting nature to do its work.

This idea was further developed by Friedrich Wilhelm Froebel (1782 – 1852) inventor of the kindergarten, the name and concept of which continues the ‘child as plant’ metaphor introduced by Rousseau. Power sums up Froebel’s general educational philosophy as follows:

He believed that man grew much as plants and animals grow, with this

difference: Plants and animals develop according to a definite inner law

of their nature; man, being endowed with a mental nature, is able to shape

many of the elements of his own nature. (Power 1970 p. 513)

Like Pestalozzi, Froebel believed that there were distinct periods of development through which children passed, and that therefore “the method of instruction must be directed by the laws of development of the human mind as well as those of the subjects to be taught.” (Power 1970 p. 511) He strongly believed that children should come into contact with the world through play at the early stage, and that these ‘plays’ should proceed from simple to more complex: his plan was to conceive of, catalog, and prescribe the ‘plays’ which would best provide learning opportunities at each stage of development . Froebel shared the Romantics’ devotion to nature as teacher, making regular trips to the fields and forests with his pupils, though not allowing them free rein there, as Rousseau counseled (Power 1970 p. 514) Though his vision of nature was infused with the idea of a unity of man, nature, and God, to which people should be led through education, Froebel was a teacher, and his main influence lies in his practical ideas for the organization of learning through the kindergarten, an environment in which children could develop, learn and grow naturally. In Froebel we see a continuation of the move away from the Romantic ideal of nature as teacher, and an attempt at a more scientific approach to nature, arising from a growing recognition that education should be aligned with the child’s inner nature.

In the course of the 19^th century, the work of two men was of key importance in fundamentally altering perceptions of the relationship between human beings and nature. Charles Darwin’s 1959 book On the Origin of Species provided a plausible mechanism – natural selection - by which evolution proceeds, erasing any line that humans had wished to draw between themselves and the rest of creation. William James’ book. Principles of Psychology, published in 1890, laid out in greater sophistication than ever before what was known about the workings of the human mind. As a result of this and other scientific work, the journey of nature from ‘out there’ to within was complete, nature was the object of scientific study, and on this basis John Dewey built his educational approach.

Dewey wanted to replace the formalistic, age-graded elementary school of the 19^th century, and its rigid curriculum, with an approach that connected pupils back to life – not to nature, as with some of his predecessors, but to the life of society, or what he called “the social consciousness of the race.” (Dewey 1897 p. 233) For Dewey, external nature was an object of study among others, but had little role in the educational process itself, in stark contrast with Rousseau. Internal nature – that of the child – took precedence in Dewey’s thinking. “The child’s own instincts and powers furnish the material and give the starting point for all education,” he wrote, and therefore “education…must begin with a psychological insight into the child’s capacities, interests, and habits.” (ibid p. 234 – 235) Children follow a chronology of development, and their interests provide ‘leverage’ and ‘propulsion’ (Dewey 1902 p. 112) to be utilized by the observant and sympathetic teacher, who, far from simply leaving the children to learn and discover by themselves, brings the subject matter into alignment with the pupils’ interests. Teachers should not take subject matter in its raw form and attempt to insert it into their pupils’ minds; rather they should attempt to mediate the material, making it comprehensible and useable to the children at their stage of development. Dewey believed that the schools of his day were set up for pupils to be passive recipients of knowledge. Children, on the other hand, were active, and education needed to marshal this activity and “give it direction.” (Dewey 1915 p. 25) Thus Dewey’s approach focuses heavily on the psychological, ‘inner nature’ of the child. He was child-centered, but did not promote a ‘laissez-faire,’ do-nothing approach in the classroom which was associated with the worst excesses of the progressive, child-centered education movement, though he has been thus maligned by some who wish to see a return to a more ‘traditional’ educational approach.

I have done little justice to the complex and nuanced thinking of the educational philosophers I have discussed above, but I hope that I have shown that the question of nature in education has not been answered in a uniform way by those who have addressed it. A reliance purely on nature has never been found to be effective in education, and such an approach has not been advocated by anyone of influence except Rousseau – and even his writings are not consistent on this point. To characterize child-centered education as an approach which allows children to grow naturally while actively teaching them nothing would be to attack a straw man. Nevertheless, in pre-schools and kindergartens I have visited, I have noticed an element of ‘withholding’ until the child is deemed ready, accompanied by the view that it is the child him or herself who will make this readiness known. For example, in conversation with my child’s pre-school teacher, I asked about her approach to writing. She stated that writing is a voluntary activity in the school, and that it is always based on the child’s interests. She gave the example of my son building a structure out of blocks. If he child seemed ready, she would ask him to draw a picture of the structure, and then, if he was inclined, to label the picture. “It sounds a lot like Dewey,” I remarked. “I love Dewey,” she replied.

What I left unsaid in this conversation is that I spend an hour each weekend on letter, word, and number practice with my son. We rarely use objects; he completes worksheets and books that provide extensive drilling of the writing of letters, words, and numbers. For his part, he is enthusiastic (for now) about our ‘study time’ and is becoming proficient in the skills we have practiced. But it raises the question: is he doing well because he individually is developmentally ready for this practice, or am I causing him to ‘rise above’ his nature? More importantly, is there a place for imposing on children tasks which may seem to be slightly ahead of their developmental level, in order to ‘pull them up’ to the knowledge and skills we want them to master? If the latter, then what is our responsibility – to pull children up as early as possible in order to give them a good start in life, or to ‘let them be children’ and introduce these skills when they show the inclination?

The latter position concerns me. There is much evidence, for example, that starting to learn a second language early is advantageous, and that the ability to become fully proficient in a second language diminishes as a child grows older. Given that knowledge, should we wait until the child shows a ‘natural’ interest in learning another language (which could take a very long time, especially in a more culturally homogeneous environment), or do we put to use the knowledge provided by cognitive science and take the initiative to begin teaching the language without the child’s initial interest?

In his 1938 book, Experience and Education, John Dewey wrote:

The history of educational theory is marked by the opposition between the idea

that education is development from within and that it is formation from without;

that it is based upon natural endowments and that education is a process of

overcoming natural inclination and substituting in its place habits acquired

under external pressure. (Dewey 1938 p. 248)

I see this potentially as a creative tension that could lead to innovative practices, and I read in Dewey not an attempt to impose unthinkingly the former view at the expense of the latter, but an effort to explore how to resolve the tension. He was not the easiest writer to make sense of, however, and his position is sometimes mischaracterized as being a representative of an extreme ‘development from within’ position. Unfortunately, questions like this can come to be seen as either-or positions, with theorists and practitioners dividing into camps that refuse to interact with each other. What I have tried to do in this essay is to demonstrate that influential thinkers who advocated a role for nature in education neither spoke with one voice, nor for the most part promoted a ‘hands-off’ approach in the classroom. It would perhaps help to move the debate forward in a constructive way if this were more widely understood.

References

Dewey, J. (1897). My Pedagogic Creed (extract), in Hildesheim, J.W. & Merrill, G.D., 1971. Pacific Palisades, Goodyear.

Dewey, J. (1902). The Child and the Curriculum, in The School and Society & The Child and the Curriculum. New York, Dover, 2002.

Dewey, J. (1915). The School and Society, in The School and Society & Child & Curriculum New York, Dover, 2002.

Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and Education (extract), in Hildesheim, J.W. & Merrill, G.D., 1971. Pacific Palisades, Goodyear.

Hillesheim, J. W. and G. D. Merrill, Eds. (1971). Theory and Practice in the History of American Education. Pacific Palisades, Goodyear.

Huston, J. (1952). The African Queen. USA.

Pestalozzi, J. H. (1801). How Gertrude Teaches Her Children (extract), in Hillesheim, J.W. & Merrill, G.D, 1971. Pacific Palisades, Goodyear.

Pestalozzi, J. H. (1951). The Education of Man. New York, Philosophical Library.

Postman, N. (1995). The End of Education. New York, Vintage Books.

Power, E. J. (1970). Main Currents in the History of Education. New York, McGraw-Hill.

Reese, W. J. (2005). America's Public Schools - from the common school to "No Child Left Behind". Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press.

Rousseau, J. J. (1762). Emile (extract) in Hillesheim, J.W. & Merrill, G.D. (Eds), 1971. Pacific Palisades, Goodyear.

The Attractions and Pitfalls of Tuition Discounting

Universities in the U.S. and many other countries are struggling with rising costs and diminished revenues (Johnstone & Marcucci, 2010). On the cost side, human resources-related expenses – including, in the U.S., those associated with consistently higher-than-inflation increases in health care costs – consume the majority of institutional budgets (“About HEPI,” n.d.), while on the revenue side, governmental support for both private and public institutions is declining. Institutions have pursued a number of strategies to compensate, such as, on the cost side, employing a greater proportion of faculty on a part-time basis, and on the revenue side, seeking donations from alumni and corporations, and recruiting full fee-paying international students. Another popular strategy among U.S. institutions is tuition discounting, defined by the Lumina Foundation for Education as “the art and science of establishing the net price of attendance for students at amounts that will maximize tuition revenue while achieving certain enrollment goals.” (2003, p. 4) As Lumina and others have discovered, however, while tuition discounting has been effective for some institutions, it also has a number of pitfalls that need to be understood by institutions considering using it.

There are a number of reasons why tuition discounting has become, according to Lumina (2003), standard practice for most U.S. colleges and universities. Initially a means used by some institutions to compete on price during a time of falling enrollments starting in the late 1970s (Goral, 2003), as well as to ease the financial burden on selected students on a need basis during a time when government funding to institutions was being cut and institutions were therefore increasing their tuition rates (Parrott, 2008), discounting rapidly became a means for many institutions to strategically allocate financial aid (ibid). Institutions identify their optimal student mix, which might be based on merit, class, racial, gender, or geographical diversity, and so on. Then, “the most desirable students are offered higher discounts in the hopes that the resulting lower net cost relative to the competition will entice them to enroll at the institution.” (Parrott, 2008, p. 263) In theory, if institutions can systematically collect and analyze data on student enrollment, they can build a predictive model that allows them to fine-tune the discount amount in order to enroll a particular student at a rate that is sufficient to attract the student but not so much that it wastes institutional funds (Parrott, 2008). The resulting increased enrollment should boost overall net tuition and therefore revenue. For institutions, there is a clear advantage to using discounting to strategically enroll students and maximize revenue, as compared with, for example, charging a flat fee to all students.

Tuition discounting carries with it a number of pitfalls, or, as Lumina (2003) referred to them, unintended consequences. The first is a tendency for greater competitiveness among institutions over students. Goral (2003) described a process in which the early adopters of discounting gained a market edge, which they subsequently lost as more and more colleges adopted the practice. As a result, colleges tended to offer deeper discounts to gain a price advantage, and an “all-out arms race” (ibid.) followed. Parrott (2008) speculated that this situation is creating a generation of higher education consumers who shop for the best value education, and this, combined with the increase in opportunities for cross-border education, may lead to increasing numbers of students seeking the best-priced education in other countries, thereby “dramatically chang(ing) the global landscape of higher education.” (Parrott, 2008, p. 267) While an increase in competition among higher education institutions may be considered a positive development for higher education as a whole (if competition is a driver of quality), institutions that are not adapted to a competitive market may struggle to survive.

Ironically, given the increased need to be competitive, a second consequence of tuition discounting – especially given the discounting “arms race” - can be a diminished ability to compete on quality because discounting may require the diversion of tuition revenue from instruction, student services, facilities, and so on, to the financing of the enrollment strategy. Goral (2003) cited Redd’s demonstration that schools had increased expenditure on aid by a greater amount than they had raised tuition. The shortfall was made up by cutting back on student services and facilities, and as a result student retention suffered. Tuition discounting was therefore self-defeating in many cases. In order to be successful, institutions need to find ways to fund discounting in such a way that institutional quality does not suffer.

A third consequence of tuition discounting in the U.S. – though it is by no means an inevitable one – is that it has failed students in the greatest financial need. The Lumina Foundation’s (2003) report described how the allocation of aid by private institutions had benefitted students from higher-income households than those from lower-income households. As a result, the ability of less financially able students to choose between private and public institutions was diminished. Private institutions may consequently come to be seen as (or in fact actually become) ‘elite’ schools for the wealthy; higher education opportunities for students may come to be governed by relative wealth. Lower-income students bear a greater share of the burden of tuition increases. The Lumina report (2003) argued that offering aid to the more affluent is, in any case, an ineffective use of funds, because, “financial factors do not significantly influence the college choices of many affluent students to whom discounts are directed. Colleges offer many tuition discounts, or larger-than-necessary discounts, to students who would have enrolled anyway.” (p. 24)

As reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education recently (Labi, 2011) , British universities, which are now free to set tuition rates up to a limit of 9000 pounds, are for the most part announcing fees close to or at this upper limit, news which has met with a negative reaction, especially from student groups. A Universities UK spokesperson is quoted, “Much of the media debate has focused on a possible average fee level, but this doesn't take into account some of the fee waivers that will be on offer to students from poorer backgrounds.” (ibid.) Thus, it appears that British universities may be heading down the road to tuition discounting with very much the same rationale as U.S. universities has in the 1970s. While the Lumina report (2003) acknowledges that discounting has been successful for some colleges, the leaders of British universities should understand the potential pitfalls of the practice. Specifically, they will need strategies to fund discounting other than from non-tuition revenue sources; to articulate their market niche to prospective students in order to participate successfully in a more competitive, consumer-oriented education market; and to safeguard against slanting the allocation of aid toward the more affluent. This is sound advice to any institution considering tuition discounting.

References

About HEPI. (n.d.). . Commonfund. Retrieved from http://www.commonfund.org/CommonfundInstitute/HEPI/Pages/default.aspx

Davis, J. S. (2003). Unintended Consequences of Tuition Discounting. New Agenda Series. Lumina Foundation for Education.

Goral, T. (2003). Is Discounting Dangerous? University Business, (August), 22-26.

Johnstone, D. B., & Marcucci, P. N. (2010). Financing Higher Education Worldwide (Kindle Edition). Retrieved from Amazon.com.

Labi, A. (2011, April 21). Universities in England Seek to Charge Highest Fees They Can. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/article/Universities-in-England-Seek/127224/?sid=gn&utm_source=gn&utm_medium=en

Parrott, S. A. (2008). Tuition Discounting to Optimize Enrollment and Revenue. Tertiary Education and Management, 14(3), 261-268.

ESL Reimagined: Teaching Bilingualism in Higher Education

People brought up within a western society often think that the monolingualism that forms a routine part of their existence is the normal way of life for all but a few ‘special’ people. They are wrong. Multilingualism is the natural way of life for hundreds of millions all over the world. (David Crystal, The Encyclopedia of Language, 1987)

Looking at the teaching and learning of languages in U.S. higher education, one is met with a paradox. On the one hand, native English speaking Americans who study foreign languages in the country’s higher education institutions, whether as a major, a minor, or merely to satisfy a foreign language requirement, are rewarded with credits and degrees. For these students, there is an institutional recognition that knowledge of a foreign language is valuable, in spite of the often modest practical results of their studies. On the other hand, many of these same universities graduate thousands of individuals each year who have attained a high level of bilingualism and biculturalism. These graduates have generally received no academic credit or other recognition for this achievement. On the contrary, their efforts in their additional language, if acknowledged at all, tend to be noted for their inadequacy. They are the hundreds of thousands of international students and American students who use English as an additional language (henceforth English L2 users) enrolled in U.S. universities and colleges. And while native English-speaking students’ often unexceptional results in foreign language learning bring academic recognition, English L2 users tend to be corralled into non-credit English language programs that are widely assumed to be remedial rather than developmental (Wiley & Lukes, 1996).

What accounts for this contradictory attitude toward the learning of additional languages among these two groups of students? Ruiz (cited in Escamilla, 2006) proposed that there are three orientations to language at the national, community, and institution levels in creating language policies: language as problem, language as right, and language as resource. In U.S. society, non-English languages are viewed as a problem, and opinion is divided on the question of bilingualism and whether or not it should be supported. The debate is manifested most obviously at the elementary and secondary school level, and is linked to the debate on immigration and immigrants’ rights. Those with an assimiliationist view argue for the exclusion of languages other than English, and support English-only and immersion programs in schools; while those with a cultural pluralist view favor the development of learners’ first languages as they make progress in English, and advocate for bilingual education (Lucas & Katz, 1994).

In higher education, on the other hand, there is no debate. The bilingualism and multilingualism of English L2 students is simply construed in terms of their deficient English, while the possibility that their first and other languages are a resource and a right is not considered. U.S. higher education is dominated by English monolingual thinking that not only does not recognize the valuable bilingualism of thousands of its students, but imposes on them a monolingual norm against which bilingualism is regarded as problematic. Further, the English language teaching profession in U.S. higher education, which has widely adopted monolingual practices, is strongly implicated in this imposition. As a profession, however, we are strongly placed to adopt and advocate for a more enlightened view of the situation of L2 users in our institutions, one that recognizes the value of bilingualism and encourages its development.

Language Learning as Bilingualization and Emergent Bilinguals

I begin with the premise that language learning is a process of bilingualization (Widdowson, 2003). That is, individuals learn an additional language not in order to become a monolingual speaker of that language, but to become bilingual (or multilingual if they already know more than one language). Terms such as English Language Learner, Limited English Proficient, and English as a Second Language are widely used in elementary and secondary education, and imply that students are suffering from a deficit which needs to be corrected. The notion of the emergent bilingual (Chen, 2007; Escamilla, 2006; García, 2009; García, Kleifgen, & Falchi, 2008), has been proposed in order to counteract this view. Emergent bilinguals are conceived not simply as moving along an interlanguage continuum toward native English speaker proficiency, but as developing a repertoire of language skills that incorporates two or more languages. Although the term emergent bilingual has thus far been applied to children in elementary and secondary education who are in the earlier stages of becoming bilingual, the concept can also be usefully applied to English L2 users in higher education, many of whom continue to grapple with English as they progress toward a deeper level of bilingualism. While students in higher education are obviously more advanced cognitively than the elementary and secondary learners, there is nonetheless a strong case to be made that they are progressing toward a state of bilingualism and biculturalism, as opposed to the more narrowly conceived notion that they are simply improving their English.

What does this imply in terms of the learning needs and resources of English L2 users? Cummins (2007) offered three theoretical perspectives that lend support to the view that teaching in U.S. universities largely fails to address their learning needs and leverage their resources. The first is the notion that education builds on learners’ prior understanding. Since much of emergent bilinguals’ knowledge is encoded in their first language, it makes sense to draw on the first language in developing knowledge and skill in additional languages and in learning academic content. The second perspective proposes that in bilinguals and multilinguals there is interdependence across languages, and that development in one language may have positive effects on users’ overall language skills. This perspective denies a previously held assumption that transfer across languages is necessarily negative, and posits instead the benefits of learners’ transferring of conceptual elements, metacognitive and metalinguistic strategies, pragmatic elements of language use, and so on. Cummins summarized the benefits of taking advantage of language interdependence in language classrooms by proposing that, “ learning efficiencies can be achieved if teachers explicitly draw students’ attention to similarities and differences between their languages and reinforce effective learning strategies in a coordinated way across languages” (Cummins, 2007, p. 233). Allowing and encouraging students to make use of the full range of their linguistic resources gives them a greater chance of mastering the material, and to be able to handle it in more than one language.

Cummins’ third theoretical perspective follows from the first two: that the state of multilingualism is qualitatively different from monolingualism. Rather than language systems compartmentalized in users’ minds, there exists a Common Underlying Proficiency (CUP) in which “the entire psycholinguistic system of the bi- and multilingual is transformed in comparison to the relatively less complex psycholinguistic system of the monolingual” (Cummins, 2007, p. 234).

Cook (1999) reached a similar conclusion. His “multicompetence,” the totality of a multilingual’s language knowledge, “is intrinsically more complex than monolingualism” (p. 191). Multicompetence recognizes, and research supports the theory that users’ first and additional languages are linked, and that users frequently draw on their first language and competencies associated with it when processing their additional languages. Code-switching and code-mixing, the context-motivated or expedient use of more than one language when conversing with fellow bi- and multilinguals, provides evidence that languages are connected and not hermetically sealed from each other in users’ minds. In short, Cook concluded, “L2 users are different kinds of people, not just monolingual native speakers who happen to know another language” (Cook, 1999, p. 194).

If L2 users are indeed different kinds of people, who build on knowledge acquired in their first language, and in whose minds different languages are linked, then it is incumbent upon institutions to consider how these differences might be leveraged to make their education more effective. Moreover, if we believe that proficiency in additional languages is a valuable attribute in the 21^st century, then higher education institutions ought to be encouraging the development of multicompetent individuals rather than fixating on perceived deficiencies that are informed by the monolingual native speaker model.

The TESOL Profession’s Role in the Maintenance of the Monolingual Hegemony

Despite the goal of bilingualism/multilingualism inherent in language learning, many in our own profession, far from encouraging contact and interaction between languages in learners’ minds, impose a monolingual pedagogy which seeks to keep the two languages separate, indeed attempts to suppress the learner’s first language altogether, as if it is a hindrance to the language learning process and to academic success. Some writers in our field have questioned English-only practices in the ESL classroom (e.g. Atkinson, 1987; Auerbach, 1993; Cummins, 2007; Schweers, 1999). Auerbach, for example, pointed out that in many ESL classrooms, “teachers devise elaborate games, signals, and penalty systems to ensure that students do not use their L1 and justify these practices with the claim that use of the L1 will impede progress in the acquisition of English” (Auerbach, 1993, p. 10). These practices are a manifestation of Ruiz’s ‘language as problem’ orientation, and prevent students from doing exactly what bilinguals do: engaging in code-switching or code-mixing, using their first and second languages expediently to achieve their goals, which is, according to Hudson (1996) “the inevitable consequence of bilingualism” (p. 51). Bilingual dictionaries, used by learners to make input comprehensible, are often frowned upon or banished by teachers who otherwise acknowledge the pedagogic principle that individuals learn new knowledge by relating it to existing knowledge. This type of practice is encouraged in our profession by the texts used to train and educate ESL teachers, many of which, as Cook (1999) has pointed out, encourage the comparison of learners’ English with the native speaker goal, and assume that native speaker English – as opposed to bilingualism - is the learners’ goal.

Much ESL teaching then, like most teaching in higher education as a whole, assumes that only one language is involved: English. Yet whenever there are English L2 users in the classroom, at least two languages are involved in learning, even if one of these languages is not permitted to be expressed openly. L2 users are then, in Widdowson’s words, “obliged to go along with the pedagogic pretence imposed upon them” (Widdowson, 2003, p. 155).

It is worth pointing out the discrepancy between the practice of teachers of ESL and that of foreign language teachers to U.S. college students. In one study of university foreign language teachers, (Polio & Duff, 1994), the teachers used the students’ first language, English, for a number of purposes, including classroom administration, grammar instruction, building empathy and solidarity, explaining unknown vocabulary, and providing clarification. Writing from a monolingual pedagogy perspective, the authors considered what they viewed as a prevalence of English language use to be “shortsighted” (ibid. p. 323), and suggested ways to remedy it. This is an interpretation one can make only if one believes that all use of the students’ first language is necessarily a lapse. An alternative interpretation of the same data might reveal bilingual teachers drawing on their own and their students’ language to provide a supportive environment for language learning and the process of bilingualization. The teachers in the study said it themselves: they used English “to create some kind of relaxed atmosphere,” and to ensure that “everybody immediately gets everything” (p. 323–4).

Other examples of teachers exploiting their students’ first language include checking comprehension, explaining an activity, for peer tutoring (Lucas & Katz, 1994), as a part of the writing process, and for a number of other purposes including presenting language rules, discussing cultural issues, and giving instructions (Auerbach, 1993). In one of my classes, students selected a short comic strip in their own language, translated it into English, and made a poster which included the original strip, the student’s translation, and some words of explanation in English as to why the strip was humorous. It was not necessary for me to understand the students’ first language for this activity to succeed and generate enthusiasm among the students as they sought to explain to me and the other students the cultural and linguistic elements of the strip in English.

That a bilingual approach to language teaching is used by many language teachers is a reality, and this approach should not be dismissed out of hand by those teaching English L2 speakers in university settings. Nor, as Cummins (2007) argued, should those teachers, having internalized as axiomatic the need to eliminate the first language from their classrooms, feel – or be made to feel - a sense a guilt for allowing its principled use.

Indeed, research appears to support a bilingually-oriented approach to language teaching. Although as Cummins (2007) pointed out, the dominance of the monolingual approach in language teaching theory has led to a dearth of research into the benefits of L1 to L2 translation for language learning, he nevertheless identified research which suggests that translation aids language acquisition, and prepares students to be language brokers outside the classroom. University students have reported favoring teachers using their first language in foreign language classes, “to help (them) feel more comfortable and confident, to check comprehension, and to define new vocabulary items,” as well as “because it helps them when they feel lost.” (Schweers, 1999, p. 7)

We in the ESL profession should therefore question our assumptions about imposing English-only in our classrooms in order to lay the groundwork for building a more positive attitude toward bilingualism and multilingualism on our campuses. To help our students on the path toward bilingualism, we ought to strive to be emergent bilinguals ourselves and to reflect on our own use of our first language in the learning process. Additionally, we ought to consider how we can help our students continue to learn English by building on prior knowledge of their first and additional languages, and by drawing on both intralingual and crosslingual strategies in our teaching (Stern, 1992). This will not necessarily be easy. As Auerbach has pointed out, monolingual pedagogy is a largely unquestioned practice which supports and is supported by a global power structure, an institutional manifestation of the dominance of English-speaking nations on the global level that assumes ESL teaching expertise is the province of native English speakers and promotes the idea that standards of English will fall if other languages are used (Phillipson, as cited in Auerbach, 1993).

I acknowledge the value of restricting the use of the students’ first language where an instructor feels this will be helpful; indeed, intralingual functioning in an additional language is a valuable skill as well as crosslingual proficiency. Rather, I propose that we be open to the notion that students are progressing toward bilingualism, and make principled pedagogic choices that are consistent with this goal. In both ESL classes and in the university as a whole, I echo Lucas and Katz’s approach to this question: “language choice in and of itself does not have to be the key educational issue. The question should be: What circumstances and strategies will provide the best opportunities for particular students to learn in a particular context?” (Lucas & Katz, 1994, p. 559)

Looking Ahead

In order to continue progressing toward bilingualism, our students need our help and the help of our non-English language teaching colleagues. They need to be given encouragement to continue developing their language ability, not simply marked down for ‘poor English;’ and there should be no attempt to force learners to suppress their first language unless there are sound pedagogical reasons for doing so. In a globalized world that increasingly needs individuals who can mediate between languages and cultures, those reasons would have to be compelling.

It is a common assumption among university teachers that L2 users should be able to function in English at the same level as native English speakers. Yet all experienced ESL teachers know that even advanced English L2 users may make fundamental grammatical errors such as inappropriate tense use or the omission of third-person singular ‘s,’ and it takes years to master the non-rule-based idiomaticity and the collocational conventions that characterize native-speaker English use. That the majority of English L2 users will never be able to replicate the language of educated native speakers does not make them, in Cook’s words, “failed native speakers” - they should be treated as “speakers in their own right” (Cook, 1999, p. 185), and it is unreasonable to expect the same from them as one would from native speakers. This is not a call for a lowering of standards, but rather for a tolerance of inevitable difference.

I do not deny the need for a common language of communication and academics in higher education settings, nor that students should be expected to learn and follow American conventions in their writing. Yet caution is needed: isolating the academic setting as a locale in which only a single language is welcome fails to replicate the real world outside academia – certainly outside the United States - and to prepare students for that world; and it is a denial of the fact that students bring into the academic environment a multiplicity of languages, even if those languages are not given the right of expression or recognition in that environment. American universities are deliberately limiting themselves by denying the richness of the language and cultural backgrounds its students bring. This denial, moreover, contradicts the universities’ own expressed aspiration for diversity on campus: while universities claim to value diversity, this appreciation apparently does not include languages other than English. Universities need to respond to the fact that they place sole responsibility for perceived deficits in students’ English squarely on the student, rather than acknowledging the contradiction brought about by the their recruiting those students and then failing to acknowledge that they are emergent bilinguals – different kinds of people.

If universities are recruiting international students, most of whom will return to their own countries after completing their studies; and if universities seek to prepare their students for success in their chosen careers, then it follows that universities should address how international students and other English L2 users will apply their knowledge in their own languages and cross-lingually and cross-culturally after graduation. An English-only approach which fails to recognize the bilingualism and biculturalism of English L2 users not only sells the students short but also minimizes the university’s own recognition of its potential value in preparing students for a globalized world.

It is time, then, for higher education institutions to recognize the value of bilingualism and multilingualism, and to encourage and reward students as they progress along this path, rather than blatantly ignoring it. Dual-language degree programs, such as the one offered by Puerto Rico’s Sistema Universitario Ana G. Méndez in Florida (Epstein, 2010), and the Dual Language Program at Miami Dade College (Miami Dade College, 2010) are a reimagining of the ESL enterprise, and point the way to how universities might recognize, encourage, leverage, and reward students’ bilingualism.

We in the TESOL profession need to play our part. We first need to increase our own comfort level with students’ bilingualism, to view our students as emergent bilinguals, and to view the process of language learning as one of bilingualization. Then we should work to bring to the awareness of our colleagues on campus the fact that our international students have attained, and continue to attain, a high level of bilingualism or multilingualism. We need to learn to be proud of our students’ language achievement; we should support it in its entirety and reach the point where we can acknowledge it as a valuable resource that we have helped them develop.

References

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Auerbach, E. R. (1993). Reexamining English Only in the ESL Classroom. TESOL Quarterly, 27(1), 9-32.

Chen, Y. (2007). Equality and Inequality of Opportunity in Education: Chinese Emergent Bilingual Children in the English Mainstream Classroom. Language, Culture, and Curriculum, 20(1), 36 - 51.

Cook, V. (1999). Going beyond the Native Speaker in Language Teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 33(2), 185-209.

Crystal, D. (1987). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cummins, J. (2007). Rethinking monolingual instructional strategies in multilingual classrooms. Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 10(2), 221-240.

Epstein, J. (2010). Bilingual (Higher) Ed. Retrieved June 17, 2010, from http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/04/08/agmus

Escamilla, K. (2006). Monolingual Assessment and Emerging Bilinguals: A Case Study in the US. In O. Garcia, T. Skutnabb-Kangas & M. Torres-Guzman (Eds.), Imagining Multilingual Schools. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

García, O. (2009). Emergent Bilinguals and TESOL: What's in a Name? TESOL Quarterly, 43(2).

García, O., Kleifgen, J. A., & Falchi, L. (2008). From English Language Learners to Emergent Bilinguals. New York: Teachers College, Columbia University.

Hudson, R. A. (1996). Sociolinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lucas, T., & Katz, A. (1994). Reframing the Debate: The Roles of Native Languages in English-Only Programs for Language Minority Students. TESOL Quarterly, 28(3), 537-561.

Miami Dade College. (2010). Dual Language Program. Retrieved June 18, 2010, from http://www.mdc.edu/honorscollege/Academics_DualLanguageHonors.asp

Polio, C. G., & Duff, P. A. (1994). Teachers' Language Use in University Foreign Language Classrooms: A Qualitative Analysis of English and Target Language Alternation. The Modern Language Journal 78(3), 313 - 326.

Schweers, C. W. (1999). Using the L1 in the L2 Classroom. English Teaching Forum, April - June 1999, 6 - 13.

Stern, H. H. (1992). Issues and Options in Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Widdowson, H. (2003). Defining Issues in English Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wiley, T. G., & Lukes, M. (1996). English-Only and Standard English Ideologies in the U.S. . TESOL Quarterly, 30(3), 511-535.

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