Thoughts on language and teaching

Oh what a long time since my last blog entry! Just been a bit too much going on. But I've been thinking about it the whole time, I promise...

So there's this thing that's been preying on my mind for some time. It has to do with language and education, and attitudes to both these things. A couple of years ago I ran a course at Masters level for the Swedish agricultural University, SLU, over a period of 10 weeks. From the students who participated in that course I learnt that all the Masters courses at SLU are run in English, they're open to international students so there's a reason for this. But here's the first problem, which someone actually brought to my attention much earlier. Not all of the university lecturers are proficient enough in English to allow the teaching to be at an appropriate level. The person who first mentioned this to me was very concerned about the standard.

Fast forward to my course and my discussions with the students. This course was also run in English, which wasn't much of a problem for me, it being my native tongue, but it certainly caused complications for the students. A couple of them in particular had quite a hard time because I ran the whole course based on participation and discussion and their lack of practice that English held them back. Now this course happened to be the last one of their entire university education. So they had been to at least two years of courses run in English and you have to wonder why they hadn't already become quite used to using the language. The simple answer, I learnt, was that no one had forced them to participate in discussions previously.

We talked about this at length and, after experiencing what the 10 weeks with me had given them in terms of knowledge as well as practice, they were themselves painfully aware of the shortcomings of having to sit and listen without active participation in all the previous courses (lectures).

So I have two points here: the first is that language is a fairly important part of the art and skill of teaching, how on earth do you get complex subjects across without control of language? My second point is, what on earth is going on when Masters level education does not include an absolute requirement for student participation?

And just as a final point, one might care to dwell on the fact that while Swedes are in general much better at English than other nationalities that don't speak it as their first language, that doesn't necessarily mean that people are really good at English. Better is a relative term. There are very few people that speak English well enough to be able to teach a university level course.