Fiction meets (near-)reality: Language Teaching and Technology

Instead of staring at my phone before going to bed, I've decided to buck the trend of "no for-pleasure reading in grad school." I'm currently reading Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. This is a book set in the near future where the virtually the whole planet regularly plugs in to a virtual reality called OASIS. OASIS is even used to deliver free public education, which includes language classes. A couple excerpts stood out to me:

Unfortunately, even with the limitless possibilities of OASIS at her disposal, my Latin teacher, Ms. Rank, still had a hard time making her lessons interesting. And today she was reviewing a bunch of verbs I'd already memorized, so I found my attention drifting almost immediately. (p. 61)

I think this is often the case in the present- impressive technology is used in very conventional and often boring ways. Sometimes convention works- I'm a big fan of digital vocabulary flashcards. But sometimes (more often than not?) putting a slick interface on top of low-engagement, low-context activities does very little to help language learning.

A few pages later, Cline describes the method of the protagonist's Latin teacher, Ms. Rank:

Our teacher, Ms. Rank, was standing at the front of the class, slowly conjugating Latin verbs. She said them in English first, then in Latin, and each word automatically appeared on the board behind her as she spoke it. Whenever we were doing tedious verb conjugation, I always got the lyrics to an old Schoolhouse Rock! song stuck in my head: "To run, to go, to give. Verb! You're what's happenin'!"

I was quietly humming this tune to myself when Ms. Rank began to conjugate the Latin for the verb "to learn." "To Learn. Discere," she said. "Now, this one should be easy to remember, because it's similar to the English word 'discern,' which also means 'to learn.'"

...

Ms. Rank continued, using the verb in a sentence. "We go to school to learn," she said. "Petimus scholam ut litteras discamus."

So first, I found it interesting that this is how Cline envisions or remembers language classes. To be fair, this is a description of a Latin class, which is (mostly) a dead language, in the real world and in Cline's fiction. Second, this sort of teaching still happens for living languages, and particularly in a lot of online language learning resources like Youtube video lessons or explicitly-oriented language learning apps. Explicit, L1-delivered instruction can definitely help people feel more comfortable about meanings and rules, and does arguably have some beneficial effect on learning, but it's clearly not the main driver of language learning. I hope that as the field of language teaching continues to move forward and more people learn in communicative classrooms, the next generation of authors will paint a different picture for us.