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It’s homecoming week at Northfield High School, and Denise Halvorson’s French 4/5 students came appropriately dressed in red, white and blue for Monday’s spirit day. Fittingly, they also matched the bleu, blanc et rouge of the French flag that greeted them at the entrance of the classroom. The walls within the classroom were lined with maps in French, wall hangings adorned with the Parisian skyline, posters spelling out French vocabulary, and a bookshelf full of French books. Madame Halvorson, a 27-year veteran at Northfield Public Schools, welcomed me into her classroom on Monday and told me that her advanced French class would be spending class doing a silent writing activity, revising a piece of writing they had composed the week before about their weekend activities. After the bell rang, reminding me instantly of my own regimented public school experience, I introduced myself to the class: “Bonjour, je m’appelle Lauren. Je suis étudiante de français à Carleton et je vais passer du temps à observer ce cours et à travailler avec vous.” Following some nods of comprehension and some blank stares, I settled into a desk in the back row. Mme Halvorson led the students in a brief warm-up activity, instructing them to make a Google Slide describing their back-to-school experience and allowing them to discuss with their peers. Much of this discussion occurred in English, and from what I could tell it wasn’t strictly back-to-school related. In fact, the advanced students’ quiet writing activity meant that I didn’t hear much French at all during the third period class on Monday. Nonetheless, I contributed to the classroom’s festive, French-themed flair by gluing Le Petit Prince themed posters onto construction paper backgrounds and hanging them below the whiteboard for students’ eyes to stray towards should the Google Slides presentation above fail to captivate them. During the next period, I got a taste of French 3 in all of its regular liveliness as students learned about two Parisian theaters. On Friday, Mme Halvorson led the French 4/5 students in a guided story about two friends living in Belgium—one a Belgium native and one an immigrant from Morocco—navigating their different cultural backgrounds.
I will admit that I am surprised by the extent to which the classes have been conducted in English. Throughout Friday’s story-reading activity, Mme Halvorson urged her students to turn to a partner to discuss items related to the story, whether to translate a new word into English or to relate their experiences to those of the characters. These conversations happened largely in English, occasionally with the express permission of the teacher. Moreover, a general sense of confusion permeated the room; during one of the discussion interludes, a student in the group I was observing remarked, “I just, like, zone out. It’s so hard to pay attention.” Indeed, I was struck by the distance between teacher and students, and I wonder to what extent this is a result of having grown accustomed to online learning. In some instances, there were actual barriers between the students and the front of the classroom—namely, the iPads propped up on their desks and the phones they took little effort to hide until Mme Halvorson told them midway through Friday’s third period to put them “dans les sacs à dos !” Although the iPads theoretically allowed students to engage with the material—in French 3, for instance, they mostly used them to look at the Google Slides that were already projected on the board at the front of the classroom—I couldn’t help but feel that students in both French 3 and 4/5 were not fully participating in the activities. They were dealing with technological issues when they were supposed to be discussing their hobbies or checking Instagram while they could have been adding more details to their compositions. It reminded me of my own struggle to engage in online classes, especially when distractions were easy to access and to conceal. The fact that these distractions persisted in an in-person setting surprised me, and I wonder if they are in fact the aftereffects of pandemic learning.
The spatial and technological barriers that characterized the class were of course compounded by the language barrier, which was an interesting lens through which to observe the Piagetian stages the students were in. One French 3 student summed up my observations in this regard when he misheard a question as “Why is it September 27?” He joked to the class, “How do we describe the concept of time in French?” By grappling with the abstract concept of time, this student indicated that he was in the formal operational stage, just as Piaget would predict for high school students. However, I noticed that students were often confined to expressing the characteristics of the concrete operational stage as they learned French. Classification struck me as a common theme: identify the month and the date; list the things you did this weekend; compare and contrast la Comédie-Française and le Théâtre de la Huchette—which theatre is larger? While students weren’t relegated all the way to the preoperational stage for the process of second language learning, even though this is the stage where first language acquisition occurs, I still got the impression that they couldn’t demonstrate the extent of their Piagetian development with the language tools at their disposal. This leads me to wonder how teachers can reconcile language learning with the developmental stage of students. Perhaps students’ disengagement was due not only to the residual effects of Covid and a lack of comprehension, but also a lack of interest in the discussions they were having in class. Why bother trying to understand an uninteresting conversation below one’s developmental level?
However, perhaps that assessment doesn’t give enough credit to the teacher and the curriculum. For instance, I could tell that Mme Halvorson was trying to push her students toward a conversation about identity with the story about the two friends from different backgrounds. Maybe students’ reticence was ultimately also a product of being in the formal operational stage. Learning a language requires a person to make unfamiliar sounds, use unfamiliar words, and, above all, make mistakes. For formal operational teenagers developing concerns about identity and how they are perceived by others, this is no easy task.
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The question that you raise at the end of your second to last paragraph, “Why bother trying to understand an uninteresting conversation below one’s developmental level?”, strikes me as an incredibly important observation to make and something core to the question of learning languages starting from an older age. I can recall myself being in middle school and high school talking about all kinds of interesting things during my regular classes, and then having to return to elementary concepts in my Spanish classes that often felt incredibly boring, even though the aspects that we were learning were still in our zones of proximal development for the language. It seems that one solution to this problem could be to start language education at an earlier age so that children can develop their language skills alongside their other skills, but this rather unrealistic, especially considering the variety of languages students have available to them. I wonder if the best strategy is to try and do things at a level that still engage the skills characteristic of the specific Piagetian stage, but focusing on simpler issues and using basic vocabulary. I don’t have any kind of a concrete plan as to how this could be done, but I would imagine what hurts children’s interest is not the specific content, but that they are asked to decrease the complexity of their thinking to engage with the content.
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