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I took three years of Spanish in high school, and recently embarked on a mission to reclaim my Spanish language skills by adding a Spanish minor. By reflecting on my language learning experiences, I found that conditions #3, 5 and 7 were the most influential in my language learning.
The third condition stipulates that, "Learners are involved in authentic tasks" (Egbert, Hanson-Smith & Chao, 2007, p.5). Looking back at my high school Spanish language learning experiences, the lessons that stood out the most were those that involved Task-Based language learning. Every week, my teacher held "Fun Fridays," where we would visit various workstations, rotating through a different one each week, such as cooking, film, music and arts & crafts. Each station required us to rely on a different set of skills- for example, at the cooking station, we had to follow a recipe written out in Spanish in order to make the targeted food; however, through the incorporation of fun activities, we didn't realize that we were being linguistically challenged.
The next most influential condition was #5, which states that, "Learners have enough time and feedback" (Egbert, Hanson-Smith & Chao, 2007, p.5). All of my high school Spanish teachers were very patient and willing to give their students as much time as needed to ensure that we were learning at our full potential. I didn't realize how important this element was to our language learning, but in July 2009, I spent three weeks in Mexico after not doing anything with the Spanish language in over three years since graduating high school. I was shocked to find that I was speaking and thinking in Spanish within a day of arriving! ... My high school Spanish 1 teacher had been a native German woman who taught Spanish and French. At the time I was enrolled in her course, I thought the notion of having a woman with a thick German accent teaching us Spanish was ridiculous; however, I now realize that as a quadrilingual, she was probably one of the most-qualified people to be teaching us a second language. I now believe that she was very aware of our needs because of her first-hand experiences with language learning, which helped strengthen and solidify our basic language foundations. In my case, I returned to Spanish three years later after doing nothing with the language, and was still able to recall all of my Spanish 1 learning (and some Spanish 2 & 3 aspects), which I accredit to her great teaching and patience.
The last condition that has influenced my own language learning was #7, which says, "Learners work in an atmosphere with an ideal stress/anxiety level" (Egbert, Hanson-Smith & Chao, 2007, p.5). While my teachers pushed us to stretch beyond our comfort levels, we always felt comfortable testing new vocabulary and verb tenses because we understood that our teachers would correct us as necessary, but were always supporting us in our language learning endeavors. Overall, the 3rd, 5th and 7th conditions helped me feel like Optimus Prime in that they helped me feel like I could tackle anything that came my way in the Spanish language.
The use of technology could help support the establishment of the conditions for optimal language learning environments by enhancing the lessons already in place. In the case of my Spanish teacher's "Fun Fridays," she successfully incorporated technology into her lessons by creating different workstations that included a variety of technological inventions. For example, the cooking station required kitchen gadgets, the film station relied on a television and DVD player, and the music workstation required a stereo. Through the incorporation of technology in teaching, students have more opportunities to make meanings, "interact in the target language with an authentic audience," and are "exposed to and encouraged to produce varied and creative language" (Egbert, Hanson-Smith & Chao, 2007, p.5).
While the inclusion of technology in one's classroom can have many positive effects on student learning, one problem that might arise could be a technology overload, which could overwhelm students and lead to a sub-optimal learning environment. This could occur when students are hit with input from too many technological sources in a short amount of time. A good way to prevent this from happening is to limit the exposure the students have to technological input--a good example of this is how my Spanish teacher structured "Fun Fridays." She set it up so that each group rotated through one workstation each week, rather than having us be overwhelmed by cooking recipes, music and film all back-to-back. This would have resulted in an overload of language input, which would have led to a decrease in the amount of language knowledge/vocabulary gained. The inclusion of technology definitely helps lend strength to the optimal classroom language learning, but should be used in moderation.
