Laura Romig, Brown University Class of 2025, Language Ambassador
We've previously talked a little about the structure of language learning courses. Today, let's discuss the importance of media—from ancient literature to recent social media posts—in learning a new language. Which forms of media, if any, are best for language learning? And how should they be included into a language curriculum?
Literature, news articles, and other written sources are integral parts of most traditional language learning curricula. If you remember graduating in your language classes from small textbook passages to short stories or real newspaper excerpts, then you've used media to learn a language. In most modern language learning courses, including those at Brown, you can also usually find film or other forms of video used as part of the instruction.
But when using authentic media to teach a language, how should a language instructor balance the structure and words of the language used with the message behind it? Somewhere between those short, stilted reading comprehension passages and authentic newspaper articles, the words take on another level of meaning. They stop representing just sounds and vocabulary and start to convey ideas, positions, viewpoints, and often pieces of the culture in places where the language is spoken. So choosing and discussing the media used in language classes becomes a key task for language instructors; it can shape how students understand not only the language, but the culture, places, and people surrounding it.
Furthermore, what is the best way to balance between formal, more 'standard' language, and colloquial, spoken language in choosing media texts? The language in a news report, a chatty podcast, and a YouTube vlog will all have style differences. And in showing media texts that have syntax or vocabulary differing from a textbook's instruction, which should the teacher ask the students to adhere to? (If an English teacher has taught her students never to end a sentence with a preposition, and then one of her students read the previous sentence, which structure should they use in their writing?) The center of this question becomes a more broad query about languages, which is the matter of whether the official rules of a language or its demonstrated usage should take precedence.
There are also language learners who swear by an almost exclusively media-based method of learning languages. Study a few basics, and then jump into the texts produced by the people who actually speak a language, not a pre-set vocabulary list or a hyper-structured paragraph. This somewhat mimics the way individuals learn a new language in a foreign country—by listening, observing, and imitating. The goal would be to absorb large amounts of media and eventually reproduce words and sentences based on a mixture of critical thinking and mimicry—supplemented by many Internet searches. However, we've previously talked about how consumption and input only compose half of a language; the other half is creation, or output. Simply consuming and pondering media is missing the crucial steps of engagement, interaction, and spontaneous creation that can truly build fluency.
Researchers refer to media as "an easily accessible source of language data for research and teaching purposes" that "reflects and shapes both language use and attitudes in a speech community". That second part is key: media not only reports the social and cultural attitudes of a population, but can directly influence it. It's a powerful tool, important for the language learning environment, but consuming media in another language requires the same type of critical analysis and informational hygiene as consuming media in our first language.
For more, you can read this study about the possibility of teaching languages on social media (and scroll through the language learning hashtag on any social media platform to see what you think of the content there) and this paper about how the "text" and "context" of a piece of media interact for Quechua learners.