Acquisition

My good friend just started teaching at a public high school in rural Pennsylvania. While her main subject area is social studies, she also teaches Spanish, which she acquired while studying abroad in Guatemala.

My word choice is deliberate there: she acquired Spanish while living in a Spanish-speaking country. Anyone will tell you that the best way to learn a language is through immersion in the target language and culture. A recent conversation with her made me wonder if the same principle wouldn’t hold for religious education as well.

As a classroom Spanish teacher in an area of the country where there are almost no native speakers of Spanish, my friend’s challenge is to recreate some of the urgency associated with learning a language in a foreign country.

She has described to me two ways of looking at language study. Language learning involves studying the rules and patterns of the target language. This is how most of us learned Spanish, or French, or German. We can fill out grammar worksheets, and we can talk about our knowledge of a language in technical terms.

Language acquisition dispenses with grammar exercises. This approach seeks to imitate the way a child acquires his native language. After all, by the time a child is five, he can express accurately almost any idea he needs to express. This competence becomes possible through exposure to the language, not by painstaking study.

My friend, therefore, speaks to her students in Spanish 90% of the time, and invites them into communication as soon as they feel even somewhat capable: she teaches them to embrace errors. In the traditional method, teacher output is matched by student output. Teacher says, “Yo soy una muchacha!”; class chants: “Yo soy una muchacha.” In acquisition classrooms, output is matched by student input: when ready, the student joins the conversation, rather than parroting the teacher. Spanish becomes not a series of chopped phrases, but a world in which one lives, thinks and communicates.

Is religious education in your Meeting closer to the learning model, or the acquisition model? Is there sufficient exposure to the lived language of Quakerism for newcomers and youth? Are they compelled to try using that language themselves? When I visit a new church community, I want to see their faith embodied in the way they speak—of God, of service, of justice, of peace. That means they need to be talking about these things.

If we want people to be compelled to act on behalf of Quaker principles, we need a constant conversation about essential topics, a conversation that invites new language learners into the discussion, not in the sense that they can recite the SPICES (that would be akin to a grammar handout), but in the sense that they can speak up about what’s happening in the street, at school, at home, in the workplace.

Faith communities sometimes shy away from conversation about God, Jesus, scripture, and the daily practice of discerning and acting upon God’s will. But if people are coming through our doors, we would be foolish not to assume that these are the conversations they’re hoping to have.

~Mimi Marstaller is pursuing her Master in Teaching at Earlham College, and helping coordinate youth programs in religious education at West Richmond Friends Meeting. She plans to teach high school English.

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