from Inquiry, Volume 1, Number 2, Fall 1997, 21-27
© Copyright 1997 Virginia Community College System
Abstract
Seeking to know our students,
why they are enrolled in our classes, what their objectives are,
and why these are sometimes so hard to attain are issues we must
grapple with if we are to guide learners to success.
Attrition in community college foreign language programs has long been an area of concern for educators who continue to refine strategies to promote the success of all students in the discipline. Research has shown that there are myriad factors which contribute to attrition, including conflicting teacher/learner styles, difficulties with approaches to course content (linguistic versus communicative orientations), and such affective elements as student anxiety, motivation, and self-efficacy beliefs about success in foreign language study. While these factors may be described as academic concerns, there are non-academic factors which are strictly beyond the educator's control and which are arguably the most significant reasons for attrition. Inadequate time management, employment issues, health, and financial concerns are all major obstacles to student persistence.
The authors of the present study began examination of this issue with the distribution of a faculty survey sent to all VCCS foreign language departments in 1995. In the faculty survey, respondents were asked to cite their perceptions of the reasons for attrition as well as the strategies that they employ for retention. A complete summary of the retention survey results may be found in the newsletter of the VCCS Foreign Language Peer Group, LOGOS, published in Spring 1996. The focus of this paper is more precisely on the strategy component.
When faculty were asked for retention strategies, many recurrent themes emerged:
The present study summarizes the result of the implementation of some of the above strategies at the Alexandria Campus of Northern Virginia Community College (NVCC).
Knowing Our Students
A review of student profiles at the Alexandria campus of NVCC, as reported in the 1996 Foreign Language Discipline Assessment Report, demonstrates that there are a significantly greater number of older adult foreign language learners at Alexandria than at the other four campuses. Knowledge of this fact inevitably influences the organization of courses which must be designed to consider the needs unique to this particular segment of students.
Research has shown that motivation among adult learners is a key factor in persistence. Their course of study must be relevant to their ultimate goal, and obstacles to learning must be easily surmountable:
The best way to motivate adult learners is simply to enhance their reasons for enrolling and decrease the barriers. Instructors must learn why their students are enrolled; they have to discover what is keeping them from learning. Then the instructors must plan their motivating strategies. (Lieb, 1996)
The identification of barriers to success is an important first step in addressing attrition. At NVCC, various measures have been implemented to help students recognize and address these areas.
Non-Academic Factors
Working students frequently complain that courses in traditional formats are not feasible for them due to scheduling constraints. In order to remove scheduling barriers, it has become standard practice in the community college to offer courses in compressed time frames, in weekend and other short-term, intensive formats. At NVCC, we have added a number of “bridge courses” designed to reorient students after a hiatus from a certain subject area. These short-term courses centered on a particular skill can help the non-traditional student address gaps in his or her knowledge base. In foreign languages, one-week grammar reviews and pronunciation workshops can bolster the skills of students in need of reinforcement, enabling them to subsequently enroll in a longer course with confidence. In designing these courses in diverse formats, the teacher’s main challenge is to build into them the mechanisms that will help students adjust to their intensive structure, precisely because the students’ inability to cope with an accelerated pace can also result in attrition.
Academic Barriers
There are various ways to discover what academic barriers exist for students before they consider withdrawal. While it is true that some will desist before the instructor can intervene, knowledge of the obstacles allows the instructor to guide the student in setting realistic expectations. Classroom assessment techniques, or “CATs,” as they have been referred to by Cross and Angelo (1993), are practical tools available to instructors while a course is in progress. Dialogue journals¾either traditional or by e-mail¾can provide regular dialogue on student progress and concerns about a course. Students who are reluctant to speak up during class or office hours are often willing to articulate their concerns about a course in a written format. The dialogue journal develops a link between student and teacher that provides individual attention in a non-threatening atmosphere. The dialogue journal may also be used as a classroom assessment tool to evaluate how well a student has integrated a given lesson. In such a case, a teacher devotes two minutes at the end of a class period to asking the students to write down any questions they might have about the lesson for that day. Instructors respond to individual concerns, either in writing or during office hours for longer questions. If there is a recurring question, the instructor is ready to key in on it during the next class period. This type of assessment is far more valuable to the teacher than an evaluation at the end of the course. It allows one to fine tune the course and meet the needs of the students immediately.
Affective Barriers and Motivation of the Adult Learner
It must be acknowledged that there are affective barriers to motivation in adult learners that can influence persistence.
When the adult learners are thrust into an academic environment that is inconsistent with what they are accustomed to, it can have an adverse effect on learning. They process more slowly information that seems to be in conflict with previously acquired knowledge (Zemke,1984). Adult learners are usually goal-oriented and insistent upon relevant, practical instruction. They are frequently more interested in a concrete outcome, such as the acquisition of a specific skill or a certain competency level in a given area of study. A clear and realistic set of goals and objectives, outlined at the beginning of the course and, most importantly, reiterated at regular intervals throughout the semester, will enhance motivation among goal-oriented students. While many faculty members regularly focus on goals at the beginning of the semester, the tendency thereafter is to plunge into the subject matter and assume that the students will keep sight of the goals for the duration of the course. When the course material becomes more complex, it can be motivational to remind students that, in spite of the complexity of the moment, the outcome will be the realization of the same worthwhile goal that they set in the beginning. Every activity should be justified as a meaningful step toward the realization of the course goal. When the students perceive relevancy, they are frequently more willing to persist.
Learning Styles
Contemporary research shows that there are a wide variety of learning styles among students, and it is important for faculty to teach to all modalities. Multisensory teaching, embraced by leading foreign language professionals as a means of reaching more students, requires the integration of visual, auditory, and tactile/kinesthetic techniques in our foreign language programs. The right combination of these activities varies with the class profile, and finding the right mix requires early investigation on the part of the instructor. One effective first step is the use of a learning style inventory. These survey instruments, administered at the beginning of a semester, are an effective means of detecting learning style differences. They do not have to be long cumbersome documents that can only be deciphered by specialists. The authors use a short questionnaire that allows students to self-assess and report their learning styles to the teacher. The students can complete the survey, tabulate the results, and make use of the information in all of their classes. This practice has the benefit of raising students’ awareness of what works for them and lets the teacher know how many visual, auditory or tactile/kinesthetic learners there are in a given classroom.
Most students report being visual learners; they want to see everything written and/or diagrammed and they want many handouts. They do not always realize that they then actually have to use all the resources available to them in order to succeed. Learning style inventories are particularly useful in working with learning-disabled students.
Adults can sometimes become frustrated with the incompatibility of their learning style with that of other students in a class. They may be at odds with teaching styles that differ greatly from methods that they were exposed to in the past. This is particularly true in foreign language classes, where methodology has changed radically over recent decades. Many returning students feel an initial uneasiness with immersion courses where their mother tongue is not spoken or with communicative approaches that require them to interact with their classmates in the target language.
Faced with the anxiety brought about by learning style differences, the instructor must incorporate teaching techniques that appeal to a variety of styles. In the case of the adult learner, this will mean validating those techniques that appeal to their learning channel preferences while promoting other appropriate techniques for other learners.
Learning Strategies
It has been demonstrated that inroads can be made with the overt teaching of learning strategies. Learning strategies are measures that students can take to promote their own learning success. They include a vast number of study techniques that can both increase self-confidence and boost performance. Rebecca Oxford defines learning strategies as “specific actions taken by the learner to make learning easier, faster, more enjoyable, more self-directed, more effective, and more transferable to new situations.” (Oxford, Language Learning Strategies, 1990)
Oxford's Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) has become the standard tool in the foreign language profession for the identification of learning strategies to help individual students succeed. The inventory is an important component of what has come to be called “strategy-based instruction,” a methodological orientation that is gaining momentum nationwide.
The premise behind the inclusion of learning strategies in the foreign language classroom activities is that student awareness of what works and what does not empowers the learner. Students who feel more in control of their learning are much more likely to persist than the ones who flounder without clearly defined study habits. In the fall 1996, the authors administered a student questionnaire, both to discover how the students were studying and to suggest to students that they should be responsible for their own learning. The questionnaire provided information about student study habits and suggested a variety of learning strategies that were perhaps not previously considered by the student such as highlighting, using flash cards, journaling, reviewing on-line tutorials, studying via e-mail, etc.
The authors' survey, modeled after Rebecca Oxford's Questionnaire for Determining Language Learning Goals and Objectives, provides valuable planning information for the rest of the semester. An essential element of the student questionnaire is the question about the students' own short and long-term goals for the course. Students are asked to evaluate what they feel they would like to accomplish in a given course after one month, at mid-term, and by the end of the semester. By having the students set realistic goals at the beginning, the instructor can guard against unreasonable expectations that will later lead to frustration and anxiety. Knowing in advance what students hope to attain from a course is invaluable information.
Regarding student goals, the authors learned that the number of students in the survey sample who were taking French purely to satisfy a language requirement was low, while a little more than half of the Spanish students needed to fulfill a degree requirement. The number of students taking French for personal enrichment was high and most of the Spanish students reported that Spanish was necessary in their community or jobs. Listening and speaking were the two skills deemed as most important by French students in the survey group. Many students, in both languages, were interested in learning language for travel purposes. They were very interested in more authentic contact with language than the classroom normally provides (theater and cinema in the target language, language exchanges with native speakers).
Their learning strategy responses indicated greater reliance on independent strategies, particularly flashcards, lists, and written exercises. At the time of the survey, fewer students chose interactive strategies (study groups, tutorial, etc.); yet they were interested in the potential of these, and many finished the semester with tutors.
Technology and Foreign Language Learning
In spite of a low rate of access to e-mail among those surveyed, students showed an interest in e-mail correspondence with students in target language countries. A small number of students provided e-mail addresses on the questionnaire, opening a line of communication between the faculty and students that proved to be of great use during the semester. Students with e-mail access sent queries to their professor regarding exams, quizzes, and course content. Faculty used e-mail to redirect the efforts of students who were starting to fall behind in their course work during the semester. The benefit of e-mail communication with students is only beginning to be felt and will increase with greater student access.
The questionnaire also asked about student interest in technology as a learning tool. Many expressed an interest in software to reinforce grammar, pronunciation, and other skills. As the results illustrate, students showed a willingness to try new strategies after being exposed to the ideas in the student questionnaire.
Conclusion
The process of removing barriers to student success through the implementation of the aforementioned techniques is one step toward the reduction of attrition. Seeking to know our students, why they are enrolled in our classes, what their objectives are, and why these are sometimes so hard to attain are issues we must grapple with if we are to guide the learners to success. With the understanding that there are always attrition factors well beyond our control as educators, we must never fail to be sensitive to the changes that we can make to transform our classrooms into effective learning environments.
We began this study from a teacher-centered perspective, with the survey in 1995. From that point of departure, we moved to a focus on our students, with the learning style inventories, classroom assessment techniques and student questionnaires. Our research is now centered in the classroom itself, which is where the answers on effective learning strategies must ultimately be found.
References
Angelo, Thomas, & Cross, K. Patricia (1993). Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Franklin, Laura, Hodge, Margarita, & Monica Sasscer (1995). How to Increase Retention While Maintaining High Academic Standards: A Study on Retention in Community College Foreign Language Programs. LOGOS 1(2), 1-4.
Lieb, Stephen (1996). Principles of the Adult Learner. Internet http://www.hcc.hawaii.edu/hccinfo/facdev/AdultLearners.html
Northern Virginia Community College Foreign Language Discipline Assesssment Report (1996)
Oxford, Rebecca L. (1990). Language Learning Strategies: What Every Teacher Should Know. New York: Newbury House.
Zemke, Ron and Zemke, Susan (1984) 30 Things We Know For Sure About Adult Learning. Innovation Abstracts 6 (8).
Dr. Laura Franklin is a Professor of French
and current Assistant Division Chair for Foreign Languages and
Philosophy in the Humanities Division of NVCC Alexandria Campus. Dr.
Margarita Esparza Hodge is a Professor of Spanish at the
NVCC Alexandria Campus. She is a frequent presenter on
language-based learning disabilities at ACTFL, FLAVA and GWATFL,
foreign language professional organizations on the national,
state and regional levels. Dr. Monica Flynn Sasscer
is a Professor of Spanish at NVCC Alexandria. In addition to
traditional classes, she is presently teaching Spanish via
television and voice mail through the NVCC Extended Learning
Institute's distance learning program.