FoRMULATING ACTIoNABLE GoALS

Formulating Actionable Goals

[Name of the Writer]

[Name of the Institution]

Formulating Actionable Goals

All of us have had some event, some experience, and like my student's personal library at eleven, which drives us toward the discipline we inhabit. I was speaking to a group of students recently about this. one student — let's call her Jennifer — said she wanted to get a master's degree in speech therapy. When I asked her why, Jennifer said she had taken a class in it for fun and really loved it. But then I pressed her: was there some personal reason she found that field significant enough to spend her whole life doing ito At first Jennifer said no, but after more questioning she revealed that her brother had speech problems.

Bilingual Education

Two facts about language acquisition are consistently supported in research. First, everyone can learn one or several languages; and second, the success of this learning depends on the real need or wish to use the new language(s) in authentic communication (Snow, 2007). These facts exist because what motivates and promotes the learning of language is the social need and the pragmatic demands of communication; that is, the characteristics, relationships, and purposes of those who communicate and the contextual conditions in which they do so (Ninio & Snow, 1996). This is why a main problem we face in Colombia (when teaching foreign languages like English that we accept as necessary in today's life) is that our socio-linguistic context is mostly monolingual in Spanish. This means that we do not need to use English to function in society, which makes it especially difficult for us to motivate our children and adolescents to learn it.

In our limited experience in international languages and with school bilingualism, we see that the institutions perceived as most successful are the schools we call bilingual. These are mostly elite private schools located in our large cities.

They have adopted bilingual education models developed for contexts alien to ours (ordóñez, 2008). Many follow the programs and practices of Canadian immersion and even programs, policies, and accreditation systems used by and for monolingual schools in Europe or the United States (De Mejía, ordóñez & Fonseca, 2006). But they also follow common sense: if the foreign language does not occur naturally in our social context, creating the need for it at school makes sense. So they set up artificial environments in which the foreign language of interest becomes necessary for communication and academic success through four basic actions: the introduction of the foreign language at the earliest possible age, normally at preschool level and often in partial or total immersion programs; the learning of academic areas different from the language itself in the foreign language; the hiring of as many native foreign language teachers as possible; and the requirement that everyone in school speak in the foreign language in and outside of class.

But the very little research done in these learning environments reveals that policy-makers can easily ignore important facts of language ...