Becoming a Lifelong Learner

One of the National Standards for foreign language learning reads:

Standard 5.2: Students show evidence of becoming life-long learners by using the language for personal enjoyment and enrichment.

This is, understandably, a difficult standard to address in any classroom—online, or brick and mortar. But I am impressed with what we have done to address this standard in our courses. Though several activities in our courses are related to this standard, I would like to focus on the activity that addresses it most explicitly. It’s called (wait for it…) “Becoming a Lifelong Learner”.

The assignment opens by explaining the rationale for “Lifelong learning” (I’m taking the example from French I):

Learning a language opens doors to a world of opportunity. Of course, in order to really benefit from your studies, you’ll need to do more than just complete assignments. You’ll need to set habits that will tie you to French and its cultures even beyond the classroom. Students who become lifelong learners of French have some basic characteristics and habits that you should develop if you want to get the most from your experience learning French.

This assignment challenges students to set up a regular schedule for engaging the target language and culture in three respects:

1. accessing information intended for native speakers
2. interacting with native speakers
3. participating in target-language speaking cultural events

And we want students to think about developing these habits in very specific ways: With whom will they converse? What information source will they access? And when? This overarching assignment gives concrete applications for what students learn in the other instructional modules, and gives very simple, yet adequate structure for the aim of communicative competence (an ultimate aim for all our courses). The following is the format of the table students complete and commit to for the assignment Becoming a Lifelong Learner:

Someone who has developed these habits is on the way to becoming a lifelong learner. These types of habits reinforce a strong connection to the language and culture and develop a love and better understanding of that culture.

Such assignments, for all standards, should convey the seriousness with which Powerspeak takes the National standards, and the deliberate work we have done to squarely meet each standard. What do you think? Could you keep up such a schedule? How accurate an indicator would such habits be for a “lifelong learner”?