A friend recently asked me to participate in a one day seminar on citizenship put on by a local university, Simon Fraser, as part of their "Semester on Dialogue" program, described as fol ows on their website. I have highlighted certain phrases.
"The Undergraduate Semester in Dialogue addresses what we believe is the principal chal enge for contemporary education: to inspire students with a sense of civic responsibility, encourage their passion to improve Canadian society, and develop innovative intel ect ual tools for effective problem solving. Each semester we develop an original and intensive learning experience that uses dialogue to focus student education on public issues."
The site goes on to say:
"Dialogue is a particularly effective educational paradigm, involving col aborative listening and learning to discover meaning among diverse participants, and is best conducted in the context of citizenship and civic engagement. Dialogue offers helpful ways to relate to one another, and leads to better-quality outcomes than the adversarial, position-based discussions that typical y characterize debate about complex issues. Dialogue-based processes build deep relationships through free expression of views and respectful exploration of differences, with positive action emerging through mutual understanding around sources of agreement and disagreement."
I am not entirely sure what al of that means. I was not aware that the principal chal enge of contemporary education is to inspire a passion to improve Canadian society. I am certainly aware of other major challenges including poor literacy. But assuming that this —improving Canadian society—is a major chal enge, surely there wil be various positions, and even conflicting positions, on how to do this. People's interests and ideologies differ. Surely, in reality, there wil be a need to go beyond a ―respectful exploration of differences", as these different positions come into contact with each other. At some point people wil have to debate and try to defend their positions, and decide which positions are more useful. And not everyone wil agree. Not al positions are equal y useful nor equal y worthy of respect. I doubt if a love-in of ―col aborative listening" can achieve very much.
At any rate, at this one day seminar the students presented us with largely a monolithic "position" on multiculturalism, and when I and others questioned this orthodoxy we were either ignored, or attacked. There was not much listening by the students, col aborative or otherwise.
During our one day conference we were divided into groups around smal tables. We were encouraged to doodle, draw and write down "whatever came into our heads" onto large paper sheets on our tables, just like in kindergarten. These were then gathered together and combined to represent our col ective ideas. Doodling is col aborative, I guess. Our student moderators were trying to get us into the mood for col aborative doodling by leading serious discussion on citizenship with questions like, (I am not joking), "What is your favourite Canadian movie?" "What is your favourite pastime?" "Should five year olds have the right to vote?‖
I prefer free discussion without manipulation. I agree where I agree, and disagree where I disagree. I do not col aboratively listen. I listen to understand. A conversation is by definition a dialogue. The goal is not to effect improvement, but to exchange views and ideas and bring facts forward. It is an opportunity to try to defend one's own opinions, to discover holes in one's own position, and to explore the positions of others. This is best done with no special rules or assumptions about col aborating to improve things. In any case, differences of ideology or interest soon expose all this col aborative theology as bogus.
How effective are the existing language tests for English? How do we know what our skil level is in another language? How can other people best judge our skil level? Is our own subjective evaluation enough? Is it possible to standardize the evaluation of language skil s?
What are the advantages and disadvantages of doing so?
I do not know much about tests for other languages since I have not taken any language tests since I did my British Foreign Service Exam for Mandarin Chinese in 1969. Not taking tests has not prevented me from becoming fluent in a number of languages since then. Not having passed any tests in Japanese, Spanish, Swedish or German does not prevent me from conducting business in these languages. These are al languages that I studied very hard on my own after the age of 25. I did it using my principles but without the tremendous advantages of modern technology, like the resources of the Internet, MP3 players, and online dictionaries etc... I know what my level is in these languages even without taking a test. I know what I need to do to improve further.
