Help Them Learn a Language Deeply Francois Victor Tochon's Deep Approach to World Languages and Cultures

Tochon's Deep Approach is a convergence of what worked best in earlier approaches to learning foreign languages and cultures. Its holistic scope allows for more student autonomy and works for the planet and society while working on the language. The instructional principles I believe in for teachers are to: ➢ Go by the results of motivation research, and provide incentives for self-directed learning and self-determination. ➢ Help students build their curriculum through their own literacy-based thematic units, indexing all language modalities to each other. ➢ Emphasize process rather than outcomes; refer to instructional organizers in forward planning rather than goals or outcomes in a backward planning. ➢ Encourage individualized, peer-oriented, and small group project-based learning, focusing on cultural content and social action; ➢ Give primacy to text. Consider grammar as storytelling about language; target extensive reading/viewing and intensive writing/recording. ➢ Use deep formative feedback and empowerment evaluation. Integrate self-evaluations and peer-evaluations. ➢ Focus on value creation: highlight critical issues related to the respect of other languages and cultures, language status and invisible or open discrimination, the colonial mindset versus principles of social justice, and linguistic human rights for peace building. Here is what makes this approach distinct: • The students are placed in charge of building their own curriculum and projects to achieve their own desired expertise, using accountability measures through instructional agreements. • The basis of the students' curriculum building is the teacher's provision of literary and multimedia resources organized adaptively. The teacher becomes expert in scaffolding and facilitating feedback. • Knowledge is not a 'thing' that can be taught as an object: it is understood as deep, subjective and intersubjective, inseparable from the identity process. • The focus is on deep processing, not standardized outcomes similar for all. There is room for diversity and flexibility, non-native speaker comfort, code-switching, and unique perspectives. • It targets transdisciplinary values for a more sensible and wiser world-this way language learning becomes the means toward conflict resolution, ending war and poverty, re-greening the planet, and turning to politics for the human. In summary, understanding the Deep Approach is seeing Education and schooling in an 'avant-garde' way!