--- Forwarded Message from Irene Starr <[log in to unmask]> ---

>Date:         Wed, 5 Sep 2007 10:36:51 -0400
>From: Irene Starr <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: NYT article refers to language teaching as model
>To: [log in to unmask]
>cc: Irene Starr <[log in to unmask]>

Thought the following may be of interest. It suggests that econ should be 
taught as languages are now! The excerpt is from: 
http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?
res=F50E13FE3F5D0C718DDDA10894DF404482.

Sincerely,
Irene Starr

ECONOMIC VIEW; The Dismal Science, Dismally Taught 
By ROBERT H. FRANK, August 12, 2007
... Why aren't introductory economics courses more effective? One possibility 
is that professors try to teach their students far too much. The typical course 
bombards students with hundreds of concepts, many of them embedded in 
complex equations and graphs. The mathematical formalism that has become 
the hallmark of economic research has yielded deep insights. But it does not 
seem to have helped introductory students learn basic economic principles. 

In a recent paper, Paul J. Ferraro and Laura O. Taylor, economists at Georgia 
State University, suggest a more troubling possibility -- that introductory 
economics instructors may not have mastered some of the basic concepts 
themselves. When the researchers described an activity and asked a sample 
of 199 professional economists to identify its opportunity cost, only one in
five 
answered correctly. 

The good news is that an approach that has revolutionized the teaching of 
foreign languages promises similar gains in economics and other disciplines. I 
took four years of Spanish in high school, only to have difficulty making myself 
understood when traveling in Spain. In those days, most language courses 
focused on arcane grammatical details, the functional equivalent of the 
technical material that often bedevils introductory economics students. 
Today, the best language programs try to mimic the organic process by which 
children learn their native language. 

My first exposure to the new approach came during my Peace Corps training 
for teaching math and science in rural Nepal. All the things we learned to say 
were grammatically correct, but we were never taught any formal grammatical 
rules. Starting from scratch, we had to be able to teach, in Nepali, just 13 
weeks later. Our linguistic skills were fairly basic, but virtually all of us
made it. 

Of course, it's not easy taking this approach consistently in an economics 
textbook. Ben S. Bernanke and I have tried in our own textbook, but given 
what the marketplace is willing to accept, we have not yet gotten all the way 
there. Just as a few simple sentence patterns enable small children to express 
an amazing variety of thoughts, a few basic principles do much of the lifting in 
economics. If someone focuses on only these principles and applies them 
repeatedly in examples drawn from familiar contexts, they can be mastered 
easily in a single semester. ...



***********************************************
 LLTI is a service of IALLT, the International Association for
Language Learning (http://iallt.org/), and The Consortium for Language Teaching
and Learning (http://www.languageconsortium.org/).
Join IALLT at http://iallt.org.
Otmar Foelsche, LLTI-Editor ([log in to unmask])
***********************************************