Implications of Experiential Learning

Experiential Learning includes activities that engage both left- and right-brain processing, that contextualize language, that integrate skills, and that point toward authentic, real-world purposes. But what Experiential Learning highlights for us is giving students concrete experiences through which they “discover” language principles (even if subconsciously) by trial and error, by processing feedback, by building hypotheses about language, and by revising these assumptions in order to become fluent (Erying, 1991: 347). That is, teachers do not simply tell students about how language works; instead, they give students opportunities to use language as they grapple with the problem-solving complexities of a variety of concrete experiences. According to Morris Keeton and Pamela Tate, in Experiential Learning:

The learner is directly in touch with the realities being studied. It is contrasted with learning in which the learner only reads about, hears about, talks about, or writes about these realities but never comes in contact with them as part of the learning process… It involves direct encounter with the phenomenon being studied rather than merely thinking about the encounter or only considering the possibility of doing something with it. (Keeton & Tate, 1978: 2)

Experiential Learning is not so much a novel concept as it is an emphasis on the marriage of two substantive principles of effective learning, principles espoused by the famous American educator John Dewey: (a) one learns best by “doing”, by active experimentation, and (b) inductive learning by discovery activates strategies that enable students to “take charge” of their own learning process. As such it is an especially useful concept for teaching children, whose abstract intellectual processing abilities are not yet mature.

In traditional foreign language teaching, language teaching was primarily aimed at developing the students’ mastery of the grammar as the linguistic system as near as possible to that of a native speaker. In experiential language learning, language teaching needs to have a wider goal orientation of educating intercultural speakers. Language learning therefore has to be sensitive to the social dimension of language involving such factors as the setting, communicative intentions and practical needs of both the individual and the society. The development of autonomy in the classroom context requires a sufficient learning space and guidance provided and structured by the teacher. Developing a critical awareness of language and learning processesmeans that learners have opportunities to share the decisions related to their learning. Language classroom practices should therefore reflect democratic procedures (Sheils, 1996). The difference between traditional foreign language teaching and experiential language learning can be obviously seen from the following:

Professional success and personal satisfaction will increasingly depend on the ability to communicate competently with people not only from the same cultures, more importantly, from other cultures. The acquisition of appropriate linguistic knowledge and skills can be integrated with the learning of the self-reflective and interpersonal skills and attitudes that help language learners deal with otherness and cultural diversity in constructive ways.