The era of "Come Follow Me" handbooks has ushered in a renewed focus on home-centered and church-supported learning. Now, more than ever before, it is vital to our spiritual development that we take responsibility for our learning and strengthen our testimonies of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The replacement of this personal study with podcasts, talks, and other spiritual interpreters could be detrimental to our spiritual development. In second language learning, the use of scaffolding is vital to a students' development. Scaffolding in language-learning, much like that of a building, is a structured curriculum that helps students progress at a good pace and gives them the proper structure to learn new words and grammar concepts. Without proper scaffolding, students often feel lost and don't recognize the progress they are making, not to mention they feel inadequate in their language production which can cause them to give it up completely. Many things can make up this scaffolding, including captioning, subtitling, and various methods of translation. The problem with the implementation of some of these features too early is that it prevents the learner from actually internalizing the concepts they should be learning. For example, if a student is just barely starting out, watching a subtitled video (a video in the target language with words in their native language) could cause the learner to be overwhelmed by all the new words and resort to just reading the subtitles. This can carry their eyes away from the visual images of the video and instead focus all their attention on the words themselves. Because the words are not in the target language, their brain shifts priority to the eyes instead of the ears and the sound of the video becomes muted. This turns an audiovisual activity in the second language into an entirely visual exercise in their native language which does not help their second language development.
Another way I like to think of this is the use of an interpreter. As you know, I am a certified interpreter and pride myself in preserving the communicative autonomy of those I interpret for. What I mean by this is that I try not to insert any bias into my interpretation so that what the client hears is exactly what the person I'm interpreting for said, just in their native language. This is a great tool for anyone who doesn't know both languages, as it helps progress businesses and medical appointments, but what it doesn't help with is language learning. Think about it. If someone uses interpreters every single day for their Spanish-speaking patients, they are not anywhere closer to understanding Spanish, no matter how many hours they spend listening to their interpreter. When students ask for a translation or interpretation into their native language of something they just read or heard, it often takes away from their ability to internalize the Spanish. If a teacher does this too often, students may find themselves waiting around for the translation/interpretation instead of listening to/reading the second language material. In church, we often talk about the language of the Spirit and how we need to learn how God tries to communicate with us. Essentially, the reason that we practice reading our scriptures and praying to God each day is to better understand the language of the Spirit so that when God communicates with us through revelation and promptings, we can understand Him. Without this daily practice, we wouldn't know how God communicates with us, nor how to communicate with him. In essence, we wouldn't know the language of the Spirit. In the same way that language-learning needs scaffolding, so does learning the language of the Spirit. The church has developed the "Come Follow Me" program, which is beautifully scaffolded into small segments of text to read and thought-provoking questions to help students of the scriptures better understand what God is trying to teach them. It also provides a lot of autonomy, as students are able to explore the scriptures and come to the conclusion that they need most. While this scaffolding is super important, sometimes, we study from it wrong. Sometimes, we decide that we don't want to try reading the scriptures on our own first before delving into the questions or before we explore a talk mentioned in the manual, or even before we turn on our favorite podcast about the scriptures. While each of these tools are great, they are in their own way interpretations of the scriptures and by skipping our scripture study and replacing it with the consumption of material from these interpreters, we are doing ourselves a disservice. When we only listen to podcasts that share interpretations of the scriptures from that week, instead of using them as scaffolding to help us better understand the scriptures, we lose our ability to understand and speak the language of the Spirit. We may come to amazing conclusions and even feel enlightened, but when God sends us a prompting, we might miss it. When we read something online, we might not turn to the scriptures and prayer for peace first. We might search the web or look at what the podcast has to say about that particular topic. This draws us further away from the Spirit and causes us to have a weakened relationship with our Heavenly Father. When we follow the scaffolding that the church has put out, but first reading and praying about the section for that week and then writing down our own thoughts, and then follow that study up with podcasts, talks, and a discussion about the thought-provoking questions, we will come away with a strengthened ability to understand the Spirit. These tools can be so useful and as long as we use them right, we can accomplish exactly what "Come Follow Me" hopes to do: to deepen our conversion to Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ and help us become more like Them (Church of Jesus Christ). Commit today to learn the language of the Spirit by studying the scriptures first, before turning to someone else's interpretation of what they say.
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