How Language Learning Shapes Faith: A Christian Approach to World Languages

In this episode of The Cross and The Classroom, host Toby Coffman sits down with Thomas Hill, Valor’s World Language Department Chair, to dive into the philosophy and practice of language teaching at Valor. The conversation uncovers Valor’s unique approach to language instruction, focusing on “comprehensible input” and immersive communication, rather than memorizing grammar rules. Thomas explains how students spend up to 95% of their class time in the target language, which empowers them to actually communicate and understand at a deep level.

An interesting fact from the episode: Valor students take the STAMP test at the end of each year to objectively measure their proficiency in reading, listening, speaking, and writing. Due to the school’s teaching methods, many students consistently outperform their peers nationally and even qualify for the prestigious Global Seal of Biliteracy—an accomplishment that distinguishes them on college applications.

Thomas also makes a compelling case for why language learning is especially meaningful for Christians, describing it as an act of humility and a way to better understand and connect with others, just as Christ did.

Whether you’re a parent, educator, or student, this episode offers fascinating insights into the “why” and “how” behind modern language education—and what makes the Valor experience truly unique.

Thank you for listening. To learn more about Valor Christian High School please check out our website. Follow us on Instagram and Facebook!

Transcript

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Well, Thomas, thanks for joining us today. Want to talk about world language at Valor? You're the guy to talk to about that. But before we get into that specific territory here and how our world language department works, love to hear just a little bit of your background. How you ended up at Valor, how long you've been here, and more pertinently to our conversation, how you came to love learning languages and acquiring them. Absolutely. Yeah. So this is going to be my 10th year at Valor. We came in 2016 and have been here ever since my journey with languages started and therefore my journey to Valor started probably when I was a teenager. I, like many people, had a Spanish class in high school that I just goofed off in. It came easily to me. So I didn't really care too much about it. It wasn't really until college that my love for language learning began to develop. I credit that to a youth minister I had who my junior and senior year of high school started to utilize some Greek in the Bible studies we were doing and just dropping little tidbits here and there that got me interested. So I knew I wanted to to take some Greek classes at some point in college. And I ended up going to Harding University where I found out my my sophomore year that they had a. A major in Biblical languages. I don't know if they still do, but through various experiences in my life, I had just sort of been funneled to loving language learning. So had you taken any Greek other than what was like occasionally dropped in your Bible study? No, I hadn't. I. I decided to major in missions there first and my first Greek class was a required class for that major. My second Greek class I actually spent studying abroad in Zambia and the professor as an independent study made me translate the book of John. And I remember in the morning is getting up early when it was still cool and I was alone and I was wrestling with the teacher text. And even though it was difficult, I realized in that moment I just found a joy that something I enjoyed doing even though it was difficult. And I in my head thought when I get back I'm going to ask if there's a major that I can experience more Greek with. And there was and I could major in. So I ended up majoring in Greek and Hebrew so that I could interact with the texts of the Old Testament and New Testament in their original languages. And then after undergraduate school I went to seminary where I studied Latin and started reading the texts of the early church and of the Western church fathers and found again another branch of that same Love of language learning that I had experienced before. After seminary, I began to teach at a small private school in Charlotte, north carolina. And that school didn't stay open for too long. It was a very small school. But I had enjoyed it so much that I thought, well, if the lord opens another door somewhere else, I'll go through it. And so that's when I began to job search and found valor and flew me out for an interview. Teaching sample offered me the job. I remember that conversation with Gary Fisher. Unexpected. And. And that's kind of how the lord has worked in my life. Just opening doors unexpectedly, but using that love for language as a catalyst to push me forward in my journey. That's how we ended up here. Well, that's great. Even your love for language is kind of unexpected. Yeah, yeah. Something I didn't anticipate. So how do we. How do we set up our courses here at Valor for in languages to give students that same sort of aha moment you had studying Greek in Zambia. How do we make room for them to really fall in love with language acquisition? I think there are a small percentage of students like me that find that they just enjoy even the nitty gritty of the grammar analysis and the translation work and things like that. But we do try to instill joy into our classrooms because at the root of it, language learning is about communicating. And we are the imago dei. We are the image of God and our God is a communicator. And so I think inherent in just the act of communicating, whether that be in your native tongue or a second language, there is an inherent joy because you are experiencing fellow. And that's what language is for. And that's what it's meant to be used for, is to make connection and to build relationship. And so that's the emphasis. One of the emphases of our program and the way we do things in class is it's communicative. We want there to be interactions in the target language. That's learning. So that even if the students can't quite put their finger on what they learned that day, they. Their experience was one of relationship and one of joy. We hope so. I grew up taking Spanish like probably a lot of the parents in our audience here, because it made sense. It was the thing to do. I took three years of Spanish in high school, A couple of years in junior high. I didn't retain much. And what I mostly remember is learning lists of words and sort of grammar stuff, which I found interesting for. Actually for helping me understand English better. Because it taught me sort of how languages work, but it didn't really help me acquire Spanish, at least at a deep level. So the way we teach today, it was new to me when I came to Valor. It's probably new for a lot of our parents as their students enter into our world language classes here. So kind of talk me through the pedagogy and philosophy of world language at Valor. Why? What maybe the science or research says about it, what you've seen in the classroom. Why is this the way we teach? Absolutely. Yeah. You and I had similar high school experiences with Spanish. We didn't come away with large abilities to communicate in that language because of the way it was taught. And going back to what I said a second ago, since we desire students to be able to communicate in the language because we believe that's one part of the way we image God himself and where the joy is found, that's what we want them to be able to do. Those are our student outcomes, are to be able to communicate in reading, listening, speaking, and writing. And so the way our classes work really comes out of second language acquisition theory. And, you know, the scholars, scholarly research in the. At, you know, in the universities that have has slowly been distilled down, so to speak, to us over time. But our classrooms are modeled really on the way that you learn your first language. And that is through massive amounts of input. But input that is comprehensible, input that is understood, you can understand. Exactly. Your mom talks to you at an age appropriate level, helps you acquire language. Correct. You know, that's why children's books are so repetitively boring to us as parents, because they are written at a simple level. The brain is wired to make meaning. It desires deeply to connect meaning to words and sounds and images. And so you are made to be able to acquire language. And our classrooms are. Are modeled on that way of learning a language. It is your second language. And so we can leverage some of the thinking parts of your brain to help you acquire. But in our classrooms, you're going to enter in and you're going to experience the language 90%, 95% of the time. In the classroom, we speak in the target language, we write in the target language, but we do it so slowly and so intentionally that there should not be many times where you do not understand what is being said. Once the brain begins to make meaning out of what it's hearing, that's when it starts to actually acquire the language. It becomes a part of you, and then eventually you're able to hear it. Easily. You're able to read it easily, and then you're actually able to begin to say it and then write it. And so we call this comprehensible input or acquisition driven instruction. Our goal is for students to acquire the language through input that they understand, that they comprehend, which then through the wonderful way God has created us, turns into the ability to use the language and communicate with the language. And that's why our students do so well when they go on our discovery trips. They're able to help translate when they take our test at the end of the year, that measures their proficiency. They're outscoring their colleagues across the country and internationally at their given level. And so a lot of times in that classroom, since we don't focus on making them memorize grammar, making them memorize forms like you recalled, sometimes students and parents have a hard time putting their finger on what was actually learned in the classroom. Well, they've actually begun to acquire the language. And your student can actually use the language and understand the language at his or her level in a way that even as freshmen, they're able to do it in a way that you and I weren't able to really do even after our years in. In high school. So you would say kind of initially, it probably is jarring for students to be able to do 95% of the class in the target language. And how do. How do they kind of adjust over time from maybe open mouth, like, oh, my gosh, like, this is serious. Like, we're just in Spanish or French or whatever. How do they come to adapt to that over time? The students are shocked at first. A lot of. I get a lot of emails. Sometimes I don't think my student is ready for this level. Well, this is the first level, so they have to go here. But they realize actually after a short period of time that they're supported in the classroom, that even though the language is being used constantly, there's so many mechanisms that the teachers design and use in the classroom that support their comprehension of what's being said or what's being read that they begin to realize and understand. Oh, okay. I'm actually not lost. I actually do understand what's going on. I'm supported here. And they become a little more comfortable in that environment until eventually, you know, it's all they know. And they function great. And that does take a couple of weeks, but that's. Yeah, with a lot of support. And then they. They do realize the skills that they've gained, you know, and that is a huge motivator. For students when they understand, wow, I'm able to read all that, I'm able to listen to all that and understand. And I just had a conversation with my teacher where I was speaking entirely in Spanish by the end of two, three weeks. That kind of realization of their own learning goes a long way to also helping them feel confident, but it takes a couple weeks of onboarding. I like what you say, though. Like, there is an empowering element to this to our students when they gain the confidence that they can go to these places on discovery or for study abroad when they're in college and they can actually communicate in that language. Wanted to follow up because you mentioned this briefly. A couple of questions back. Talk to us just kind of briefly about the STAMP test that our students take, what that is measuring and how our students have done on that. I made fun of this acronym in an earlier meeting with staff and faculty because it felt like they decided they want it to be called stamp, I'm guessing because of like passport stamps or something, and then they arranged the acronym around it. But this is the language all of or the test all of our world language students take at the end of the year. Yeah, the STAMP stands for Standard Assessment for Measuring Proficiency. And it really is quite an. It really is a rather objective test. Some people like to. I mean, some people think that measuring proficiency is rather subjective, but we have a lot of criteria and data that we use to support the criteria in student outcomes that allow us and allow the makers of this test to measure proficiency level rather accurately. And so all of our students in every language take this test at the end of the year, and it measures their proficiency in four areas. Reading, listening, speaking, and writing. And the way that we have our levels set up and the way that our, you know, one of the organizations that has given us a lot of input on how to talk about our levels, actful is what it's called the American Council for Teachers Foreign Language. Another great act, another great acronym is Novice, Intermediate and Advanced. So we're trying to measure where you fall on that scale at the end of the year, at the end of your first year as a Spanish student, for instance. Our goal for you is a novice high, which in the the hierarchy of this system is a level three, an L3, we call it. You hit all L3s on reading, listening, speaking, and writing on the stamp test. Then that, you know, shows us, okay, you are exactly where you think we are. We think you are. You've achieved the level that we wanted for you, and you're ready for the next level. You're ready for Intermediate after. After Novice high. Level 3. The next level is Intermediate low, which is a level 4, an L4. Because of the way language learning works, the farther you go, the more there is to learn. It takes longer to jump those levels. You start as a novice low, and you jump all the way to novice high at the end of your first year, at the end of your second year of Spanish or any language here, your goal is actually an L4 is just one level. We want you to be right on. You know, we want you to hit L4 in all of those modes. Reading, listening, speaking and writing. And it takes about a year for you to be able to. To get to that point. The advanced year, again, just one level jump to intermediate mid, an L5. So our classes that are called advanced, it's slight misnomer that the level we want you to achieve is Intermediate Low. There are students who hit way above these targets every year because of the way we test. And that has actually, that influences our daily grading. We have a little bit of a higher standard actually throughout the year. And most of our students not only hit the target at the end of the year on that test, but a lot of them hit way above. If you hit all fives across the board, that qualifies you for the global seal of biliteracy. And we award that to somewhere between 220 to 250 students every year in all levels. And that's a great thing to be able to put on college resumes, but really it is an accurate representation of your proficiency level in these skills, which is what the students should really feel proud of. That's awesome. And we have phenomenal data on that. And you and your team have done a tremendous job preparing our kids for that. Thanks. But this is also a Christian school. And so I want to. I want to ask the last couple minutes of our conversation here, why, maybe even especially for followers of Christ, is it important to acquire a second language and to seek to learn a culture that corresponds to a language? I think there could be a world very conceivable in the future where AI is pretty flawless in its translation. And we could go to a cafe in Barcelona and speak into our phone and it would repeat perfect Spanish to our waiter. How do we make the case for world language acquisition is not just something because there's no other option out there. What's the gospel case for learning a new language? Yeah, and I actually, I'm excited about that kind of world, actually, where there's artificial intelligence bridging the language barrier in multiple ways. But for me, you know, I've had to answer this question as a Latin teacher and someone who's interested in ancient languages for a long time. Why even study it? It's a language you can't communicate. It's the same exact question, really, and it's a very similar answer. It comes down to the fact that I'm a being created in the image of God. And we truly believe that language learning itself is inherently Christian in that you are taking on the nature, the language, the flesh, as it were, of another. You sort of clothe yourself in their worldview and in their culture through learning their language. It's not just words. Right. It's a way of seeing the world and explaining things. Exactly. And Christ has done that for us. He's divested himself, as it were, of his divine nature, and he has emptied himself and he has taken on our nature. And so why learn another language? Well, we want to be able to share the gospel. We. We talk about how it's relational, and there's joy in that because we. We image God in that way. And that's true. But we also think that there is an inherently humble thing that takes place when someone puts themselves in the position to be able to take on the language of another. And there is. There is a. Therefore, it's Christ like. And so we want our students to experience that in our classrooms and through language learning and be formed into the image of Christ in that way. It's why I studied ancient languages. It's why I enjoy studying history. These are things that form me more into the image of Christ in their own particular way. Well, I love it and wish you guys a lot of blessings as you instruct our students into that way of seeing the world. Last question. Won't take long. If you could acquire one language that you don't already have in your arsenal, modern or ancient, what would it be? Oh, gosh, there are too many to choose from. I was just at the table with my colleagues. We were having lunch together, and one of our teachers, Alejandro Kim, he's trilingual, but he's got six other languages he desperately wants to learn, and he'll probably spend the rest of his life working towards that. For me, I suppose I would want to spend more time on Italian, French, and Spanish, but particularly Italian and French. Haven't had the opportunity as much as I would have liked. Liked. Sounds great. Thomas, thank you so much for your time. Appreciate it. All right, pleasure. Bye.