As language teachers, what exactly are we trying to achieve in the long run (and by this, I mean beyond the next test or levelling up opportunity) for our learners? If I may be so bold: has it become too cliché or even unrealistic to suggest that we want and need to adequately prepare our students to go out somewhere in the real world and use this foreign language for real purposes? Is it naïve to assert we want our learners to become capable, confident, resourceful and independent?
If not, I would like to pose another couple of questions:
Why is there an obsession in our field to portray English language – and learning it – as easy?
Why is it so often the case that anything we might remotely consider challenging for learners is regularly dismissed as being “too difficult” and hence “demotivating” for them?
Learning a language – and I mean learning it for real, for use in real situations – is difficult. Any teacher who portrays it all as being “simple and easy” is potentially cutting corners or – more commonly – passing on the hype. More ominously, perhaps, I also think it’s flirting with something akin to blatant false advertising.
I studied Swedish for three years at university, getting A grades towards the end and developing the capacity to read classics in Swedish from the likes of Strindberg and Lagerkvist, not to mention a “cute” ability to order food in Swedish restaurants or introduce myself at a cultural event put on at Melbourne’s Swedish Missionary Church. Learning the language was a serious struggle almost the entire time. After that, I got a precious scholarship to do another term at Uppsala University in Sweden. I was miles ahead in Swedish compared to the other exchange students, but I struggled.
I mean, really struggled.
I struggled to open my bank account. I struggled to give specific instructions at the post office. I struggled to express my opinion during classes.
I struggled to contain my severe embarrassment when I tried to say Varför rynker du pannan? (“Why are you frowning?” or in literal translation: “Why are you creasing your forehead?”) and instead came out with Varför runkar du pannan? (“Why are you jerking off with your forehead?”), and didn’t get what all the hysterical laughter from a kitchen full of dorm-mates was about for a full ten minutes.
I struggled to avoid having an Arnold Schwarzenegger lookalike for a Swedish policeman throw me in the slammer one very merry evening in the middle of winter after a huge drinkup at Snärkes Nation pub and subsequent stop on the way home to take a toilet break on a very inviting and presumably discreet hedge. The sight of a very annoyed 6 foot 4 inch tall (and approaching the same in width) commando wielding a scowl and an automatic weapon, while his companion in the car shone a spotlight directly into my face, almost brought on a bodily release of a related but altogether more serious nature – which no doubt would have landed me in even more sh*t, and certainly more than any exchange student with three years of language study under his belt should ever have to endure.
Amazingly, and quite disappointingly, the classroom drills back in Australia and the tortured wisdom of Strindberg and Lagerkvist provided absolutely no succour throughout these challenging experiences. Zilch.
I became relatively fluent in Swedish by the end of it all, became a world expert on the difference between rynker and runkar, and had developed an excellent explanation about the comparative differences in acceptable drunken toilet behaviour between Sweden and Australia, but as a second language speaker of Swedish, there was – and will always be – an element of struggle.
Interestingly, several years later I also began to learn Korean – in Korea. It was also a struggle, but despite no previous study of Korean before arriving in that country, it was nowhere near as distressing as the experience in Sweden. Why? Because my previous three years of studying Swedish had made me (unrealistically, as it turns out) confident before I arrived in Sweden, and it was horrible to find out that I couldn’t really handle myself well at all once I actually got there. There was a feeling of failure from the outset, that – based on all that language study and practice – I should be able to communicate and give a good account of myself, but instead almost nothing around me made sense and all I could manage to do was embarrass myself by opening my mouth and trying out the local lingo.
Conversely, when I got to Korea, the experience of Swedish-in-Sweden had already demonstrated to me that I needed to take risks, be willing to experiment, remain wary of but not afraid of mistakes, laugh more than blush, and develop my own strategies for handling a low level competence with the language – as well as personal learning strategies to forge ahead with it.
In other words, my previous experience with struggling to understand and use a foreign language in real situations had prepared me for the new struggle of learning and using Korean.
I hope you see where I’m heading with all this. Surely it is acceptable, even desirable, to create conditions and situations in our language classrooms that expose our learners to the natural stress and ongoing struggle involved in using a foreign language, before they go out into the real world and cop it for real. Surely the protective warmth of our learner and learning-centred classroom can help students learn to cope with difficulties of a realistic nature, and even the sorts of break downs and outright failures that will inevitably occur when one tries to interact in a language that is not their native one.
My own experience with Swedish (and later Korean) had a major impact on my English teaching philosophy. The Swedish as a foreign language classroom struggle (for me) had been about mastering drills, memorizing teacher-allocated vocabulary lists, keeping up with the coursebook, coping with written work returned to me with instant corrections in red slashing ink, and trying in vain to maintain a shred of interest in reading classic Swedish literature that I hadn’t chosen to read. What if the struggle had been more about managing to engage in genuine conversations, learning to overcome embarrassment and trepidation when speaking, coping with the fact that only a small amount of what I heard might be instantly comprehensible, and concentrating on getting a message across – however shabbily dressed – rather than delivering a preset message with correct use of articles and noun declension inflections?
If you, like me, have ever gone out there and tried to use a foreign language in the real world, you’ll know that it is more about ongoing risk-taking, strategic independent learning and effective stress management than it is mastering particular lexical sets or grammatical constructions. If that’s what so much of it is about, then these factors of learning to cope with struggle – what I call the “noble struggle” of genuine language learning – really should be incorporated into our classroom approach as well.
This is definitely not the general approach so prevalent in ELT. What I see bandied about on ELT coursebook materials and in advertisements for language learning institutes is generally of the tone “making English easy!” and it appears to have become almost a necessary promotional adjective. Ensuring students remain confident and motivated, by ensuring everything is well presented, digestible and not too difficult, also appears to be mainstay of a lot of teachers’ approaches. Learners look at unit introductions telling them precisely what they are about to learn. Vocabulary and grammar constructions are presented carefully in advance of any sort of practice or open interaction. One unit carefully builds towards the next, and one level meticulously paves the way to the next one up in the sequence.
One thing I have noticed from ELT publishing experience is that publishers are extremely reluctant to ever feature realistic, situation-based open communication activities towards the start of units. They base their preferred approach on a careful present-practice-produce pattern (alá PPP) that is generally in response to the demands from most teachers, who claim students will “make too many mistakes” and/or “lose confidence” if they try to speak or write or read or listen without some sort of specific preparation and controlled practice. This is why there are so few task-based coursebook approaches out there. It is also why Jeremy Harmer’s reliable ESA (Engage-Study-Activate sequence) is featured sort of by default in coursebooks, rather than his excellent EAS(A) (Engage-Activate-Study-Activate) “boomerang” variation, which facilitates a “deep end” approach, potentially paves the way toward study/practice activities that feed directly out of the students’ own communicative output, and remains something that only brave and innovative teachers will go to the effort to build around or before their regular coursebook units.
Publishers, empathetic to the attitudes of the teachers they sell to, avoid anything remotely resembling a “deep” approach, dreading that this too often hints at drowning rather than exploring. Everything is presumed, planned and built carefully in advance. Every single stage is quickly achievable. Everything is safe. Or, in other words, everything is almost completely in contrast to what it is like to get out there and use and develop language proficiency in the real world.
And before this post is interpreted as being about publisher-bashing (again!), remember that in many or even most cases, publishers are only actually catering to the teachers that talk to them, and only allocating their resources and approaches according to what have proven to be strong sellers. I’ve met more than enough excellent folk in publishing who know about and would love to produce materials that are more task-based in design and genuinely (communicatively) challenging to learners. But their job is to make books that will sell, and if all they ever hear from teachers is “this is too hard for my learners” or “my learners won’t feel confident with this approach” then you can be virtually guaranteed that approaches of a “deep end” nature are never going to appear in commercial print.
This forms an interesting inside scoop on what so many teachers are concerned about and feel learners need. My general opinion is that these teachers ought to think more seriously about the prospect that, in babying and spoon-feeding learners in the lead up to and even application of “communicative” activities, they may in fact be paving the way towards some catastrophic falls later in the learners’ experience with using the language in real terms and in real situations. The sugar hit of instant achievement and confidence based on a PPP or (exclusively) ESA approach can become addictive to both learners and teachers, but the long-term effects can be catastrophic – as anyone who has learned English for 10 years at school and not managed to progress beyond a B1 level would tell you…
So, if I haven’t lost you yet, what exactly do I mean when I propose that the “noble struggle” needs to be incorporated more regularly into our approaches to teaching language? I can only really speak from my own experience, and the experience of having teachers under my supervision try out similar techniques. Here are some broad examples:
- Featuring regular live “on the spot” skits and situational roleplays without specific prior preparation, where the students are applauded for their ability to “survive” and achieve something – however small – out of the experience;
- When using coursebooks that meticulously build up through controlled practice to so-called “open communication activities”, using the open communication activity towards the start of the lesson rather than the end and using it as a basis for understanding the need to learn new language and practice it, before trying it out again as a communicative application (rather similar to Harmer’s EAS(A) approach);
- Playing real world video/audio tracks only once, at normal speaking speed, and letting students cope with whatever they can glean from it (we might repeat it later at slower speeds, but only after students have experienced the ‘struggle’ of coping with it as it might happen in a real communicative situation);
- Never (or very rarely) pre-teaching vocabulary before tackling reading passages, and asking students to always guess meaning from context before they scramble for dictionaries or word lists;
- Encouraging students to develop their own speech and essay topics, and then apply them “publicly” before they get feedback or corrections from me.
I also have some examples of incorporating the “noble struggle” in more specific and common classroom processes:
- Avoiding giving instant answers or corrections for questions from coursebooks, and only providing them after students have made several attempts to guess and self-correct;
- Insisting students guess when it comes to grammar, vocabulary or spelling enquiries;
- Indicating some errors in students’ written work, but insisting they make several attempts to self-correct or re-express them before providing definitive corrections or alternatives;
- Having students self-assess and peer-assess their work well before it ever comes before my eyes (or ears).
Now, admittedly, many of my learners and co-teachers over the years have called me a “demanding” teacher (though many were kind enough – and I’d like to believe more accurate – to use the word “challenging”), and looking through some of the examples above, some readers might be tempted to label me a “hard” teacher. I should point out that my approach for absolute beginners or very young learners is somewhat different in some cases, and not every single minute of my language lessons is oriented around an episode of “Survivor”. Language learning shouldn’t and doesn’t need to be frustratingly difficult all of the time.
I will, however, admit that many of my learners have described their experience with me as “nerve-racking” or even “terrifying” at the beginning, but motivating and enjoyable overall. Many have specifically stated that they felt very confident by the end of my course, which – considering the sorts of techniques and approaches mentioned above – appears to fly in the face of the earlier perception that everything needs to be carefully scaffolded and pre-provided in order for learners to maintain confidence and a sense of achievement. Certainly a teacher can still be very kind, friendly, patient and helpful while implementing this sort of “struggle and cope” approach, and it helps even more if you can make good use of ongoing formative assessment based around effort, willingness to take risks and participation (rather than purely summative assessment based on specific language item mastery).
What’s interesting to me is that these notions of “nerve-racking” or “terrifying” at the start, but motivating and confidence building by the end, are exactly what it can be like to get out there and use (and continue developing) a foreign language in the real world. I like the fact that I am preparing my learners to cope with this in advance. It certainly gets easier for them to handle with actual experience, and can become even more manageable with the guidance and empathy of a capable teacher who can help the learners interpret and move on from the difficult experiences in positive ways, rather than sugar-coating the whole approach from the outset.
Learning and using a foreign language is difficult and hard work. It requires a thick skin, a willingness to take risks, a capacity to laugh at and yet learn from failure, and (above all) become independent and resourceful. By helping your learners get over that reality sooner rather than later, you’re most probably doing them a better service in the long term.
P.S. This is a post from a couple of years ago that I forgot to publish and lost somewhere. I stumbled upon it recently, realised it still makes very clear sense to me (even now, in a non foreign language teaching setting), and thought it might be better late than never as an offering to toss on the raven barbecue...