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Editorial 3
The Rational Learning of Foreign
Languages
In two
previous editorial articles I have criticized the powerful vested interests of
the global English-teaching industry (The Fraud of the Global English-Teaching Industry)
and the false assumption that the various organizations and institutions
associated with that industry ensure high standards of teaching (The Illusion of Global
English-Teaching Standards). In this editorial I want to
question in more detail some of the accepted beliefs about methods of teaching
English (and other foreign languages).
1 Research
into foreign-language learning must always be defective
Research
into how people learn foreign languages and into what methods are most
successful is beset with basic difficulties which prevent it ever being truly
valid.
(1)
It is impossible
to measure the degree of a student’s motivation. Yet this will certainly be one
of the most important factors that decide how successful students are in their
language studies – in many cases probably the most important of all. Students
passionately devoted to the study of a foreign language may often succeed even
if their learning methods are utterly misguided. Others whose method appears
sound may fail, not because there is anything wrong with the method, but
because they are basically uninterested. Any pronouncement, then, about the
merits or otherwise of a particular method, however careful and scientific the
collection of the data on which it is based, is inevitably suspect. Another
group of students using the same method in different conditions and in a
different place may show quite different results.
Nor can one
trust what students themselves say about their motivation. There may be reasons
for them to exaggerate it, and even if they don’t, different individuals may
have quite different ideas of what constitutes high motivation.
(2)
Even if we
assume that everyone in a group of people studying a language is equally motivated,
what we cannot know is how each student uses that motivation. How much does the
student rely on the teacher? What does the student expect from the teacher? How
much does the student rely on the method rather than on herself? To what extent
do the students realize how crucial it is to do all the work themselves, and
even if they do realize this, how much are they able to put the principle into
practice? Even if they say they understand that translating the foreign
language into their own language in their heads is fatal for good
language-learning, how much do they really believe that? And even if they
genuinely believe it, are they in practice able to avoid such translation? Are
they translating without being aware of it? Until our understanding of the
brain and our ability to measure its activity are greatly increased, all such
things will be quite impossible to measure scientifically.
(3)
There is no
objective way of measuring a person’s linguistic competence. It is obvious when
somebody is very good at a foreign language. It is equally obvious when
somebody is totally incompetent. But it is not easy to judge the level of the
millions of people who lie between these two extremes. Different sorts of test
produce different results for the same people. Multiple choice questions, for
example, produce different results from other types of test, even if
conscientious efforts are made to cover the same ground. And what is most
important for what might be termed ‘mastery’ of a language? Is a person who can
converse fluently in colloquial language, but understands very little of a
novel, more or less competent than a person whose skills are the reverse? How
should we judge a student who can write almost flawless sophisticated prose but
talks with an accent so atrocious as to be practically incomprehensible? Or a
person who has written an excellent translation of Henry James, but is
incapable of carrying on even a simple everyday conversation in English.
(4)
Finally, even if
investigators felt sure that they had established the mental processes of
foreign-language learning, what would those tell us? It is surely clear that in
many areas of life the ways people think are very bad ways. There is no reason
to suppose it is any different where learning foreign languages is concerned.
As I pointed out in a previous editorial, what students actually do and what
they ought to do are in many cases quite different things. The last thing we
should do is slavishly adapt learning techniques to bad psychological habits.
In view of all
these flaws in trying to base language-teaching methods on research, it is not
surprising that these are so much dominated by fashions. Not so long ago a
Japanese friend explained to me how puzzled she was by the English course she
had recently attended. Their teacher, she said, was an actual English professor,
no less. But she could not understand why almost the whole time he made them
talk to each other, or gave them tasks to perform with certain
words, or got them to play games of various kinds. Why could he not demonstrate
some English to them? She was even more perplexed when I told her that her
professor was following the current high orthodoxy, the promotion of what is
termed ‘communicative competence’. Erik Gunnemark, who translated from
forty-five languages and had an active command of a large number of them,
preferred to call it “the dogma of salvation-and-bliss through chatter.”
The only
sensible and the only practical thing to do is to try to learn languages in a
way that is rational; in a way that accords with the nature of
language and how it works.
2 What can teachers do? Explain grammar? Explain words?
Let us consider realistically what a teacher can do,
as a teacher of a class. She, or he, can explain rules of grammar. But she is
unlikely to do this better than a reasonably well-thought-out grammar book. note 1
The author is likely to have
worked out the explanations just as carefully as most teachers, if not more so.
It is much better for the student to study the grammar by herself at home,
where she can go at her own individual pace and think about problems at
leisure. It is a terrible waste of time for the teacher to do this work in
class, and any notes students make will probably mostly be inadequate at best.
The only grammar that it is really worth a teacher talking about to a whole
class is either points the teacher thinks are neglected or badly explained in
the books the students are using, or questions on grammar raised by individual
students.
An even greater waste of time, an even more
misguided activity, is for the teacher to give the students detailed
explanations of the meanings of words. (See Learning Vocabulary.) Once a teacher starts explaining
vocabulary, he may find he is spending hours on just very few words. Even if he
does not do actual harm by encouraging a faulty approach to vocabulary, he will
achieve nothing of value; there are far better ways in which he can spend his
own and his students’ time. (There is just one sort of word of which this is
not true. There are some words that are often confused with other, often
similar words. If the distinctions in meaning are clear cut, it is useful for
students to have them pointed out to them. Examples of such pairs in English
are the adjectives economic and economical, and the verbs come
and go, or bring and take.
It seems that
teachers, and the pundits at applied linguistics departments at universities,
came to realize more and more that simply talking about grammar and words is not
a good way of spending a lesson. So instead they have tried to ‘involve’ their
students more.
The result has
been that a lot of teachers now go in a great deal for activities they call
group work, pair work, or role play. Students are given various tasks that they
have to carry out on their own, or they enact little scenes, such as buying
railway tickets or asking for directions, or even have short debates among
themselves. In other words, the teachers try to train their students in the
‘communicative competence’ I have mentioned above.
One wonders
whether one of the main reasons so many teachers are keen on such methods is
that they are rather desperately trying to solve practical problems in the
classroom. There are several such practical problems. There is the problem of
discipline (especially where classes of children are concerned); the problem of
finding something everybody in the class can be active in, because the teacher
cannot give individual attention to each student; the problem of boredom, keeping
learners amused.
It is difficult
to believe that things like group and pair work and role play are really
recommended because teachers truly think and have actually found that they are
better and more effective ways of teaching languages. Reason, too, suggests
that they are not sound methods.
First, language-learning is a task that has to be
carried out by individuals on their own. It is a process of ‘noticing’ that has
to be done singly. The more the process is shared and so spread out among
others, the less effective it will be.
Even more important, it is too often forgotten that by
simply using the language one can learn nothing.
One cannot speak until one has some language to speak with, and one can only
learn that language by observing – listening and reading, and
noting what one hears and reads. There is no other way. So it is obviously very
important that students should hear correct language. Yet in classes where they
do most of the talking themselves they will hear each other’s often incorrect
speech far more than they hear the teacher’s. Students clearly cannot learn
from language that is wrong. But they are also not learning anything new by
saying things that are correct, since the fact that it is correct shows that
they have already learned it (by observation).
Nor can students learn from the things their
companions say that are correct, because they cannot be sure whether those
things are in fact correct or not. Over the years I have known several students
of English as a foreign language who did an exceptionally large amount of
talking in English, especially with their fellow students of different
nationalities. They were usually warm personalities and delightful companions.
But in several cases their English was less accurate at the end of their
language course than it was at the beginning; and their vocabulary was no
larger because they had been so busy talking that they had not had time to listen
and read. What was even sadder was that sometimes their companions’ language
became less correct too. They plainly could not believe that people who talked
and ‘practised’ their English so much were not excellent models to imitate.
Any general conversation in class (whether or not the
teacher takes part in it) is going to be artificial until everybody present
becomes thoroughly personally interested in it. At that point all or nearly all
present will stop observing the language that is being used – their own as well
as the teacher’s.
The other great disadvantage of ‘talking’ activities
in class is that it reduces even further the extent to which the teacher can
control and observe her students’ learning, and reduces the amount of work that
can be done in a given time.
It is another matter that trying to talk may well –
and should – draw one’s attention to things one does not know how to express,
and so strongly encourage one to find out. But that sort of cause and effect
cannot operate in the classroom. It needs unhurried thought by each student on
his own.
If it is objected that
practising talking in the classroom is the only way students can become confident
in using the language, one must argue that it is simply not true. The safe
artificial world of the classroom cannot prepare people for the real world
outside. There, confidence depends largely on the individual personality.
For people who by nature
don’t have the right sort of temperament, the necessary boldness and lack of
shyness, the only thing that will give them true confidence is the confidence
that they have mastered enough of the language. They should then try to talk as
much as possible in the foreign language outside the classroom to native
speakers. This will confirm their confidence and get them into what is
obviously a good habit. But they must always recognize that the talking they do
themselves is only practice, not learning.
6 Lessons should
do what students cannot do by themselves
The first principle for anybody who teaches a language
in classes should be to do in class only things that cannot be done as
effectively somewhere else. In recent decades many different devices and
techniques have been thought up for the teaching of languages. There is no
evidence that they have led to any improvement. If languages are going to
continue being taught in classes, the old-fashioned method of the teacher
talking to the students (‘chalk and talk’) is still the best. But there should
be nothing old-fashioned about the manner in which the teacher talks. The talk
has to be completely informal and flexible.
One of the worst mistakes made in language-teaching
circles in recent years is the demand for the so-called ‘structured lesson’.
The teacher is supposed to plan in advance exactly what she is going to teach,
and keep to a timetable during the lesson in order to be sure she covers what
she thinks she needs to cover. It is hard to think of a more misguided
approach. It cuts the teacher off from her students and the lesson becomes
something fossilized. Above all, it completely ignores the particular needs of
the particular individuals in a particular class on a particular day.
7 Teachers should answer
and ask questions; and ‘know their stuff’
Apart from what is the
foremost task of a language teacher – showing students how to learn a foreign
language – the only really useful thing a teacher can do in a class is to
answer questions, and also to ask them. If the students do not know what
questions to ask and how to ask them, it is the task of the teacher to show
them. This way of teaching means that the teacher does not have to do any day
to day preparation. It makes all lessons completely flexible. They can always
be adapted to the students’ needs of the moment, but that does not prevent the
teacher taking up and emphasizing themes she thinks are
being neglected.
But if this method of giving lessons takes away
much of the daily drudgery of a conscientious teacher’s life, it also means
that the teacher has to ‘know her stuff’. If the language she is teaching is
not her own, she must obviously know it really well. That, though, is only the
beginning. Her own or not, she must have a confident practical knowledge of how
the language she is teaching works. By this I mean a conscious knowledge that
the teacher can explain in a way that most native speakers cannot. Students
sense a good teacher’s enthusiasm and genuine interest in the language, and
that she has thought about it and found out about it for herself, not just
learned by rote from text books.
Unfortunately even a cursory reading of the
messages posted on internet mailing lists used by working teachers of English
reveal an alarming state of affairs. First, they provide constant evidence that
large numbers of even native English-speaking teachers are uncertain about many
of the most basic principles of English grammar. This I believe is the
inevitable result of an emphasis in their training on pedagogy rather than the
workings of the language itself. Secondly, non-native teachers reveal all too
often that their English is just not good enough for them to practise their
profession effectively. There should of course never be any form of
discrimination against non-native would-be teachers of English. But before they
start teaching they should surely achieve a minimum standard both in the
language itself and in knowledge of how it works. Do we have here another
example of how the required qualifications demand pedagogical more than
linguistic knowledge?
In my own lessons at least half my ‘talk’ has
usually consisted of questions. Most students find this stimulating. I have
never singled out individuals in turn but instead always questioned the whole
class and waited for spontaneous replies from anybody who wanted to give one.
In that way a teacher can involve everybody the whole time without embarrassing
those who do not want to answer. A teacher has no right to impose interrogation
in front of others on people to who it may be unwelcome. Moreover, competition
between students has no proper place in language learning, or any
other sort of learning for that matter. note 2
Note 1
Unfortunately, though, the most prestigious authority where English is
concerned is Quirk et al.’s semi-incomprehensible A comprehensive
grammar of the English language (1985, Longman), with its disastrous
treatment of the articles, pathetic effort on –ing (the English form par
excellence), and nonsense about some and any, just to take
three examples. See Some
and Any at this site
for a detailed commentary on Quirk’s treatment of this subject, The
-ing Form for some aspects of that form, and Gethin, A., Antilinguistics
(1990, Intellect) for an examination of Quirk’s account of the articles.
Note 2
Not only competition between students, whether as
individuals or as teams, but also any sort of system of immediate ‘rewards’ for
correct answers or successful accomplishment of tasks, whatever precise form it
takes, is manipulative and morally repugnant. And the morally repugnant aspect
of systematized immediate praise, or emphasis on success, or of any method of
exercising some sort of oblique control over somebody else’s learning activity
is inseparable from the practical defects of such techniques.
These objections also apply in any computer-assisted
program.
The Editor welcomes contributions to
debate on the subject of this editorial.
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