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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 translates from forty-five languages and has an active
command of a large number of them, prefers 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 recognise
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.