Is there such a thing.....

...as a linguistic hierarchy of needs?
This is following on from the last two posts, and I'm just trying to formulate ideas behind motivation, or perhaps more accurately, demotivation in language learners. This also, I think, segues rather neatly into a piece of research I did last year, namely a brutal piece of statistical number crunching I did with ESOL students' results that showed how people moving from intermediate to upper intermediate experience a far greater drop-out rate than should be expected. It also churned up the shocking stat that nearly two-thirds of ESOL students fail the Adult Literacy exam at Level One in their first attempt, a real indictment of its efficacy and usefulness. If you want to read it, it's over here on Scrib'd.
OK, my thinking goes like this. Just as Maslow has the different needs, so do language learners. So far, so no brainer. Well, what about 'peak experience'? What do students consider to be their aim? If you look at the questions I asked my two groups last week, you'll see that this was something I was trying to tease out of them, albeit not to any great extent. What is also signifcant is the fact that the learners felt inhibited about talking in a 'deep'/'satisfying' way about subjects that they felt deeply about, and about which they could communicate highly effectively in their own languages. In other words, they perceived a disparity between what they wanted to express and what they felt they could communicate. OK, well, duh, obviously.
But is this perceived disparity a genuine, objectively measurable one, or is it in fact a highly subjective thing? When we talk about things that genuinely interest us, what we should notice is that the language is arguably highly descriptive, but not necessarily grammatically difficult.
Let's go back to Maslow. Now, here is what I propose to do: I'm going to match the type of functional language and grammar forms we might expect to teach our students onto the hierarchy of needs, then compare it to what we actually teach people at elementary level etc. What I suspect this to show is that, for a student who lives in an English-speaking country, they actually need to be far more proficient in certain grammar forms in order to express their most basic needs, than they would do to express 'peak experience' ideas. In other words, in order just to fulfill their simplest physiological and psychological needs, an adult requires language skills far above what they actually would need to express themselves fully in a 'deep' conversation.
This disjuncture, I would argue, leads to a profound sense of demotivation. Indeed, I would say that it is a leading reason for a typical ESOL/ESL student becoming essentially 'diminished' in a way that an EFL student (who is studying the language as a subject, rather than as a medium through which things are learned) does not experience.
This may suggest that they way in which English is taught may need a rethink, certainly for ESOL students. While the Skills for Life materials do, in some respects, attempt to do this, they are rather feeble.
This also suggests that we may be able to talk about a 'hierarchy of language needs' - that is, optimal levels at which a student requires particular things and ways to express him/herself. This, though, would look very different from the mapping of language skills mapped over the Maslow hierarchy, as to some extents it would be informed by the student's own perception of need. What I would would then like to do is map it against statistics for achievement and levels of achievement against exam results and learner progression, in order to see if the hypothesis matches real-world results.
Could be interesting.

More on depression and speaking

Yesterday's post, and the ideas behind it, has prompted quite a bit of interest among my colleagues and over on one of the discussion boards I frequent, and got me thinking further too. This morning, I did a bit of thoroughly unscientific research with my L1 (that's an intermediate-upper-intermediate level) and E3 (pre-int - int level) classes. I asked them, first 'does speaking in English ever make you feel depressed?'
The answer was almost unanimously 'yes', except for one student who just giggled. Mind you, she does tend to giggle at pictures of kittens, handbags, passing clouds and occasionally while staring blankly into space, so...
I then asked 'why?'
You can probably guess the types of answer - embarrassment, fear of mistakes, frustration, etc.
I then asked, 'are there any situations which make you feel particularly embarrassed?'
Here the answers were varied. For a significant portion, it was talking on the phone: others mentioned more formal social situations such as going to the bank or talking with their children's teachers. A few of the more confident students said that they couldn't answer colleagues back in more formal meetings.
I then asked 'What situations/things would you like to talk about, but feel you can't?'
Here the answers were varied, ranging from talking to the council about housing benfits, to discussing schoolwork with a teacher, up to talking about politics, environmental issues, dance and music.
Lastly, I asked 'do you sometimes feel as though you are disabled?'
A unanimous 'yes'.
and 1 giggle.
The finding that most interested me was the one about which things people would like to be able to talk about. It shows, I think, that the level at which students would consider a conversation 'deep' and 'satisfying' vary enormously. It's no wonder that language learners do get so demotivated.
It's also set me off on what may turn out to be a rather exciting tangent of thought, but I'm going to have to put in a bit of research first. More later.

Speaking foreign makes you depressed, innit?

I know, I know, far too long, far too busy, but it's time to kick this old corpse out of its coffin and bring it lumbering back to life...

Is it possible that speaking in a foreign language can actually make you depressed?
It might seem a somewhat bizarre notion: After all, learning languages is supposed to be an incredibly liberating thing, allowing you to communicate with new people and new cultures, to open your eyes to another way of seeing the world.

That's what language teachers say, anyway - after all, they have only their jobs to lose.

But consider this report on a piece of research. The basic findings are that people who spend more time engaged in chat and gossip are significantly more likely to be depressed than people who engage in 'meaningful' discussions.

Now consider what we do with our students in class and what kind of topics are used - do these count as 'meaningful'? It strikes me that it is possible that the type of topics, along with the limitations of a student's level of language and their ability to express their ideas, may collude to be massively demotivating. We already know that students get frustrated at not being able to say certain things, but if we are also making them depressed by getting them to talk about, let's say, collections and hobbies to express the notion of habitual behaviour, then we are ladling on the problems. When we also consider that many students tend to drop out of English study round about Intemediate level - when their level of language is just emerging into an increasingly more sophisticated level of complexity, but the topic matters used are frequently banal - then we may have one of the (many)reasons why the dropout rate is so high.

Of course, it's all about keeping the students interested, curious and open-minded, but let's face it, unit 5, exercise 3 (listen to Brian talk about his dead pet hamster) probably isn't going to cut it. This is where getting to know our students as individuals, their hobbies, interests, likes and dislikes, is so important. It's also important to consider the fact that one person's notion of 'meaningful discussion' may not be the same level as another's. Matey in the corner might only satisfied with a weighty talk on Wittgenstein, while someone else will be thoroughly satisfied discussing puppies and shopping. It's all about the differentiation in class.
However, I suspect it may be difficult to find a text about Wittgenstein shopping for puppies.