Set affective filters to high!

Ahem.
Hello again.
Yes, I know it's been a while, but hey, here I am.
You may (or may not) be wondering about the hiatus in writing, and all I can say is that I just haven't felt a truly compelling urge recently. That, and an awful lot of soul searching, accompanied by many Strange And Awful Things Happening.
To put it all in TEFL terms, my affective filter has been ramped up to 11 and my intrinsic motivation has flatlined, and I can't see anything particularly worthwhile about the extrinsic motivations.
More on the reasons for my own passing state of low dudgeon in a moment.

We've all seen students do this in class, even the brightest and best: A lethargy besets them and learning slows down to a glacial pace. At best, they gradually climb out of it; At worst, they just give up on learning entirely, and their English becomes stuck in the grey hinterland of sub-B1 functionality.
What can we do to help students whose performance and attitude dip? It's not an easy task, simply because there are so many factors that have to be taken into account. It might be work or study load; it may be worries about family; It could be a case of self-consciousness and fear of being seen to fail before peers.
Or it could be even simpler. It may be that your lessons are, bluntly, tedious spoonfuls of mental pabulum.
I've mentioned on this blog before that I suspect an awful lot of teaching methodologies are there to keep the teacher entertained rather than educate the learner (Suggestopedia, anyone?), but they can be used to shake up what you do in class. If you've taught the same thing the same way more than twice, give a thought to doing it differently. Not only will you be doing your class a favour, you'll most certainly be doing one for yourself. It's important, as educators, to be on the edge of uncertainty, to ponder the how and why of teaching something new or unfamiliar, or something familiar in a novel way. After all, when we started off, we were teaching something for the very first time and working out the how and the why as we planned. I remember it took me about eight attempts to get the teaching of subject and object relative clauses off pat. I'm still pondering how best to get students to make the link between auxiliaries, verb forms and aspect.
So before you start blaming high affective filters and extrinsic factors for the fact that your intermediate class are staring blank eyed at you, start with wondering what it is you can do in class that may make a change.
As for me and my weltschmerz, well, it finally appears that I have come to the end of the road in this career. That, however, deserves an entry of its own.

'Fail again. Fail better.'

How often have you heard a student say 'I don't get it!', or 'I will never understand this language'? How often have you seen them do that puffy thing with the cheeks and shrug* their shoulders before going slumping in their seats?
There's always a point where it feels easier to give up rather than plod on, as in life as it is in English language learning. How many times have you felt as if you have reached the end of the line with something?
As you may have noticed, I'm on a bit of a Student Motivation streak in my writing at present, as it's been nagging at me as to why some learners persist and why others, well, don't. In part, it is derived from the fact that I'm trying to write consistently for a hundred days, and so I'm aware of the apices and nadirs within my own motivation from day to day - and hour to hour, in fact. And because I'm aware of it in myself, I observe it in others. Currently, I have a new student, who joined the class late and has quite a complex background. This person has had some severe difficulties in life, and has only just got back into some kind of routine, but has been out of mainstream education for a very long time (they are in their forties). Doing an exercise today, I noticed that while other students were getting on with the task, this person (let's call them 'A.X.') was sitting still. A.X. then shook their head, threw the pencil down, and said 'no understand'.
I intervened at this point, as A.X. really needed guidance. After a few minutes' work, A.X. got it, and carried on with the exercises with a considerable look of relief on their face.
A.X. is an example from the more extreme end of the 'I don't get it' spectrum, and one that will take a lot of coaching and coaxing over the months to come. If we're in a class with 30 students, however, how on earth can we give just that kind of support to each and every learner?
I think a  lot of what helps or hinders the English learner is not only their expectation of the experience of learning the language, but also how they react to problems in general. Put simply, the more 'rigidly' they view a problem, the more likely it is that they will fail to crack it. To give a simple example, some learners spend years trying to get their heads round the present perfect while others just dive in merrily, splashing examples of the tense all over the language pool, if you don't mind me extending my metaphor. Another issue is, of course, speaking: some students are so concerned with speaking without mistakes that they never open their mouths at all.

It seems to me that the learners most likely to get a block with language are those who, as it were, seek perfectibility - that is, they want the language to pop out fully-formed, rather than something that needs to be whelped into shape. At this point, we should actually look at what really confident language learners do. It is generally noticeable that these kind of students are more likely to be not afraid of making mistakes; that they do more reading; and that they are more likely to talk with people outside the classroom, to have better jobs, and to generally seem better-adjusted to living in a native speaker environment. In short, learners who are more resilient to problems and and for whom failure is just a step towards success are more likely to be better language learners and become more fluent.

It does give rise to an alternative idea, however: Should that statement be the other way around? Are better users of a language more likely to be more resilient in the face of problems?

In a way, this would make sense - the greater your fluency, the greater your capacity to verbalise an issue and find a way to deal with it. But of course, when it comes to adult language learning, it is probably a case of six of one, half a dozen of the other.

What I think is most effective, at least in the classroom, is to emphasise the fact that mistakes will be made - and in fact, that making mistakes is the  best way to experiment with and perfect the target language. As I say to my learners, 'You're here because you don't speak perfect English. If you did, you wouldn't be here, and I would be out of a job'.

Students should be aware that they are allowed to fail, and fail again, and 'fail' once more if necessary, because it isn't failing. It's learning.

*There's a whole book waiting to be written about the meaning of shoulder shrugs and to what extent different people indulge in them, from the cool Parisian mere wisp of a rise of one shoulder to the full on comical both-shoulders-hands-raised-lower-lip-pout found in Central Anatolia.

It's Monday! Flee for your lives!

Actually, Monday's nearly over, so never mind.....

The last post was all about capturing that Friday feeling, but a long-term reader of this blog* suggested that it might be an idea to have a companion piece that would, as it were, book-end the week.
So here it is.

I got thinking about why we get the Monday Dreads: what is it exactly that makes people look askance at the beginning of the working week? I think we'd largely agree that it is the prospect of returning to work that does it: the prospect of the next five days appears to be an interminable grey trudge, with the bright lights of Next Weekend blinking cheerily away in the distance. So, it is all associated with the return to a routine, a set programme of events that offers little in the way of stimulation or reward - or at least, instantaneous reward and stimulation.

However, without a degree of order, routine and control in our lives, we get nothing at all done, and this ultimately is even more dissatisfying. In order to enjoy the Fridays, we've got to endure the Mondays. What we need for a balanced system is both order and disruption.

Just going back a few centuries to demonstrate what a smartarse I am, I'll point out that the medieval Feast of Fools, or even the Roman Calends of January were one of the ways of doing just this: the miserable trudge of existence was leavened by having days of festival, where the traditional social order was inverted and conventions mocked. Zooming up to the early Industrial Revolution, many workers, having come straight from the farms and fields to the city, would attempt to uphold the tradition of Saint Monday, which was basically an excuse for another day off and added booze.

So why am I speaking about this subject here? Well, simply because I think we can apply this same thinking to language learning. As Jeremy Harmer, I believe, pointed out not too long ago, most language learning is just bloody hard slog. You have to learn your irregular verbs, practise your third-person -s in the present simple, get your head around phrasal verbs and so on. There is no magical panacea that will turn you into a fluent speaker of any language overnight. You've got to stick at it, and that can be a long trudge.

No wonder language learners can get a case of the Monday Dreads. And no wonder that language learning can be so demotivating, especially when you have someone who seems to get stuck at lower-intermediate level, or, to use my working week analogy, at about 12:46 on Wednesday afternoon.

I suggest that we need little 'disruptions' to break up the monotony.

It's well known that novelty is great for learning. What people tend to forget is that novelty rapidly becomes humdrum. You might remember the first time your teacher said, 'let's have the lesson outside today!', but not the second time; If you've ever seen a Prezi presentation, you'll know that the first time you see it, it's really a 'wow!' moment. By the third time you've seen one, however, it's more of a 'meh' moment, if not one of downright hostility. This effect is known as hedonic adaptation, or the hedonic treadmill, which is just as the name suggests: we are remarkably good at turning the special or the unique into the mundane and tedious. In language learning, this is not necessarily a bad thing: if a learner is producing the routine features of language accurately without thinking about it, then they have converted something that was once novel into something everyday. However, novelty tends to work only a few times at best, and any efficacy it has is relatively limited.

So what about these 'disruptions'? What I'd have in mind is something that either a) disrupts the routine of the class or b) disrupts the way the learner looks at what he or she is learning. In other words, it's a way to get the class looking at the situation from a different perspective, then bring them back into the routine and see what difference it makes, if any. It can also be a way of developing good language routines.

Here's an (old and easy) example: if you're teaching past continuous, get a colleague to interrupt the lesson fairly early on. After about 15 minutes, ask the students 'OK, what was xxx wearing? What was he doing?' etc.
Another one: give students a card at the beginning of the lesson. The card has an instruction on it that they must not show to anyone else - for example, 'You must use the word 'well' at the beginning of everything you say'.
It might be to get the learner to do their classwork or  homework in an unexpected way, or pushes their linguistic comfort zone.
And yes, I know that some of you out there might be tutting and saying 'but that's what I do anyway - it's called teaching!', but then again, the point of disrupting is that it highlights what we might consider the mundane and force us to reappraise it, which is what I hope I've managed to do here. One of the problems that long-term TEFLers get, just like any worker, is that we perhaps don't disrupt our own work patterns enough.
So, just for a change, do something disruptive in class next lesson and see what happens.

That Friday Feeling

Yay! Friday! What's not to like about it?
Well, everything actually, if you're a TEFLer in a private language school where the concept of a weekend has yet to reach.

Erm.....

I remember feeling apprehensive about the prospect of working weekends during my first ELT gig back in 1993. The prospect of delivering seven hours' worth of lessons on a Saturday and a Sunday didn't exactly fill me with joy. As it turned out, things weren't that bad, except for the Sunday afternoon class at 3:30. I still occasionally wake up in a cold sweat about that one. Wednesdays became my de facto weekend, which was fine, apart from the fact that 1990s Turkey was full of party-loving TEFLers, meaning that a) Tuesday evenings were ESPECIALLY wild and b) Wednesdays tended to be a bit of a blur, at best. Once My Friday Feeling Mojo had been reset to Tuesday evenings, it was all pretty easy.
And the one thing that I never, ever experienced was the Monday Morning Dread. I never had that ghastly sensation of grey horror that is experienced as you know that you have to drag yourself into the office for another deadening round of the working week. I may not have always enjoyed being in the classroom, but by and large I've never had that 'oh God....' sensation. And any job that doesn't have you wishing the week away has got to be good.

Me, when I worked in a call centre.

Anyway, segueing nonchalantly into the real subject of this post, is there a way we can engender that Friday Feeling in to our learners, especially those who walk into class looking as if a monthful of Mondays just just landed on their head? Keeping up learner motivation can be difficult, and it the degree of enthusiasm someone has for learning English can wax and wane for a variety of factors, even within the course of a single lesson. In a way, we don't need to worry about those students who act as if it's permanently the cusp of the weekend, people with so much motivation that it can be exhausting just looking at them. They will, regardless of almost anything, learn, and more importantly, learn well. We also can't do a lot with the kind of student who looks as if they carry a grudge against English into the classroom - if they've decided to be against learning (which is a bit like being opposed to food), then there is really very little a teacher can do without really deep intervention.
But what about those in between? How do we influence their moods and motivation? Many educators would say 'get them copying the behaviour of the really motivated ones.' Well, yes, but that is very easy to say, but not necessarily to do. Every single student is exactly that, an individual, and what may work for one person may not work for another. We may not know all the circumstances outside the classroom that each learner lives in, and whatever happens out in the 'real' world will influence what happens within the class.
It's one of our responsibilities as teachers to be aware of possible external influences and either encourage or mitigate their effects, depending on how they affect the learners' motivation. In this respect, I think we have to lead by example: there are many times that I have had a godawful day, or week, or whatever, yet I pride myself on leaving that baggage outside the classroom and go in there as Mr Positive Vibes.
In other words, we model an example of professional behaviour that we expect the learners to emulate. This doesn't mean being manically jolly - that would soon get wearing, to put it mildly - but rather being enthusiastic, positive and realistic about the work being done in class. I believe that a lot of a learner's motivation does stem directly from the teacher's own passion for the subject.
Of course, there are other extrinsic and intrinsic factors in motivation, but I'll leave that for a different post.
Have a happy weekend - even if you are teaching the 3:30 Sunday slot.....

Keep Calm and Shout Slowly

...aka the English Approach to Talking to Foreigners.
I've been delivering workshops on working with Non-Native English Speakers recently, and of course I've highlighted the above typical behaviour as something we shouldn't do. Someone asked why we shouldn't - he thought speaking loudly and slowly was the best way of getting a message across clearly. But as anyone who has ever experienced this phenomenon in English (or in my case, Turkish) knows, this isn't the case - and it's not necessarily a problem for the language learner, but for the attitude of then speaker.
Here's why - or at least, my take on it.
Let's start with the person speaking loudly and slowly. What do we generally associate a raised voice with? I'd suggest anger, frustration, warning and reproach, or getting someone to do our bidding. Who do we raise our voices at? Well, it may be someone who has angered us. I think the act of raising volume is a deeply engrained evolutionary trait, one that originally served as a way of drawing attention, warning manger, etc.
But who else do we speak loudly and slowly to? Children, the elderly and the infirm - and also foreigners. It's remarkable, actually, that there is a built in tendency to use the same tone of voice to all the aforementioned. It's as if we associate all the above with some kind of infirmity or weakness. In the case of a language learner, it's a linguistic weakness.
Now here's my suggestion: because people tend to talk loudly and slowly to foreigners, and because talking loudly has a deep association with showing strength, being angry, giving warnings etc, there is a tendency in the speaker to assume the listener is in some way inferior. Think about the number of times you've heard the phrase 'stupid bloody foreigner' or similar. I'd suggest that this attitude arises from a simple feedback loop: because the speaker has raised bis or her voice, the or she assumes on some basic mental level that they are angry or irritated , and this colours the speaker's attitude towards the listener.
So, my advice?
DON'T. SPEAK.LOUDLY.  AND.  .SLOOWWLY.
:)

Back to work - in more ways than one

Back once more!
I am making it my mission to engage in a lot more writing between now and December, in any way, shape or form, and this blog has been in hiatus for far too long, thanks to various factors.
Well, I hope all you out there had a restful Summer break. I don't know about you, but I find it difficult to get back into the rhythm of things once the holidays are over. I have this feeling of reluctance, and I really don't want to be back into the same old routines. It's also the fact that I find the first few weeks probably the most stressful: Testing and enrolment, planning, class allocation, dusting down and recycling Schemes of Work etc are hardly the most exciting things in life to do. I'd be happier just getting into class, but my workplace requires me (and my colleagues) to get our hands dirty and get down to all the onerous, tedious pre-teaching tasks - and all the paperwork, blah blah etc.
I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling less than enthralled at the prospect of doing all this.
So, the question is, is there any way possible of getting all the necessaries done without being bored to death?
Answer: probably not. The only solution is to trudge on and get it out of the way so that we can get at the fun bits, namely strutting my funky stuff in the classroom.
In other words, and you're probably way ahead of me here, I'm suffering from a raised affective filter, meaning I have low motivation, thereby leading me to be reluctant to engage in any activity whatsoever.
It shouldn't, of course, be a surprise that we teachers also have to contend with our affective filters but I suspect that we sometimes forget about it, especially when we trudge back into work at the end of August or the beginning of September. But we could, potentially, use this New Term Drag Syndrome (I just invented that phrase. Bit awful) to give us an insight, or a reminder, what learning English can be like for our learners, and, in turn, help ourselves get back into Full Metal TEFL Mode a bit faster.
When we're faced with a dreary task or set of chores so multitudinous that we would rather gnaw our arms off than begin to attempt, it's probably better to start off by looking at the end target rather than what's right in front of our eyes. So, for me, the current end target is having four or so brand shiny new classes, full of bright-eyed, eager-faced and possibly bushy-tailed students ready to learn. For our reluctant learner, on the other hand, it should be some concrete kind of attainment. I don't think it's enough to say 'today, you will learn how to use the first conditional' or whatever. Instead, using the first conditional (or whatever) is a step towards achieving something tangible. This is where it's vital for us to get to know our learners and their needs, and to develop work that will help them reach those needs. Of course, a lot of students will say they are learning English 'to get a job', or 'because English is important', or something along those lines. Unfortunately, these are too vague, and students with vague approaches to language learning are the ones most likely to have poor motivation, to do badly, and to drop out. In my experience, the more concrete a goal a student has for learning English, the more likely they are to achieve it, and to use the language far more fluently
As an example, I came across one of my old students in a restaurant the other day. When I was teaching him, he'd been pootling along with his lessons, more or less going round in circles, and he talked only in the vaguest terms of his future. After one more protracted tutorial, I discovered that he really wanted to study Art, but that he felt he'd never reach a sufficient standard of English to do it. I wrote up a Learning Plan for him, which involved him getting his portfolio of work from Sicily. I nagged him every day for about two weeks until he gave in.
He was immediately accepted onto a Foundation Art course once he produced his work. About a year later, he'd started pootling again, and so I and a colleague once more intervened, and he was taken on to a prestigious course. So, I came across him in a restaurant where he was working. My first thoought was that he'd dropped out.
'No,' he laughed. 'I've just finished the course - this is just a summer job, you know?'
'So how was it?' I asked.
'I'm expecting to get a First,' he told me, proudly. 'Thanks to you.'
It always gives me a thrill to hear good news stories from past students, but we should be aware that they don't always know where they're heading, even the older learners - and sometimes, we don't know where we're heading, either, especially as we walk back through the school gates.
Our motivation has a direct effect on the learners and how successful they'll be. Next time you're eyeing up that unenviable task, take a breath, think of the outcome, and push on through to the other side.

That's handy!

Blimey, is it almost September already?
Well, I've had a pretty good summer - largely involving travel, mountains, beaches, rain, lots of food and wine. And not a jot of study, work, students or anything resembling work.
No wonder I feel jaded after just four days back in the office. However, I can take advantage of the current lacuna before the students return to bring this blog back to life, and on to a subject I promised to bring up ages ago.
I am fascinated by the question of why some students seem to be so good at learning languages while others would lose a fight with an auxiliary verb. As a subject, it is one I keep returning to - what is the difference between the 'good' language learner and the 'bad' one? What do the 'good' ones do that the 'bad' ones don't? How can I make the 'bad' ones 'good'? Why is it that students get to an intermediate level of English, then the numbers who continue with their studies tail off?
Now, I have discussed some of this in previous posts - intermediate students hitting a wall, trying to motivate people through the tedious slog of learning, affective filters, the 'fuzzy' handling of language, discussion of whether there is such a thing as active and passive grammar and so on. All of these are part of this one question, of why some people learn languages so easily and others don't. The key, I suspect, may lie in my observation that language learners can function with limited language, but they do so in reduced, clumsy ways - what I term 'fuzzy handling'. For example, a learner will be able to express a request in the target language, but do so in a limited way, e.g. 'I want go to College. Are you know where is it please?', which works, but in a limited fashion - a native speaker would understand it, but wouldn't regard it as 'correct'.
OK, so far, so obvious. I've pointed out before that my intermediate students often continue to use language in this fuzzy way, and that a lot of language learning (and, of course, teaching) is about bringing the language into focus, to help the student use the target language in a precise, 'focused' form - in our example above, we'd be aiming to get the student saying 'Excuse me, I'd like to go to the college, but I don't know where it is. Could you tell me how to get there, please?', or something similar.
As so often happens, a possible answer to this issue struck me one night while doing something completely unrelated - you know, that 3 a.m. feeling when you suddenly wake up and know the name of somebody you've been trying to remember all day. Anyway, it all comes down to how we handle language, our dexterity with it, our......

...handedness.

Language use and learning displays handedness. That is, just as we have an innate preference to use one hand over another, so we do the same with language. If we are learning a new language, we can attempt to use it like our L1, but it will be in a limited way - just like trying to write with your left hand if you're right handed. In the case of beginning a new language, of course, it's as if you've grown a whole new hand and are trying to work out how to make it move. Imagine trying to do all the tasks that you normally do with your dominant hand with your non-dominant one - you can do them, but it feels awkward, odd, and clumsy - precisely how it feels when trying to use an L2 naturally.
OK, so what if you're ambidextrous? Or, in this case, someone with two or more birth languages? Well, bilinguals tend to show a preference for one language over another, or a preference for one for given situations, e.g. talking in on language at home but another with friends. Again, I would argue this shows evidence that language use displays handedness, a preference for use of language based on situation.
Well, what bearing does this have on language learning? I would argue that for some learners, especially monoglots, they have such strong handedness in their L1 that it hinders their ability to handle the new language, while others are more ready to experiment with their new 'hand', as it were. The latter are more prepared to experiment with the range of use - to reach out and 'feel' their way.
This explains why it's such a good idea to encourage learners to experiment with language use outside the classroom - the more they do it, the easier it becomes to use it.
And here's another argument in favour of handedness - people who learn a second language can sometimes perform a task in the L2 better than they can in their L1. For example, a colleague of mine lived in Mexico for several years, and while there not only learned Spanish, but also how to drive. She also bought a knackered VW Beetle that required numerous visits to the mechanic in order to keep it on the road. In order to describe to the mechanic what had gone wrong this time, she had to learn, rather quickly, the various ways of describing the thing and what had fallen off, gone 'booinng' or had exploded. In fact, she became rather good at this, and bartering the price down with her mechanic for parts and labour.
But can she do the same here in the UK, in English? Nope, not without difficulty anyway, as she lacks the vocabulary to describe the things that drop off, go 'booiing' or explode. However, were she to discover a Mexican mechanic, she'd breeze through. In other words, for a specific situation, she is showing preference, or handedness, to a particular language - just as you might prefer to use your left hand to change gears on a car while steering with the right (if you live in a country like the UK where you drive on the correct side of the road, i.e. the left :) ).
I'm not going to write much more on this subject at the moment, as it merits more than a blog entry, but I will say this - thinking about language and handedness has lead me on to something else about how we acquire our L1s in the first place. But more about that in a later blog post.

Provider or Manager?

This post was originally going to be about using authentic texts with Intermediate/Upper Intermediate students, but after some reflection, I'm going to extend it somewhat, although it'll still be anchored in reading skills.

I've been doing some research and refreshment over the past few weeks on reading skills, and how to make text-based lessons more interesting to our learners. A lot of students don't really enjoy doing reading in class, as they think it's something that doesn't actually teach them any English per se. In fact, I suspect quite a few teachers think the same - it's quite a tempting thought when students have their heads down in a text, reading silently (or possibly dozing and dribbling onto the page) - there doesn't appear to be anything going on, and both the instructor and learner end up having the same uneasy sensation, that possibly there should be something apparently happening. The chances are that our students don't actually do as much text-based work as they should, and this is a shame - research shows pretty conclusively that language learners who read more are better and faster at language learning.
However, this also suggests two things - first, that the students who read  more are more likely to be avid readers and, importantly, readers of a wide range of things, in their L1, and that they are motivated to do language-based activities outside the classroom. What we don't, or possibly can't, know is whether the reading drives the motivation or vice-versa, or there's some weird feedback loop thingy going on. Anyway, it seems clear that we should motivate students to practise their English outside the classroom, doesn't it? After all, if we motivate them, they will seek down each and every opportunity to use their ninja-like English skills in new and exciting ways, yes?
Or, possibly, there's something else going on, and it very much depends on the context in which we teach, and how we teach it - hence the title of this post.
I've taught in both a monolingual environment - in this case, a private language school in Turkey - and in a native English speaker context, i.e. my current job in an FE college in Deepest Berkshire. Let's imagine that we have the same student going to both places, learning broadly the same syllabus, and moderately motivated. We'll also imagine, for the sake of things, that he's had some kind of ghastly accident involving a copy of Jeremy Harmer's finest, causing him to lose his memory of his previous English learning, and he wakes up in an ESOL class in Reading at the same level he started off in in Turkey. Well, it could be worse: he could have woken up in Slough. Anyway. Our Turkish student in Turkey, if he is sincere about learning English outside the classroom, must actively seek down opportunities to speak, read, write and listen to the language. Now, of course it is relatively easy these days to do that, but our learner, being an average chap, has a thousand and one things to do outside class as well, and to be honest, English studies are really going to drop down the list unless he is a) motivated and, crucially, b) his teacher is motivated enough to be on his case, and does things such as actively suggest where to find information, things to study, where, how and when to practise etc.
Now our hapless student has his bizarre mishap with Mr Harmer, and suddenly he's in the UK, and doing the same kind of studies. And the difference? He doesn't have to actively seek English: He's totally inundated by it. I use 'inundated' correctly, I believe: it's an uncontrollable, unstoppable, tumbling, reaving, crushing, horrid tsunami of words, phrases, attitudes, assumptions of prior knowledge, in-jokes, requests, demands, persuasions, dissuasions and god knows what else. So what is the teacher's duty in all this? After all, we don't need to persuade the learner to hunt out opportunities when they are all around.
In fact, we should first consider it from the learner's point of view. It is natural, in this context, to not engage with the language: it's so overwhelming, that you just want to run away somehow - culture shock, anyone? Look at ELT practitioners the world over - how many of them form expat groups? there you go, it's the running away from the language and culture. Of course, culture shock covers more than language, but from an ELT view it's something we should be clearly aware of, even when the student has been living in the UK/USA or wherever for years and years. A lot of their language engagement may actually be embedded in avoidance strategies - and if you're an ESOL/ESL practitioner,I bet you've seen that more than once, haven't you?
The point I'm trying to make in my roundabout way is this. Depending on our teaching context, we have to deploy different language motivation strategies. If you work in a monolingual/NNES environment, you have to be a language provider - that is, you need to give the materials in class, and provide ways, methods, links, techniques through which the learner can step outside the classroom and actively use English. In a Native English speaking context, however, the teacher is not so much the provider as the manager. In other words, we need to contextualise, parse and manage the flow of information that the learner has to deal with, and render it in such a way as to make it manageable for the student, who after all has to deal with it anyway, regardless of how many lessons he or she has. Only by showing the student that the information is actually manageable can we hope to motivate them, otherwise they will reach a point where they simply switch off, and just don't want to engage with the world around them.
So, are you a provider or a manager, or both? And what do you do to motivate your learners beyond the classroom's Fourth Wall?
I'll deal with methods and practice behind this in another post, as it's getting on the late side now, and I still have to motivate myself through a torrent of student essays.

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.

Acquisition within learning

Insight: In acquisition, learning does not occur. In learning, acquisition may occur. By this, I mean that when we acquire information, in this case languages, we do not consciously analyse, criticise or judge what has been acquired: It just is. However, when we learn, we apply a critical process - we may ask ourselves what we are learning for - in other words, there is some form of conscious motivation involved. Even though this happens, some information is (uncritically, non-judgementally) acquired. We see evidence of this where students, even in the midset of ropey writing, produce a perfectly executed phrase or sentence or turn of speech. It indicates that that phrase has been acquired syntactically. If we were to ask the student why they used that, they would probably not be able to give a good reason.
Just thought I'd share that with you.

My eyes are feeling a bit fried up from reading for the past three hours, and I'm about to call it a day - well, at least for the time being: I'll probably do some more work this evening at some stage. A question about methodologies: why are they all aimed at beginners? OK, so lots of research has been done about acquisition and learning, but what about the fine-tuning, improving and expanding phase, once students get past intermediate level? I don't know if much research has been done, but my impressions based on my teaching experiences are that there's a big drop-off in the numbers of students who want to learn English once they get to an intermediate level, or thereabouts - in other words, once they reach a basic level of linguistic competency. Now, the fact that tens of thousands of people take the FCE and CAE, and that the number of students taking IELTS has exploded over the past year, may belie that fact, but there it is. What turns basic competency into fluency and eventually mastery? What are the motivators?