A while back I
wrote a post about how it's not your teacher's responsibility for you
to learn something, but your own. So for the past few weeks I've been
following my own advise and tackled my french, which after four years
of language learning in school was rudimentary at best. I'm happy to report
that it's going quite well. Much much better than it ever did in
school. And along the way I have formed some ideas about why that is.
There are of
course some technical drawbacks to the approach we took in school.
The focus on grammar at the expense of exposure being a major one of
those. I believe we never even got to hear a native speaker until we
were already about two or three years into our studies. And it turns
out our teacher's pronunciation was anything but decent. Another one
would be the lack of context clues when it came to vocabulary
learning. Because lists of pretty much random words are an
unnecessarily inefficient form of learning material.
These are some of
the reasons that usually get cited when we wonder why kids are doing
so poorly in their language studies. But I think that's only
scratching the surface. I believe these wouldn't actually be that
much of a problem – or rather that students could easily remedy
those themselves. The thing is, though, that the root of the problem goes much deeper.
I just now
discovered what the two biggest obstacles to language learning I
faced back in school actually were: the class environment and the low
expectations of our teacher and subsequently of ourselves. I think
those two were actually reenforcing each other. Let me paint the
scene for you.
It was just after
our advancement to secondary school. I was one of the few who had
actually chosen the science program because it came with the french
classes and not the other way around. And some kids, I think, were
just there because their parents had forced them into it.
So you could say that roughly two thirds of this class had no
motivation at all to learn french and our teacher didn't provide any
either. On the contrary, she greeted us with an introduction on how
difficult this class was going to be and how much hard work we were
required to do. Needless to say this speech probably did more
harm than good for the few of us who had up to this point actually been somewhat enthusiastic about the endeavor.
Also, since we were all still in the process of finding our place in this thrown
together group of kids, you can imagine that there was a lot of
disruptive behavior going on. Some kids tried to distinguish
themselves by being very loud and wisecracking, others thought it was
cool to act up to authority figures. You get the picture.
So this coupled
with the very inefficient grammar focused approach to language
learning led to very poor results. These in turn frustrated both the
students and the teacher, and lead to the latter thinking very poorly
of her students' abilities in general, which she didn't attempt to
hide. All this served to create the illusion that language learning
in general and learning french in particular was much harder than it
actually is. In this kind of environment and the mindset it creates
it is no wonder that people wouldn't even dream of achieving fluency.
So long story
short the problem with school was not so much what I didn't learn
than what I did. Namely that language learning is hard and I couldn't
expect more of myself than merely scraping by – like most kids were
doing. After all this was the general consensus not only in school,
but in the whole of society. It essentially became a self-fulfilling
prophecy until I – pretty much by accident – became fluent in
English. Because if you spend a lot of time on the Internet, you'll
have a hard time getting around it. After all more than 50% of online
content is in English. And if you're too impatient to wait months
longer for the translation of your favorite book series' next
installment than the English speaking world does, you might just consider to get
the freaking thing and figure out what's in there. But even then the
lesson was so internalized that I thought of English as more of an
exception – a sort of fluke. After all it didn't feel like I had
put all that much effort into English learning. It just sort of
happened?!
What this little
tale ought to show is that teaching methods aren't the only problem
here. There are other things at play that are much much more destructive,
because they are so deeply engrained in the system and play on your subconscious to create mental barriers. And language
learning isn't the only school subject to suffer this curse. I'd say
that almost all of them are afflicted in varying degrees. When have you first heard how hard math is?
It has
taken me years to even begin to repair this damage and find my way
back to the curious, hungry for knowledge girl that I once was. And
although I am well on my way now, I'll probably still have a long
long way to go. After all you don't just cast off that kind of
conditioning over night.
