On Language Learning and Self-fulfilling Prophecies

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.