Perceived progress vs Actual progress

During my time as a teacher, I have had some students say to me that they are not happy with their progress. Now I work in a learning system where you get out what you put in and usually that means that the student did not progress because they did not study.
My first response to this concern then is “how often do you study?” On occasion though, I have met students who say that they study regularly and still are not happy with their progress. These students I take a lot of interest in. I am very interested in how we can improve things so that the students get the maximum benefit from their time. Most of these cases though are just people with unrealistic expectations (I have been studying 3 weeks and I’m still not fluent!) and those with a perception gap.
I have had students say “I have been here 2 years and I have made no progress”. But when I ask them, “what level did you start?” They tell me that they started at “hello” and “how are you?” two years ago. After talking to them for a while, I realize that it is difficult to see changes in yourself, especially changes that occur over a two year period.
Sometimes we forget to reassure our students of the progress that they are making and show them what they can do now. We have to go beyond the simple positive reinforcements “good job!” which really only comment on the minor task at hand. Regularly, we need to show them the level they were at before and the level that they are at now and use this to motivate them to continue that development.
If the student above really had made no progress in 2 years, the conversation wouldn’t have gone much further than “Hello, how are you?” But sometimes people just need to be reminded.

Stepping outside the comfort zone

When I was learning Japanese, I made a huge leap forward when one day, I decided to not take it all so seriously.  I was sitting at a “kotatsu”(1) table on a mountain in Nagano, Japan.  I was surrounded by Japanese colleagues and was a little bit frustrated when they corrected my pronunciation.  So I imitated them. 

In the beginning, I did it in a slightly malicious way which I am not proud of but my colleagues’ reaction was very positive. So, I continued doing it in a joking and less malicious way.  Soon, I was building up my courage to use this new voice in serious situations.  I stopped hearing “your Japanese is so good” (which is only heard to encourage beginners in Japanese, when it actually is good, it goes unnoticed).

When I look back on this now, I believe that what I had done was childish in more than one way.  I had lost my inhibitions and gotten a little playful with the language.  And it helped me to create a whole new identity from which I was speaking with much better pronunciation . 

The identity that I had created was like me but he was Japanese.  No longer was I approaching problems with the disposition of a foreigner learning English, no longer did I resort to using my “outsider” status as an excuse for not understanding or doing things the way that Japanese people did them.  I started taking off my shoes when I entered my own apartment instead of thinking that this is a “Kiwi” household.

Complete adoption of Japanese culture helped me to learn the things which did not translate easily.  A “kotatsu” was now just a kotatsu, not an unwieldy explanation of what it is because there is no direct translation. We do not have “kotatsu” tables in New Zealand so we have no word for them.  The Japanese culture is rich and built on a long history so there are many such examples of things and concepts that only exist in Japanese.

Taking the language less seriously also meant that I was filtering less (from Krashen’s Affective Filter Hypothesis, 1982).  I was happy to make mistakes and laugh about them rather than slow the conversation down by over-using my filter.  I started to use grammar as an autopsy tool instead of a construction tool.  I didn’t use grammar to build a sentence, only to examine it afterwards.  If it was not correct, I would correct it and try to remember for next time.  I would make sure that there were plenty of “next times”.

If I were asked now if adults can learn languages well, I would have to say that the limitations we face as adults are self-imposed because of how we think we are expected to act in society.   Our inhibitions are from our own fears and learning a language means conquering your doubts.  Children are just lucky enough to learn before the pressures of society’s influence have taken hold.  As a second language teacher it is my hope and belief that the biological benefits that children have in learning during the peak acquisition time are outweighed by the cognitive benefits of learning as an adult. 

My challenge as a teacher now is how we get people to understand that in order to learn a language you may need to not just take in vast amounts of information but also assume a new identity .  Seeing yourself as a native-speaker is the first step to being a native-like speaker.

(1) A knee-high table covered in a blanket with a heat-lamp underneath

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Krashen, Stephen D. (1981). Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. English Language Teaching series. London: Prentice-Hall International (UK) Ltd. 202 pages.

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One for the parents

This post is about how you learn your first language as a child.  This a good one for parents to read.

Exercise your articulatory muscles
You do this by babbling.  Note that all cultures babble and it is not only normal, it is a necessary part of language development. 
Even if the child's first language will be sign language, they will babble; they babble with their hands.  In their case, the articulatory muscles are in their hands and fingers.

Copy the sounds
Keep in mind here that children understand more than they can express.  This is proven with kids who can use signs to express their requests before they can ask for milk and the amount of gesturing that kids use in general.  My daughter used a hand and sound gesture to point out planes well before she could articulate the word "plane".

Kids learn nasals and voiced stops (see the IPA chart here) first.  These are the "b", "g", and "d" sounds. 
The fricatives and liquids come last.  "s", "z" and "y" sounds, for example.

What is interesting is that if you get to know the IPA chart, you see that children are actually approximating words using the sounds that they are familiar with first and you can translate these approximations.
Can't say Zebra?  Says Debra
Can't say see?  Says Dee

Understanding how kids approximate words they hear using the sounds that they can already use may just help a lot of frustrated parents out there figure out just want the screaming toddler is upset about.

What about correction?
There is a lot of evidence that correction does not play a big part in First Language Acquisition as adults tend to correct kids on factual not grammatical errors:
Child:  There is five chairs!
Adult:  There are SIX chairs
Not:  There ARE six chairs.

And, children can be oblivious to correction anyway, at least to some extent:
"Child: Nobody don't like me.
Mother: No, say "nobody likes me"
Child: Nobody don't like me.
(eight repetitions of this exchange)
Mother: No, now listen carefully; say "nobody likes me"
Child: Oh! Nobody don't likes me."
McNeill, D (1966). Developmental psycholinguistics. in F. Smith & G. Miller (Eds.), The genesis of language: A psycholinguistic approach (pp., 69-73). Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.

And yet children still learn to speak despite our terrible teaching.  The human brain is a truly amazing thing!