Why schools leave us with the wrong idea about learning a language

How schools distort our understanding of language learning.

After our time at school, most of us are left with the wrong idea about learning a language.

I want to share some of reasons why this is, and the effect this has on the way we regard language learning. Once we understand that the ideas we have about learning a language are mostly misguided and distorted by those experiences and impressions from our time at school, we can begin to appreciate the true nature of language acquisition. Ultimately, this realisation is an opportunity to embrace language learning.

Picking up a new language is not simply a cool party trick. Learning and speaking a language foreign to our first one is a new way of seeing and thinking about the world. It not only helps to cure us of our socio-cultural myopia, but it helps us to develop into more rounded individuals, more capable of seeing things from others’ point of view, or at least not so beholden to our own.

If we want to see the world afresh, then learning another language is one of the best ways to do this. However, learning a new language is not simply about translating what we want to say in our native language to a foreign language, but rather it’s about learning how people in that other language talk about the same things. Once we learn how to talk like those other people, we can begin to see and think as they do.

For instance, the British sense of humour is unlike the humour of most other countries. As a fan of British humour, and humour in general, I can say with confidence that British humour is unique. One thing I have observed consistently, is people who get extremely fluent in British English by living in the UK, often develop a British sense of humour. These people begin to see and think about the world as British people do. They begin to use a specific brand of dry sarcasm and wit. They begin to mock their own behaviour, in the self-deprecating and self-effacing tones of British people. They also develop a sharp sense of irony. This is all thanks to the fact that they begin to speak and use English as British people would, and so are able to joke, mock, and tease in the ways that are simply natural to British people.

A perfect recent example of this British sense of humour is when a man walked into a pub and put a cardboard box on the bar, next to where my friend was standing. My friend out of his uncontrollable curiosity (remember British bars and pubs are perfect places for small talk and random conversations) asks the man, what’s in the box? The man replies, a chimney.

Now, when anyone in the UK thinks of a chimney, it’s a construction that looks like a big stack of bricks that sits on a roof. Thinking of a such a chimney in a small box is cleverly absurd — and well, just funny. As a British person, I love this type of absurd quick wittedness.

Remember in the words of Oscar Wilde, “Wit is the highest form of sarcasm, and sarcasm the lowest form of wit.”

This dance of humour is not something you could partake in, unless you really begin to see and think about the world as a British English speaker would.

Under an illusion: social and cultural reality is often not reality

Enough of chimneys in boxes. Getting back to the point.

Most of us are oblivious to how we acquired our first language. This is the first fact that really distorts our understanding of what it means to acquire a language.

This is no surprise. Maybe a few people may have some picture of how they learnt their first language as a child, if they have parents who were unusually curious and systematic in documenting their child’s language acquisition journey. But for most of us the socialisation and acculturation that really matters is learning a foreign language at school. This shapes our behaviour and belief system around how we learn languages.

At schools, the way a language is taught, like a lot of things in schools, is mostly a historical result of socio-economic needs of a by-gone era, which have been adapted to the socio-economic needs of our era. The current system purports to meet the needs of the modern mind and reality, whereas what it does is serve a narrow subset of socio-economic needs, with not much regard to the qualitative experience of learners. Furthermore, school curricula are designed such that they do what is necessary in maintaining the standardised testing paradigm of education (just see the work of Ken Robinson, a great educational reform advocate).

This is the paradigm in which most students are taught the same national curriculum and material in order to serve the socio-economic needs of modern societies. They are then put through standardised tests of competence, the grades they achieve then determine how they progress up the educational ladder, and finally they mark and determine an individual’s socio-economic and professional life outcomes. The qualitative experience of the learner, if they enjoy how and what they learn, or really deeply understand the concepts and ideas, and can relate them to other aspects of their knowledge in an holistic and integrated way, are mostly, if we are lucky, secondary concerns, and at worst non-concerns.

In this habitat, learning a language is all about being able to demonstrate knowledge of the language learnt for a standardised test. To achieve that end, textbooks, exercises, and classes are designed in such a way that students must learn a designated amount of material, structured in such a way that makes standardised testing possible.

This means that the language learning material. textbooks, and classes themselves, are categorised and systematised to meet the needs of testing, not the natural learning capacities of the learners.

What this all boils down to, is the idea that the way we have been taught languages at schools, a social and cultural reality, has shaped our belief system itself concerning learning language. It has left us with the illusions that some people are good at learning languages while others aren’t, that all it means to be good at learning a language is to do well in classroom-based learning, and doing well in standardised tests proves how good we are in a language.

In reality, we know most people who do well in standardised language tests at school, can still leave school without being competent speakers in that language.

Beyond the illusion, the reality is that people who perform poorly in languages at school, given the right circumstances and conditions can out do themselves and pick up languages as well as any other person. People do not needlessly need to be condemned to a lifelong purgatory of being monolingual, or be given to believe that learning language is something well beyond them.

However, this does not mean that everyone who no matter how well they do in standardised tests is bad at learning a language — of course not. It merely means that those who do really well, still might not be as fluent and strong communicators as they could be if we took in the psychological nature of learning fully into account. And those that are mediocre, would be better too, and those who were marginalised by language learning at school, might not be marginalised in quite the same way. As I write in Words are like friends, these effects are made worse by the language-talent myth, which I outline there.

Learning a language doesn’t have to be a form of compulsory torture

Most of us look back on our experiences at school learning a language as a form of medieval torture. I can’t say I enjoyed my five years of learning French at school in anyway. It’s safe to say that now my Chinese is far better than my French. And I’ve never learnt Chinese! I still barely speak French now. Five years is a long time to learn a language, if I spent five years learning a language now, I am certain I would be pretty good. What is more, later in life I went on to self-learn languages, and develop conversational fluency. Polish is a good example in my case.

So what goes so horribly wrong in schools?

The first thing is that there is nothing to suggest that learning a language in a big group of around 30 or so people is somehow a magical ingredient of language acquisition. It just isn’t. It’s just a fact of socio-economic needs. The need to educate a populace in an economical, efficient, and pragmatic way. Some people flourish and thrive in this environment, others don’t. They rebel, react, and are subsequently punished and marginalised. And then there are those who just quietly fall by the wayside. In short, there is nothing to say that learning a language in this way is beneficial to us. There are arguments to be made, and good evidence to suggest that learning in groups is a healthy thing for us. After all we are social creatures, who need to be socialised into group behaviour and dynamics. However, here we are addressing the concern that overly large groups, forced into standardised learning, do more harm than good.

The second thing is that once we’re in these groups at school, group behavioural dynamics (see my upcoming article The classroom out of control — group behavioural dynamics) come into force. Even the most well-intentioned teacher cannot keep this cat from getting out of the bag. In short, these our behaviours that ultimately lead a cluster of students to dominate and perform well in a group, while a larger cluster under perform relative to that smaller cluster, and a smaller cluster under perform relative to that larger cluster. Some teachers do a remarkable job in levelling out this playing field so that literally no student is left behind, but such cases are far and few between, to the best of my knowledge, and limited to specific disciplines, mathematics being one.

The third thing is that the actual approach and content of language lessons do little to respect the embodied nature of language and its acquisition. Most of people are left with the idea that what it means to learn a language is to progress through a textbook, learn grammatical rules, and then practice grammar and vocabulary through exercises, with bits of reading and writing in between. And then to be tested on how much we have remembered from all of this. While there are certainly benefits to these practices, the idea that this is essentially the heart of language learning is a distortion of reality. Learning a language cannot be simplified down to learning a grammar and vocabulary, and reading and writing. Reading and writing are core activities, and I’m a strong advocate for these practices, but only when they are done without neglecting the core embodied aspects of language acquisition.

It’s all in the body

The reality is that we can’t separate the act of learning a language from our body and behaviour.

Language learning should respect the embodied nature of language. This is the idea that we can’t simply abstract a language and learn it as a set of rules and words to be manipulated by those rules. Or as an absurd practice that only takes place in the form of standardised learning and testing in classrooms.

Rather a language must be seen as an embodied process. Something that enables speakers to communicate intentions and emotional content, through developing intention reading skills, understanding joint attentional frames, and cultivating pattern finding skills. These are skills that are attuned to reading the patterns in body language, emotional behaviour, gesture, facial expression, intonation…and marrying those patterns to language instances. In short, when we hear a word, expression, or phrase spoken with specific embodied behaviours, we fuse that instance of language with those patterns of behaviour. Now we can appreciate that instance of language as non-trivially embodied.

It is this fact that enables us to remember and recall that instance of language with much greater ease, as it aligns with our natural language acquiring instincts. Learning in such a way, make instances of language much more intuitively understandable, leads to ease of memorisation, and to instinctive reproduction.

Language reproduction is our ability to receive novel language inputs and reproduce novel outputs without being prompted. It is the single best natural test of our language competency.

In the realm of language learning, what this means practically, is that learning designed to respect the embodied nature of language can be far more effective for the majority of learners. This means learning language through interactions, games, and more natural communication and critical discussion of language use. The main hinderance to this is the strict requirements of school curricula and school environments that are held hostage to standardised testing that leaves little space for teachers to incorporate such practices in the classroom.

Be that as it may, as potential learners we should appreciate the fact that just because we failed to learn a second language at school, does not mean we lack the capacity to do so. Rather as we have seen above, the school environment is a place that serves the needs of standardised testing and is limited in its capacity to respect language acquisition as an embodied process. Once we leave school, we are left with a false impression of what it means to learn a language.

Were we all able to learn in a way that is much instinctive to out nature of language acquisition, through interaction, play, and natural communication, we would all find ourselves speaking two languages or more.

And most importantly not thinking of learning a language as a torturous experience that happens in schools.