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Learner Training (Part
I) By Barbara
Sinclair (keeper of the Learner Training worm)
‘Learner Training’ has been a slithery, slippery worm for some 25 years now….it has provoked a wide range of emotions amongst members of the TESOL profession, and beyond. Why is this? One problem is the term ‘Learner Training’ itself, another is the multitude of context-related interpretations that can be found in the literature, and yet another is the difficulty of verifying claims made about its efficacy. As the keeper of this particular worm, and researcher in the field since 1981, I present the following thoughts on Learner Training. I hope they will provoke some further critical reflection! Wrestling with my own worm…. When I reflect on the various factors that have affected my success in language learning, the reasons for my varying levels of personal linguistic success become clearer. At grammar school I learnt Latin for one year, French for 5 years, and German for 6 years. At university I studied German and Russian (ab initio). I learnt survival Spanish when I lived and worked in Spain for a year, and attended evening classes in Italian while living in Germany. Of all the languages I have spent time and effort learning, only German remains as a medium of fluent communication; my ‘second’ language. There are a number of significant influences which caused this to be so. As a holistic (Pask 1976), concrete (Willing 1988) learner, the traditional grammar-translation approaches used by my language teachers in school bored me. Furthermore, the only strategy for success offered by those teachers was memorisation - memorisation of vocabulary items and grammar rules. I found such activities tedious. Only fear of the German teacher, who was a strict disciplinarian, and fear of failure motivated me to try hard with German. Consequently, I began to make good progress with this language and started to come top of the class. At that time, teacher approval was crucial for my success and my self-esteem grew a little. Success engendered greater motivation and I began to enjoy the sense of achievement that learning German gave me. My German teacher insisted that we all have German penpals from our twinned school and, for the first time, I was in a position to communicate in a genuine way with someone in a foreign language. I found it intoxicating. When I met my penpal, however, I was devastated when I realised I could hardly speak to her; I was far too shy and inhibited to actually speak German. However, I was determined to improve my oral skills and, at the age of 16, went on a youth visit to Germany for two weeks. There I experienced for the first time the thrill of real-life oral communication in a foreign language when I bought something in a shop or discussed fashions with a friend. These real-life communicative experiences gave me new insights into language learning which, in turn, were to directly impact upon my own teaching and research. I later went on to spend some eight years living, studying and working in Germany. Clearly, there were two important motivating factors in my language learning career: firstly, fear of failure and of the teacher, and, secondly, the need to use the language for a real purpose. The second was a revelation to me. I saw a reason for learning the language and the sense of achievement any successful communication engendered gave me a driving impetus to carry on learning. Language learning at school was entirely teacher-led, and, in the 70s the same approach was followed at university, where I had a number of very negative experiences. For the first time, I experienced lectures in German and was expected to take notes and produce assignments on topics relating to German politics and institutions in that language. The lectures in German were a shock. I had no strategies for dealing with this. I developed my own form of short-hand and literally wrote down everything the lecturer said. It was exhausting and there was no time to think about the content of the lectures. With the benefit of hindsight, I realise now that, although I had the ability to take notes from a lecture per se, I was unable, for some reason, to transfer these strategies to my foreign language learning. The problem was not that I did not know how to take notes, nor that I could not understand the German - it was something else. Of course, I did not consciously reflect on this problem at the time; I was simply frustrated and felt inadequate. My early attempts to learn foreign languages provided me with a profound learning experience, not so much in terms of the final levels of proficiency I attained, but rather with respect to the processes and human relationships integral to learning languages in both formal and real-life contexts. I also learned a great deal about myself as a language learner: my needs, my goals, my inhibitions and my learning preferences. Looking back, I was, for example, able to acknowledge the effects of my teachers on my psyche and, thus, my language learning success -or lack of it. I had felt stupid because I found the emphasis on analytical language work and rote learning difficult to cope with, and failed to understand why attempts to use other strategies which seemed to help me were either not allowed or dismissed as incorrect.. As a language student, I was disempowered and made to feel inadequate for not conforming to the view of the teacher on how to be a ‘good student’ . My lack of knowledge about how to learn a foreign language at school and at university seems shocking to me now, but my fellow students and I were never encouraged to reflect on the processes of learning language or on ourselves as language learners. Other factors, of course, were involved, but it occurred to me that there must be better ways of teaching foreign languages. I also felt strongly that a teacher needed to respect an individual learner’s needs and preferences. These experiences led me to experiment in my own teaching with techniques for helping learners discover personally suitable ways of learning, In 1989, Gail Ellis and I published ‘Learning to learn English: a course in learner training’ (CUP). Read part II of this article: ‘So what is “learner training”?’ |
