Over my years of learning, teaching and training I have become increasingly aware of the impact that teachers can and often do have on our learners, and their attitudes to English. Affective factors, such as attitude and self-esteem, are well known to have a profound effect on learners’ motivation and ultimately on their success or failure in learning.

Author
Rod Bolitho

As teachers we need to take some responsibility for influencing these factors in a positive or negative way. Yet, time and again, when I observe classes and talk to learners I notice signs of near-neurotic behaviour in them, and in many of these cases pretty quickly realise that the source of the anxiety that leads to this behaviour is the teacher. In this short article and in the blogs that follow this month I will mention and discuss some of these common neuroses and suggest ways of overcoming them.

Error neurosis or ‘lathophobia’
Fear of making mistakes is the mother of all neuroses and almost certainly the most common source of anxiety in language learners in the public forum of a language classroom. I first became conscious of it as a learner in a Modern Greek evening class when the teacher-priest had the habit of pointing out our mistakes by drawing himself up to his full height and intoning lathos – the Greek for mistake – in a profoundly haughty and disapproving way which had us all believing we had committed one of the seven deadly sins. I lasted just one term in that class.

  • The notion of mistake as sin is very deeply rooted in educational cultures around the world, the more so since mistakes in any subject can be totted up as a means of giving grades and of distinguishing between strong and weak students. 
  • Learners are also often concerned about looking foolish and losing face in front of their peers if they make mistakes. Research into interlanguage and second language acquisition, so often irrelevant to day-to-day classroom concerns, did deliver a useful insight in this instance in the form of a useful distinction between types of error, and also of Krashen’s oft-cited assertion that errors may be seen as ‘stepping stones on the way to learning’. My own experience as a learner and a teacher backs this up, and I go along wholeheartedly with the notion that learners benefit from observing language, hypothesising about it, testing out their hypotheses by experimenting and working with the feedback they get from their interlocutors. We as teachers would do well to allow time and space for this kind of experimentation and to offer learners support rather than a scolding when they do make mistakes.

When I was trained as a teacher of English I was told that every learner’s mistake was ‘my’ mistake, the result of inadequate teaching. As a result, I beat myself up about my learners’ mistakes for years afterwards until I realised that for progress to be made they had to start taking responsibility for their own learning and that learning from mistakes is one important part of that process. That realisation lifted a great weight from my shoulders and helped me to be concerned much more with my students’ learning and less obsessed with my own ‘performance’ as a teacher, which was a big breakthrough in my career.

Verb tense neurosis
Teachers inspire many different grammar-related neuroses in their learners, but perhaps the biggest of these is the one about verb tenses. Its origins almost certainly lie in the hard-to-shake-off tradition of Latin teaching.  The syllabus in a typical Latin course was built largely around the verb tenses, a forgivable decision considering that Latin has a very formal and highly inflected system and is also no longer used for everyday communication (though I did once have a lively conversation in Latin with a fellow passenger on a train to Reggio in South Italy!).

English verbs are minimally inflected, subjects are clearly signalled through nouns and pronouns, and time is as often flagged by time adverbials as by the verb itself.

Consider these examples, all from recent authentic sources:

  1. What time do we start tomorrow, 8 or 8.30? (participant on a seminar in Austria last week)
  2. Are you coming to the dinner tomorrow evening? (phone call from a colleague today)
  3. I’ve just sent you an e-mail to tell you I can’t make it (reply to the previous question)
  4. I’m calling ‘cos I just got your message (voicemail message from my sister-in-law)
  5. If you don’t go tonight, I don’t (a friend, about a social event)
  6. She says she wants a DVD (me to my partner during a phone conversation with my daughter)

In the first four examples above, the time adverbials are crucial to the message. Without them, and with only the form of the verb to go on, the message loses its precision. In example 3 the speaker chooses present perfect whereas in 4 she uses the simple past. Both are OK. The real force of the messages is in the immediacy expressed by the word just. The speakers in example 5 and 6 ignore the rules which learners are all too often tortured with about the sequence of tenses in ‘if’ sentences and reported speech respectively, and simply say what they want to mean; in the first case it’s a kind of ultimatum and in the second the reporting refers to a conversation still in full flow.

My take on this is that we need to spend far less time on teaching the tenses and some rather dubious rules about the sequence of tenses, and a lot more on equipping learners with a good range of time adverbials and on liberating them to allow them to say what they want to mean, rather than teaching rules and then complaining that English is a badly behaved language with a lot of exceptions.

Still to come:

  • Phrasal verb neurosis
  • Article neurosis
  • The perfect pronunciation neurosis

In the meantime, your thoughts on any of these neuroses would be very welcome!

 

Comments

Submitted by amazinanian on Wed, 12/03/2008 - 20:51

Removing anxiety from the class
Dear Rod,
From psychological points of view, you have mentioned something very important which is worthy of research and needs more investigations. I would like to share my experience with you about this subject   in a short essay as follows:
On the first day of attending any class I usually try to make a quiet and encouraging atmosphere for the students so that they become more interested in learning the materials. As an example I begin in this way:
1-    Mentioning the importance of the language
 Dears, we have come here to help each other towards a common goal, learning a foreign language. We all know that English is the scientific language of the world and many countries use it worldwide. People of the world have become nowadays very nearer   to one another. We can send an Email from Iran to someone who is far away in USA and the other person receives it in less a minute. We will have a better world if we can speak in one common language. Therefore as the ratio of the people who speak or write in English is much higher than the people who do it in other languages; most of the people of the world try to learn this valuable language. SO English is worthy of being learnt and you have made a good decision to learn English.
2-    Breaking the ice and convincing the students to speak.
I practice and improve my English by correcting your mistakes and you will learn it better by making more practice. So you shouldn’t be worried about your mistakes at all. Imagine that a
Child falls down many times before learning how to walk and makes many mistakes before becoming able to speak. When a child begins to speak, he /she say words that are very funny but enjoyable for their parents. A father or mother never scolds his/ her son/daughter for the inaccuracy of their language but motivating them to be corrected. Now when you want to learn a language you are just like that small child who makes many mistakes in the beginning but gradually and by trial and mistake will learn to speak. Come on and do not be bashful to speak. I begin to introduce myself and you do the same but try to use the model mention on the board.
3-    Motivation
The students who speak, regardless of their mistakes will get positive marks. So our class is as active as possible. I am sure you don’t like an inactive or a dead class. Our class is quite live and dynamic, not static. You will get better marks by asking   and answering more questions .Here I try to organize any diversion that may arises so that they follow the rules.
Students are allowed to choose their groups to practice together.
4-    Choosing  a good subject of discussion
Suppose you are living with some friends and sharing a flat together. Every one of you has a responsibility to do something such as shopping, cooking, cleaning, brooming the rooms, washing the dishes and ETC. One of you is lazy and has no patience to do his duty so you have to convince him to do his job in the group. You my may begin like this:
 Ali to Ahmad: Oh Ahmad we are running short of bread. Could you go to the supermarket and get us some?
Ahmad, I’m sorry, I am watching TV, the serial is very interesting and I can’t stop watching.
Ali O.K. You will be starving at noon and…….
In this way Ahmad is convinced and induced to go to the supermarket.

5-    Writing all the necessary words and some grammar cues  on the board
Many times students are worried and shy to speak because they do not know the required vocabulary related to the topic of the lesson. When we provide them with new words we actually remove the anxiety from  the classroom.

6-    Do not worry about passing the exam
Your exam marks will be partly considered on your active presence in the class, the raising of your hands to answer the questions and partly on your final exam but I emphasize on the first part. There is no room for exam anxiety in my classes.
7-    No discriminations and behaving all of them alike.
Every student has a special character and talent which must be respected and noticed. Our fingers are not alike but able to perform different jobs and students should be behaved in accordance with their capacities.
8-    Bringing the sleepy students to the class
Sometimes I come across with students who gaze at me when teaching but are thinking about finding a way to solve their personal problems .Here we have to do something to draw their attentions either by asking them an easy questions or talking to them to find out  the problem. May be  He is suffering from lack of sleeping.
9-    Bringing the right tools to the class
If possible all classes must be equipped with necessary equipments such as computers, video, tape recorder, TV set.
10-    Telling stories and giving lectures.
We can ask them to tell us their happiness and sorrows in forms of an imaginary story or a real lecture.
11-    Taking the students out of the class, to a nice park or on a picnic.
We can make changes in the class so that it is will not be monotonous for them. They can present their lectures on a picnic or in a park.
I will write more in future.
 Best wishes and many thanks for your useful essay

A Mazinanian

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