Editorial
This article originally appeared in ‘The Teacher’ magazine.
Language Domesticated (1): Does Foreign Language Learning Have to Hurt?
Grzegorz Śpiewak and Marek Jannasz, Poland
Marek Jannasz is an educational publisher, historian, US studies specialist and translator. He is Warsaw University graduate and a Fulbright scholar. He is also a former lecturer at American Studies Centre of Warsaw University and at Studium Edytorstwa Współczesnego UKSW. Co-founder of deDOMO Education.
Grzegorz Śpiewak is a tteacher, teacher trainer, EFL project manager, adviser and author. He is also a lecturer and deputy director for PE at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw and former IATEFL Poland president. He is head ELT Consultant for Macmillan Polska, President of DOS-Teacher Training Solutions and co-founder of deDOMO Education, lead author of Angielski dla rodziców deDOMO.
E-mail: grzegorz@e-dos.org
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Introduction
English as a life skill
English as a must
Error no terror
English domesticated?
Bibliography
Welcome to episode 1 of a new article series brought to you by deDOMO Education. The overall purpose of the series is to introduce an alternative approach to foreign language education, tried and tested with considerable success recently. We start out by tracing some of the unexpected implications of English having acquired the status of a global lingua franca, the concept of English as a form of cultural capital, and the idea that mainstream foreign language education displays several properties of a traumatic initiation ritual.
Before we attempt to answer the question contained in the title of this opening episode, let us start by reflecting a little on the context of foreign language learning in the first decades of the 21st century. For better or worse (and more and more are apparently inclined to say: ‘worse’!), it is an era of globalization. And globalization requires a lingua franca, to speed up global commerce, communication networks, diplomacy, workforce mobility, academic exchange, and so on and so forth. For reasons that are numerous but irrelevant for the argument in the present episode, the early 21st century global lingua franca is English. In a widely quoted and highly influential report compiled for the British Council, David Graddol ( 2006) famously stopped referring to English as a ‘foreign language’, coining instead the term ‘other language’ to reflect the unique status it has enjoyed in recent decades.
The triumphant progress that English has made is typically portrayed as a case of more and more people joining a rapidly increasing global speech community. But surely this entails that an insufficient command of this global communication tool (let alone a complete lack of English ability) equals partial exclusion of a given individual or group of individuals from the activities of the respective society, itself subject to globalization pressures.
The pressure is transferred down all the way to family level as parents certainly do not wish to raise their children to be social outcasts. With English encroaching on virtually all social domains, monolingual mother-tongue socialization is no longer adequate in places as remote and otherwise distinct as eastern Europe, southern Africa or the Far East. This is one of the most thought-provoking findings in Graddol’s BC report: the age of inception to English language learning has been dropping systematically in recent years all over the world. An obvious example of this in Poland is the recent reform of Core Curriculum (“Nowa Podstawa Programowa” 2008), where one of the chief motivations behind changes in the domain of foreign language learning is the increasing number of 6-year-olds starting English language education.
21st century parents and employers are in full agreement in this respect: developing a degree of English language ability is no longer a matter of individual choice. Rather, it is a vital life skill, on a par with digital competence. Both types of competence: speaking English and knowing how to use a computer are hardly worth listing on a resume. They are generally taken for granted and treated as given, save for the least prestigious, low-paid, menial jobs. Returning to parents, none of them fear that their kids will not pick up vital digital competences – all they need is access to hardware and a slightly more knowledgeable kid to look up to. But what about picking up English – clearly things will not simply take care of themselves in parallel to pc keyboard skills…
To put it bluntly, parents must invest in their children’s English language education to help their kids accumulate the requisite social capital for their future. (The concept of English as a vital part of one’s cultural and intellectual ‘capital’ goes back to the classic argument in Quirk (‘The English language in a global context’ CUP 1985, and is picked up very recently by Luke Prodromou in his spat with Robin Walker over the notion of standard English ‘ELF models and linguistic capital’, IATEFL Voices issue 199, Dec 2007). ‘Invest’ can take on quite literal meaning, and cover considerable sums spent on anything from audio-CDs with nursery rhymes, children’s stories on DVD, pictionaries and English-speaking ‘Sesame Street’ or ‘Winnie de Pooh’ toys, to English language games, multimedia courses, and - last but certainly not least (costwise!) – private language tuition. The sky – or more accurately the size of one’s pocket – is the limit. What is noteworthy here is not just the sums involved, but the social imperative to invest, and the resultant feel-good factor of the parent-investor, truly invaluable at various family and/or peer gatherings.
So, any child whose parents must invest in his or her English education must in equal measure demonstrate that the investment has been prudent – i.e. they must display an amount of language competence commensurate with the sums invested, not unlike someone displaying a precious item of jewellery in a shop window. This is arguably the underlying source of the parents’ expectant ‘What did you do in English today?’, routinely frustrated with their kids’ uninspiring ‘Can’t remember’ or ‘Nothing much’. What is striking about such all-too-familiar family rituals is the apparently irresistible parallelism: since English (like money) makes the global world go round, kids should be made to study it. Which in turn implies blood, sweat and tears – hence the wording of the title of this episode.
So, watch out, little Zuzia, Matsuko or Ibrahim: English (like cough medicine) is good for you, even if – or perhaps: especially if – it tastes foul. Whoever said it was meant to be fun? It is something you have to go through if you aspire for admission to the community of the successful. And if you don’t, we – your parents and teachers – shall aspire for you! We shall also make sure you will be treated to every little drop of it, no matter how much you might loath the experience. Of course you hate it (and us) now, but you’ll thank us one day.
And that’s how we come to the second reason why learning English must hurt. It is a stunning paradox of the ruling English language teaching paradigm that – quite regardless of the current role of English as a global lingua franca – it is still taught in the great majority of places as nothing as such! Instead, it continues to be taught not as an ‘other’ language or a global communication tool but as a foreign language. The discrepancy has been noted in recent years, most provocatively by Jennifer Jenkins, the godmother (some would rather say: the witch…) of the debate on the so-called ‘standard English’ as a model for learners worldwide. Jenkins suggested that the third letter in the ‘TEFL’ acronym be demoted to the final position, thus reporting on the postulated paradigm shift from ‘Teaching English as a Foreign Language’ to ‘Teaching English as a Lingua Franca’ (‘TELF’). It is by no means a case of idle sociolinguistic wordplay. Rather, it is meant to expose the demotivating effects of setting a linguistically unattainable goal for English learners: from linguistic ‘rags’ (a false beginner or thereabouts) to ‘riches’ (a perfect imitation of a native speaker). And we continue to insist on that sort of ‘grand ideal’ even though we all know that few if any shoeshine boys end up as multimillionaire CEOs.
This is not to rule out the possibility that one or two might be talented and/or hardworking enough to master a full repertoire of native English sounds, rhythms, intonation contours, idiomatic phrases and syntactic intuitions (though I have yet to meet him or her, after nearly 20 years that I have been in the ELT profession…). But what about those who never will, and that’s an estimated 99.9% of the whole English learning population? Are they all failures, to a greater or lesser extent? And if they are failures, are we, their teachers, professional failures, too?
No one is being naïve here, at least since professor Henry Widdowson, arguably the greatest EFL specialist alive, taught us in a memorable IATEFL PL conference plenary that “the initial experience of a foreign language is its foreigness” [emphasis added]. Yes, it will certainly *hurt*, i.e. feel strange, at the beginning. But does it really need to hurt throughout? An unattainable learning goal is not just - by definition - impossible to attain, i.e. deeply demotivating. In the world of global English, it is also largely redundant! Most non-native adult users of English know that: they communicate successfully despite obvious slips of the tongue and even gaps in their linguistic competence. All it takes is a sufficiently profitable business deal or a desperately enough case of getting lost and having to ask for directions. Let alone all those chat-up lines whose communicative potential has very little to do with linguistic accuracy and a lot with the mutual sexual attractiveness of the two interlocutors…
Why is it then that as English teachers– despite several decades of Communicative Language Teaching as the dominating methodology – we find it so hard to accept that our natural, strategic goal is a communicative, lingua franca competence, and not an idealized native speaker model?! In case the reader feels the latter is an exaggerated complaint, let us recall the professional outcry caused by the introduction of the upper-secondary school leaving exam (the so-called ‘Nowa Matura’) several years ago. Dubbed ‘an exam for idiots’ by many a teacher, it was simply the first exam biased towards communicative rather than formal-linguistic competence. As such it defocused accuracy in favour of … yes, successful communication, understood as intelligible transfer of meaning.
Ironically speaking, foreign language learning as we know it is not quite unlike an initiation ritual. Like learning to drive, which has to hurt, too, doesn’t it? Before you even sit behind the wheel for the first time, you hear stories of people having taken the test a dozen times. And your experienced-driver-husband will yell at you every 5 seconds, apparently to help you gain confidence and (the parallels with language teaching are just too irresistible!) stop you from making a fool of yourself on the road… The accompanying learner trauma is marketed as part of the learning package.
And, once you’ve finally passed the wretched test, you realize that most of the things you had to learn for the sake of the test are not just unnecessary to drive successfully, but in some cases counterproductive to your driving success (which, incidentally, will probably not stop you from passing on the stories of trauma to subsequent learners). Once on the road, you will succeed by being flexible and by occasionally bending the rules. It may cost you a few scratches and a couple of penalty points, but that’s the only way forward.
And in the language classroom, can we not afford to make errors and accept that they are not only unavoidable (another fact of life), but indispensable – even welcome! - if learning is to progress?? So error as terror or error as step? How many times does a toddler need to fall before they learn to walk? Why don’t we tell them off each time they do? Come to think of it, we don’t normally correct their language errors, either. Rather, we marvel at them, tell other parents about them, and are proud of them as evidence of learning.
After all, the kid is learning their mother tongue. Not a ‘tribe tongue’, or even ‘family tongue’, interestingly. The choice of attribute noun arguably reflects maximum closeness, something natural and instinctive (Pinker, 1994), the very opposite of ‘foreigness’. This is perhaps what lay behind the claim made back in the 1970’s by Doris and David Jonas. The two socio-biologists posited that the emergence of language among early humans was not primarily motivated by the need to exchange information, but as a socializing tool between mothers and their babies (Kuckenberg, 2006). If so, language and domestication go hand in hand. At least until the child enters the school system, that is. It is there that she learns very quickly that ‘pig morska’ or ‘lody white’ (Śpiewak 2010) are no longer adorable feats of linguistic creativity and evidence of linguistic risk-taking. Rather, they are errors, to be eradicated or else one faces punishment.
Can foreign language learning ever be domesticated, to some extent at least? In spite of the apparent contradiction in terms, it is my firm belief that we are getting closer to answering this question in the affirmative. This said, an attempt at such domestication will inevitably lead to critical reevaluation of some of the core concepts for our profession: the status of language norm, the notion of standard variety, the validity of language error – to name but a few. They will be discussed in turn in the subsequent episodes of the ‘Language Domesticated’ series. Sloganizing somewhat, let us preview this discussion by saying that we (by which is meant ‘teachers and learners alike’) truly need to think global (since English is a global phenomenon), but act very local indeed.
In particular, acting towards domestication may require a fresh selection of motivating tools, acceptable to educators and highly attractive to language learners. W shall argue that some of the best tools of this sort come ‘de domo’ in that they exploit the natural status and social roles of children and their parents or care providers.
Learning English as a global lingua franca may well be a global imperative, but the way our children should be learning it need not hurt as much as it hurt most of us. Our mission as educators is to make learning of the ‘other language’ feel less like a traumatic initiation ritual and more like a fascinating journey towards a full membership in a global community of users of English as a lingua franca.
To be continued …
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Graddol, D. , English Next. Why global English may mean the end of ‘English as a Foreign Language’. British Council 2006
Kuckenberg, M. Pierwsze słowo, Warszawa 2006.
Pinker, S. The Language Instinct.1994.
Prodromou, L. ‘ELF models and linguistic capital’, IATEFL Voices issue 199, Dec 2007.
Quirk, R., ‘The English language in a global context’ CUP 1985
Śpiewak, G. Angielski dla rodziców deDOMO. Przewodnik metodyczny, deDOMO Education 2010
Please check the Methodology and Language for Kindergarten Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Methodology and Language for Primary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
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