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Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 2; March 02
CHAPTER 1 from THE CONFIDENCE BOOK
by Paul Davis et al.
Language confidence
Many language learners either have or are induced into having a poor self-image. This can become a vicious circle: 'I am bad at learning this language, therefore I perform inadequately, therefore I am right to think I am hopeless at language.' The aim of this chapter is to offer you ways of allowing learners to appreciate their own achievements in areas such as pronunciation, vocabulary learning and coping with grammar.
Let's take an example: in The power of the mother tongue (p.15) complete beginners listen to a story in their mother tongue with some target language words mixed into the text. They are then asked to write down any words they remember or partly remember. The stress is on inviting them to notice what they have got right, not what has gone wrong. People will get something like 90 per cent right and only focus on the 10 per cent that is wrong. This balance needs redressing, as guilt is an inefficient baseline from which to try and learn something.
In 100 Verbs (p.14) students at a post beginner level are asked to estimate how many verbs they know. The lesson then shows them that they actually know two to four times more verbs than they thought they did. The aim throughout this section is to give people a positive, realistic assessment of their own abilities. If you, as the teacher, manage to get your students to realise how good they already are, this frequently leads to steep improvements in their performance. The message is not Moskowitz's 'accentuate the positive' (see Caring and Sharing in the Foreign Language Classroom, Moskowitz, 1978); it is much more simply 'allow yourself to notice the positive and to enjoy it'.
