Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 2; March 03

by Patrick Henry CEL/CCI formation Clermont-Ferrand, France

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( editorial comment: what Patrick describes below is what NLP would call a "resource state". The " success experiences" are positive states from the past that can be summoned up and put to work when one is striving towards a future goal. )

All the language teachers who teach teir mother tongue and whom I have met in my eleven years in TEFL have also been learners of at least one foreign language. I myself have learnt German and French. The experience of learning these languages, especially German, a language I never studied formally, has been very useful to me as a teacher.

This learning experience has enabled me to put myself in the place of my students and also to pass on what I've learnt about motivation and progress. At the centre of this experience as a language learner is the notion of what Germans call “erfolgserlebnisse”, or, translated literally into English, “success experiences”. For a language learner this means experiences where we succeed in doing something with the language that we didn't expect to be able to do. In my own language learning curve I have found that I have made great leaps in progress as a direct result of such “success experiences”.

Take for example something simple like making a phone call. The first time I made a phone call in German I was very nervous and afraid but prepared for it well by rehearsing mentally exactly what words and expressions I would need to begin the conversation and the possible directions the conversation could take and I then completed the task successfully. The result was a total confidence boost, both physical and mental, but most evident in the stimulation of mental activity. I immediately wanted to think more in German, to use the language more in my inner monologue.

A higher level is, for example, a job interview. My knowledge of the language was of course more advanced when I had my first job interview than when I made my first phone call and so the preparation was less formalised in that I didn't rehearse the conversation but just spontaneously allowed myself and trusted myself to produce the necessary language in the situation when it arose. I was pleased with the result.

These examples will certainly be familiar to many people and the results even obvious, but I believe we can gain still more from them by consciously applying our experience both as learners and as teachers.

The important quality of the success experience is not what comes before but what comes afterwards: the confidence boost, the motivation which leads to increased mental activity in the language and a period of faster learning. The wash-forward effect from the interview produced a desire to use the language at a more complex level, lifting me off the plateau where I had been. It aroused a desire to communicate in similar situations, to look for further linguistic challenges, always realistic challenges of course, to look constantly for situations which I considered just a little bit difficult for me and to continuously redefine my ability in the target language.

This has helped me as a teacher to convincingly persuade my students to try to do things they think they aren't able to do. Take for example typical business students who would like to be able to participate in negotiations but don't think they have the linguistic ability to do so: A well-chosen negotiation role-play, adapted to the learner's ability but a little challenging, can provide an opportunity for a successful exchange information and a positive outcome to the negotiation, thus giving the student a strong motivational boost.

The teachers skill lies in finding the right level of challenge. A too challenging exercise could lead to a sort of defeat experience, so it's important to select tasks carefully. To get the most from the erfolgserlebnis it can be celebrated by drawing the student's attention to their success and by asking them to imagine themselves succeeding outside of the classroom in similar real-life situations, to lead them towards being able to transfer the glow of the success experience in the role play over into a real-life situation.

The success experience is vital to the next step up the ladder of language learning and in teaching we can try to find opportunities to lay "success traps", or offer success possibilities to the students so that they come to the language classroom with a positive attitude. So it's not just a question of two or three tricks, the state of mind plays an important role. It's not always necessary for the student to be conscious of the way in which the success experience motivates and stimulates.

The learner's priority is always to be able to use what they learn in the classroom in their lives, this is especially obvious with business students, and the more they feel they're able to use the more they'll try to use in real-life. A very important part of the teacher's job is to help them believe in their ability and to try to use the language in real-life.

I once read somewhere that teaching was showing people what they already know but I could never understand how this could be applied to foreign-language teaching, where the student genuinely seems to lack the knowledge he desires, but I have learned that the student nearly always knows more than he thinks he knows and can do more than he thinks he can.