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MAJOR ARTICLES

In Defence of the Individual in the Language Learning Environment

Feride Hekimgil, Turkey

Feride Hekimgil was born into a multicultural, multilingual family in Basingstoke in 1955. She grew up and completed her primary and secondary education in Istanbul, after which she attended Boğaziçi University, an English medium university in the same city. After graduating in 1976 having received a BA in English Literature and her teaching certificate from the Department of Education, she started teaching English as a foreign language at the same university. She has been teaching at the same university for the past 39 years. E-mail: pheridey@yahoo.com

From the individual to the collective

Education is defined in the Longman English dictionary as the training or teaching of the mind and character, from which you would be forgiven for deducing that its focus is the individual and in ‘theory’ you would be right. The trouble with this definition is that it is not really very practical, not at all feasible and ‘untidy’ to say the least; much better to go down a familiar path and group ‘like’ components, i.e. students, together to form manageable units in order to streamline the whole process, i.e. schooling. This inherent human tendency to categorize and pigeon hole is eminently practical and in a lot of cases works beautifully on the condition that the subjects share the requisite qualities that allow them to be gathered under a single heading or placed in a single category like androids, smart phones and laptop computers. The desire to tidy everything up by placing ‘things’ together in neat little piles rather than allowing them to roam freely anywhere and everywhere disrupting the natural order of ‘things’ as decreed by the powers that be ironically also dominates most human activities and education is no exception.

The problem is that however hard we try to categorize, however much we would love to pretend that the cultivation, teaching and training of the mind and character is a ‘group activity’, it is not and never will be for the simple reason that the target we are dealing with, humans, were not mass produced on an assembly line; they were individually crafted if you like and no single one is wired quite the same way. To further complicate matters, the wiring forms an intricate pattern each strand of which impacts and is impacted by a host of other strands. Nothing is that simple when dealing with individuals however much we would like it to be.

Each of us is born with a host of features and proclivities which are honed and sharpened by experience or left dormant. To further complicate matters, the form the fine tuning instigated by experience takes varies greatly from individual to individual: while a spate of bullying in childhood may turn one person into a thug, it may lead another into charity work for example. The possible variables at issue here are infinite meaning that no two individuals are the same; a truism educators are quick to pay lip service to but are equally quick to brush under the carpet. It is, after all, far easier to deal with ‘young learners, second language learners, adult learners, special needs students’ en masse. Easier certainly, but more efficient, most certainly not. The standard approach is to persist in the ‘one prescription fits all’ approach and hope that fall-out is minimal. Considering how life changing individual experience can be, such an approach is neither humane nor efficient.

Placing the individual front and center

Individuals make up classes, classes make up schools and schools in turn make up the future of a country. Glossing over individual needs or worse, disregarding them as minor inconveniences bodes ill for the individual who will perhaps not achieve his full potential honing all those features that will bring him peace and happiness. It also bodes ill for the community in which this individual lives and works as his individual contribution, large or small, will impact the whole. After all, it only takes one discordant sound to ruin the rendition of an orchestral piece by a great composer. The well-being and happiness of society cannot and should not be considered as distinct from that of each individual member.

MRI imaging now makes it possible to study the human brain in ever more detail: scientists have mapped the brain, can observe the wonderful electrical circuit therein, and how connections strengthen and weaken. The more we learn about this seat of learning and character building, the more, surely, we must come to accept the very individual nature of learning. The ideal scenario would be one where each individual’s needs, talents and proclivities are assessed and where a targeted approach to learning takes place. In some areas, thanks to developments in computer technology, individuals are being catered to a far larger extent than ever before but the assumption that the target in the case of teaching is the group and not the individuals who make up the group is unlikely to change. That is, for the time being at least, the case but it doesn’t mean the individual should be completely ignored in favor of the group.

The role of ‘thru-put’

‘Thru-put’ as it is popularly known is very much operational in large rambling ‘student factories’ like the prep divisions of major English medium universities, our own, Boğaziçi University, among them. Thousands of students are placed in the prep schools of universities thanks to the centralized university entrance exam. This raw material, the prep students, is categorized into levels via a placement test and each group then undergoes various procedures to furnish it with the requisite properties for university study, i.e. academic English. The assembly line operates 24 /7 to outfit each group with the requisite amount of competence in academic English and turn them over, neatly packaged, to their departments. The system is a vortex that each and everyone is sucked into and spat out come graduation or retirement the raison d’être being that nothing else will work with the numbers at hand; true enough but surely a compromise is also possible. The ‘all or nothing’ approach is neater and more practical but far from ideal. Something we find it so easy to forget is that our moral responsibility is not to stop the future but to channel our destiny in humane directions and to ease the trauma of transition (Alvin Toeffler); not something we are going to achieve with the production- line-approach to education.

The mass production approach to second language teaching incorporates a very popular feature of the assembly line: departmentalization or the breaking down of tasks into small meaningless units in the form of listening tasks, which stand alone and don’t lead anywhere, reading tasks lacking any pre or post reading activities to contextualize them and lend meaning to the whole activity, writing tasks that come at you out of the blue and the crowning glory: vocabulary exercises that stand alone. The assembly line worked just fine for Henry Ford when the role of a certain individual worker was to stick a screw on the bottom left hand corner of a panel for example. The worker would not even need to know he was building a car to successfully accomplish his task; he certainly never saw his role in the completion of the task as anything but meaningless. He was an expendable cog in the system.

Extrapolating to the learning process, it is easy to see the damage that ‘mass dissection’ does to the learning process. Given that we learn and remember what we learn by forming meaningful connections, the damage that is done is phenomenal. The process applied runs counter to the operating system we were born with; i.e. the way we think. It is all very well to say that the brain is like a computer but the truth is the similarities are minimal: for one thing we cannot upgrade to ‘a more efficient system like Windows 10 for example. Secondly, a computer will involve the operator in every decision that needs to be made at every step of the way and if anything goes wrong it is because the operator has made the wrong decision. Not so with the brain; the human brain, having been programmed by the Creator if you like, has a fixed operating system which no hacker can penetrate. This has important implications for second language acquisition.

Since the brain acquires knowledge and commits it to memory by means of forming meaningful connections and through constant revision to strengthen the memory trace, random vocabulary out of a vocabulary book which relates to nothing in the syllabus; that is to say, is just there is deemed unnecessary by the brain and promptly swept away. Vocabulary items make up sentences; sentences form paragraphs which in turn form texts. The only way to learn vocabulary and collocations is to expose the brain to plenty of reading and listening, which is followed by the post reading activity par excellence, a writing task which weaves all that has been learnt into a meaningful whole. Research indicates that language learners need to be exposed to new words and collocations a minimum of seven times in context for their brains to be convinced to retain the information.

The most efficient way to learn a language is to draw all the strands together rather like weaving a web with an intricate pattern to form a meaningful whole; it is not dissecting or departmentalization. Analyzing each component to death, assigning painfully boring homework like memorizing vocabulary lists or making sentences with words the learner has met for the first time in a list will not only be pointless but very distressing for the learner who will naturally fail to grasp subtle differences in meaning, fail to learn, and decide he is a dunce. The long term psychological damage done by educators who persist in ill founded learning methods is phenomenal: learners will develop mental blocks about language learning as a result of bashing their heads against the brick wall of the brain’s operating system. Worse still, it is very hard to disabuse the learners of the fact that they have been going about learning a second language in the wrong way.

There is another area of damage which may not be immediately obvious but which has devastating consequences nevertheless: the changes triggered in the structure of the brain through lack of cognitive challenge. A learning system where all the components of the language are brought together and during which the student is required to draw on videos and podcasts he has listened to and taken notes from and texts he has read and made notes on to write an essay for instance is a far more sophisticated cognitive challenge than taking a topic which relates to nothing in particular and writing about it against the clock; especially if the so called writing involves what could be called ‘the essay writing template’. Such a template would involve ‘a plan which is set in stone’ a list of pat phrases and clichés and minimal original thought. It is cognitive challenges that help grey matter in the brain to grow and simplistic tasks that instigate loss of the same. Dumbing down of the approach to language learning has significant implications for the intellectual development and cognitive potential of the individual and by association, the society as a whole. The ability to analyze information, edit it, draw conclusions, generalize and build a rational argument which is fostered by a more integrated approach to language learning will have far reaching consequences and important implications for future intellectual pursuits of the individual thus shaping his intellectual destiny and all he is thus able to contribute to the progress and well being of the community of which he is a part. Above all else, therefore, it is our moral and civic responsibility as teachers to consider the bigger picture and the wider implications of methods we employ while instructing our students. The blinkered approach can and does have far reaching consequences.

The methods applied in big conglomerates or on the assembly lines of major companies work in the right setting but not in language learning because the learner does need to be cognizant of the end product: competence in the second language he is endeavoring to acquire. Most jobs in the business world or in factories now involve apps, standard procedures, and computer programs which no one questions and not everyone understands. I recall a financial director of a large company telling me how exasperated he got with his accountant who couldn’t think beyond a computer program designed for accounting. Take another example, let us imagine, for the sake of argument, that your flat screen television is out of order and you take it to be repaired. The technician will log on to the computer and enter the problem; pinpoint what has to be changed and replace it with a new part; he understands the inner workings of the television only a little better than you do and would be lost without his computer program to tell him which part to replace. Apply the same system to language learning and you get a bizarre picture: listening, reading, writing, vocabulary and grammar all in their neat little compartments with little or no overlap. From this it follows that the focus of each skill each week may be completely different, which is deemed fine; after all, the left hand does not need to know what the right hand is doing. Thus, for example the greenhouse effect may be the focus of the listening lesson, while inequality in the modern world may be the title of the reading lesson. This could be followed with a writing lesson where the student is asked to write narratives and a vocabulary book where the unit to be covered involves travel vocabulary. The hope that if a sufficient amount of ‘stuff’ is thrown at the learner, some will surely stick and provided it does, the student can pass the proficiency, exit the system and become someone else’s problem is a shortsighted, inefficient and frankly unethical attitude. However, ‘perceived efficiency’ seems to trump actual efficiency.

Applying the methods that help churn out consumer durables at fully automated factories to great lumbering language schools may seem inevitable given the amount of ‘raw material’ entering one end and the number of ‘students who are proficient in English’ required to exit the other. However, the margin of error here involves living breathing individuals with their unique talents, failings, dreams and aspirations. The punishing pace of ‘the system’ almost guarantees that individuals fall through the cracks but luckily they land on the doorstep of learning coaches or writing center tutors, at least at our university.

Enter the learning coach and the writing center tutor

The role of a learning coach in such a system is tough as his first duty is to disabuse the learner of all the misconceptions concerning language learning that have been permitted to take root in his mind and fester. An educational system that stresses the importance of details the analysis of which will help the learner grasp the whole and encourages the use of appropriate formulas where all else fails make second language learning in the prep schools an uphill battle and needlessly stressful. There are significant similarities between the way many rambling prep departments and language teaching institutions operate and the way assembly lines operate: enter Henry Ford and the automobile factory. On an assembly line, the worker is required to ‘do’ and not question or think; the whole mantra of assembly lines is that cognitive skills humans are endowed with are not ‘overly stretched’. There are operating procedures that are followed and which may be flawed, inefficient, expensive or counterproductive but are never questioned because that is the way ‘things have always been done’. The same logic applied to the language learning environment comes up with the essay writing templates and ‘key words’ that all essays need to include for example. Gone is the need to develop a rational argument with all that such an endeavor entails and in comes the patch-work that is built up into a so called essay. The students quite naturally form the erroneous impression that writing an academic essay is rather like assembling Lego bricks to form a structure, an attitude with devastating consequences.

As far our students are concerned, writing is a separate unit which involves pulling a topic out of the blue and giving themselves 40 minutes to write 250 words on it. While doing so, they feel they have to sprinkle the essay liberally with transition words like hence, thus, moreover and the like, start each paragraph with a cliché which has been taken off a list that each writing book and writing handout produced these days feels compelled to tout such as “Opponents of this idea claim that, it is widely believed, claimed or thought that, one fact to support the above argument and the like” and round it all off with a minimum of original English. It is hardly worth pointing out where that approach gets them: the resulting piece of writing is certainly English but an academic essay it is not.

Persuading the students who visit a learning center or a writing center that so called ‘formulas’ have no place in essay writing proper, and that learners are expected to develop a rational argument, which inevitably involves a host of cognitive powers; i.e., thinking is the unenviable duty of the tutor. The tutor’s job is made further difficult by the fact that most writing books on the market, especially those targeting American College students are full of the clichés and formulas; after all how can something which has been so widely published be so wrong? It defies reason and the students are understandably dubious. In short, the tutor needs to have great powers of persuasion, great determination and endless patience to be able to dispel the fog and set the learner on the correct path.

The case for reading is no different: deep reading and speed reading may sound similar as they rhyme but they are worlds apart. On most standardized tests, students are required to read easily manageable morsels of information and answer multiple choice questions. On the proficiency exam our prep students sit at the end of their first year however, students are faced with a decent text of four or five pages – not paragraphs – and every possible type of question. There is no question of skimming the surface and expecting to provide sensible answers to the questions; students discover pretty quickly that they have to actually read the text properly and therein lies the problem: they have had little practice with deep reading. Come the age of eighteen and university, after having spent their whole lives as students dealing with bite size chunks of knowledge and short sharp answers to questions they are expected to answer against the clock, they are suddenly expected to read every line of a long text, identify main ideas, analyze support, see what conclusions the writer has reached, what generalizations he has made and then think about the implications of it all; a formidable task. Persuading the individual learner that all this cannot and should not be done on the hop is the unenviable task of the learning coach or tutor. Persuading someone who has been tackling reading material like Jason Button to suddenly slow to crawl to be able to succeed is a tough call. It is also a bitter pill for the student to swallow as he realizes that the way he has approached reading and writing all his life is wrong. The problems of the learning coach do not stop there: there is also the issue of connecting the skills.

Someone once said “I write well because I read a lot”, something which we would all be quick to agree with but which falls on deaf ears where the modern Turkish eighteen year old is concerned. Naturally, the learning coach faces an uphill battle with a student who may come to see him and say he has just failed listening and that is what he must study; or his reading and listening is fine but he needs to study vocabulary; or even better, that he has problems with timing so he needs to keep practicing against the clock. The learning coach then has the unenviable task of having to explain until he is blue in the face that timing is a reflection of general level of competence and listening, reading and writing skills are intricately woven together as skills. He will have to explain that a more holistic and integrated system is much more effective and convince a very skeptical learner that the listening should lead to reading and both should culminate in an all inclusive writing activity. Most students I have worked with have a eureka moment when they discover for themselves, after being begged and cajoled to do so, that such a writing task consolidates learning. The biggest hurdle is trying to persuade them not to consider vocabulary study as a separate entity; separate that is from spoken and written language. The desire to analyze a whole, break it up into its constituent parts and then proceed to further analyze each is ingrained in the student psyche, which makes fighting it, something any learning coach worth his salt has no choice but to do, a challenge to say the very least.

The system, a colossus, will often win. The problem is further exacerbated if, as in our institution, students are allowed to pass individual skills on the proficiency; in this case, changing mind sets and overturning the segmented approach becomes well nigh impossible. A system constructed to increase speed, efficiency and boost success rates thus becomes bogged down; a perfectly predictable but partly avoidable outcome. A collective approach, or a certain amount of stream lining is necessary, efficient and unavoidable but this practice should not be implemented to the detriment of that ‘expendable cog’, the individual learner, as expendable, he is most certainly not. As previously mentioned, such an approach has the potential to do irreparable damage to his cognitive skills. Safety nets should be in place throughout the journey to the proficiency exam to help stragglers. One such measure is the learning coach and the other is the writing center tutor; both have an important role in helping individuals and both need to be prepared to take on more than they bargained for while doing their jobs as their focus is the individual. Individual attention does exist in the system the only thing is that it seems, inexplicably, to peter out.

The younger the students in question are in most parts of the world, the greater is the individual attention they will receive. In accordance with this rule of thumb, kindergarteners and primary school students are watched over by teachers and teaching assistants who remain far more focused on the individual. Individual needs are shunted to the back burner come secondary school and completely disappear from view at university where, unlike previous stages in education, the professors have had no specialist teacher training. For some bizarre reason, it is widely felt that teacher training courses cater to those dealing with individuals below the age of eighteen. The logical conclusion to be drawn here is that after a certain age, students can be taught by any Tom, Dick or Harry, which in turn means we can forget about individual attention. Alternatively, it could logically be concluded that it is felt they no longer need individual attention as they have ceased to be individuals and have been assimilated. This is purely wishful thinking on the part of the powers that be: the need for individual attention ends when the last nail is driven into one’s coffin; no society has ever managed to automate the production system, education, to that extent, and that includes totalitarian states too.

This brings us to the important role a learning coach plays in a language learning environment such as ours where it is all too easy for the individual to feel lost, alienated, helpless or confused. The said expert needs to be furnished with the requisite skill set and have plenty of experience teaching at all levels to be able to fulfill his duties successfully. This means that ideally, it should be members of staff who have been working at a specific teaching establishment for quite a number of years rather than the novices that are appointed to this post. In this particular case, second language acquisition, it also means that the said person should have plenty of experience teaching at all levels and this is important in a developing country such as our own for one important reason: the general characteristics of the type of student at each level are very different.

The student body

In Turkey, there are vast differences in terms of culture, social and economic background as well as quality and type of life between the more industrial and European west of the country and the more agrarian, poorer and ‘middle eastern’ east. The young people in the more affluent west have the option of going to private schools, good science high schools and the like while those in the east more often than not, have to make do with state schools. The implications of the educational backgrounds of the two groups are obvious: while those in the west may be more familiar with the concept of a foreign language and have one under their belts already, those in the east may only have a smattering of English. Moreover, Turkish could well be a second language for some ethnic groups. According to our placement test results, students from the more affluent west, who have had more and better instruction in English as a second language, mostly end up in our intermediate and advanced classes and those from the east, who have had far fewer opportunities, mostly end up in pre intermediate and beginner level classes. In short, while those who start their university education higher up the social and cultural ladder are clearly the more advantaged group while those who start lower down are more disadvantaged and this is one important point any learning coach has to keep well in mind.

The difference indicated above between the groups of students in the prep classes is also reflected in family background: those in the more affluent west often have parents who are university graduates, which in turn impacts the home environment. There is often a culture of reading books and newspapers, following cultural events and enjoying hobbies for example. Some students may have travelled more widely, enjoyed sea-side holidays and interacted with foreigners. Such students will have broadened their horizons and developed their perspectives to an extent that students from eastern regions may only dream of. While those in the west live in sprawling metropolises with all the modern conveniences such a life entails, many in the east may be living in small towns or villages where the main occupation is agriculture and animal husbandry. The type of cultural background a language learner has makes a huge difference to how easy or difficult he finds the task of second language learning; especially one involving deep reading and academic essay writing.

A third factor that any tutor needs to keep in mind is the difference between students in terms of financial background as it ends up impacting language learning. There is a wonderful picture in, I believe, the British Museum titled Venus Frigida, which depicts a very chilly Venus who, being in physical discomfort, is paying not the slightest attention to the lovers around her. In the same vein, hunger, cold, worry about the future or whether a meager scholarship will be enough to purchase much needed resource books as well as paying for the next meal will, without doubt, prevent a student from devoting his full attention to his studies despite the best of intensions. It is all very well to say this should hardly concern the tutor but it does; I have ended up intervening with charities and benevolent individuals for help and cooperating with the requisite agencies and units in the university; it is just something that needs to be done. I am lucky to have a relatively spacious room with a table that can sit up to ten students and one thing I never fail to do is provide healthy snacks for students. These healthy edibles – nuts, dried fruit, simit, a popular Turkish bread role and the like – are always in center of the table for all who want them. I also have a kettle and tea bags for those who want something hot. The edge taken off their hunger and with a hot drink inside them, the students are far more ready to focus and do what the coach or tutor desires them to do. Only yesterday, a young businessman and former graduate of our university bought a laptop for a poor student who badly needed one and I am in the process of procuring a second one; getting through university without a computer of some sort is unthinkable in the modern age. Such problems having been dealt with, the student is better able to focus on his studies, which is, after all, what the tutor or coach has been trying to achieve.

All the problems highlighted above also mean that the second language learner may have a host of adaptation problems both to life in a big city and the university proper. The coach or the tutor in a country such as our own has to be prepared to lend a sympathetic ear should the student wish to discuss such issues and provide practical advice. I have had many a student who has been on the verge of tears in my office as they described their sense of isolation in the big city, the unfamiliar anonymity of city relations, the lack of familiar social networks and accustomed way of life. Left alone, students do adapt, of course they do but the price they pay in terms of lost time and poor grades is high: they fall behind in their studies. Unsurprisingly, depression is quite high among students who may need counseling; something which is also in short supply despite the best intentions but that is a separate issue. Considering that these students are mostly beginner or pre intermediate students, catching up becomes a mammoth task. Intervening early and cooperating with the counseling service is important if these students are to be helped. Shrugging one’s shoulders and claiming it isn’t part of a tutor’s job description may be the way big business operates but it shouldn’t be the way universities operate. Anything which directly impacts learning is and should be part of the purview of a learning center or a writing center. Where humans are concerned, there is no clear delineation of where a tutor’s job ends and another official’s begins. The staff at universities such as our own must be prepared to communicate regularly and cooperate to help students fulfill their potential without getting territorial. Egos have no place in efforts to help students; cooperation and team work are key.

Getting down to brass tacks

The first meeting with a student involves a long chat during which the coach has to be prepared to do some serious listening. During this conversation the coach will become familiar with both the educational and family background of the student and begin to form an opinion as to the difficulties that need addressing. Non- learning related practical problems which inevitably surface during such meetings may not always lend themselves to immediate solutions but even just listening is a great help. The main business of the day can, at this point, be addressed: correcting misconceptions concerning language learning. In order to be able to do this, the student needs to be made to understand how the brain processes new information and what methods need to be employed to guarantee retention and speed up learning in the most efficient way.

Many have been quick to compare the human brain to a computer, which is rather unfortunate and misleading: for one thing the operating system of the brain cannot be upgraded, deleted and rewritten for example; we have to work with the system we are born with. First and foremost, the brain acquires knowledge through forming connections whose staying power is linked to the amount of revision that takes place. New information, let us assume that in this case it is vocabulary, will not be ‘saved’ just because the individual may want it to be; unlike the computer where once you click save, the vocabulary item will remain accessible. The students listen in disbelief as I tell them that they need to read or hear a new word or collocation a minimum of seven times for the brain to consign the said item to long term memory. They find out, to their relief, that the fact that they forgot the words on a vocabulary list by the following day is quite understandable. The sting comes when they realize that acquiring vocabulary or collocations involves copious amounts of reading and listening during which process the brain forms logical connections between the word and the context in which it has been used both in terms of structure and meaning. Return to the same context regularly and the memory trace becomes firmly entrenched. Having completed this mini lecture on neuroscience, the coach or tutor has to move on to how all this applies to deep reading and language learning.

The first obstacle to be overcome is the by that point deep seated belief in the segmented approach to learning. Students have to be made to accept that research precedes writing of all kinds and especially academic essays. The students are shown that they need to watch videos, listen to podcasts and take notes, read academic texts and make notes and only then write their essay. The learning coach or tutor is likely to discover, at this stage, that the student has never made notes from a reading text; tragic but true. He may then have to interrupt the proceedings and address this problem: what I recommend is a good power point or videos detailing how the Cornell Method works. I have found that it is by far the easiest way to get the point across; the websites I use for this purpose can be found in the list provided in the appendix. Getting back to the task at hand, drawing a title out of a hat and timing oneself to write about it is a very inefficient way to develop one’s writing skills as the resulting piece of writing will be a reflection of the existing knowledge base of the individual. What is more he may very naturally draw on his native language when trying to express an idea he is not capable of doing in his second language. This method of trying to improve one’s essay writing skills is slow, cumbersome and inefficient. Better to employ a method by means of which one can broaden one’s knowledge base and ensure what is learnt in fact sticks by writing about it. What this means is that the student is encouraged to watch videos and listen to podcasts pertaining to a topic, read about it, compile notes, form opinions and then write. Study the following example, a topic off my blog http://theproproom.blogspot.com

RUMINATION: THE DANGER OF DWELLING ON THINGS

There is nothing worse for your state of mind than brooding or ruminating as it has some devastating effects. Do your research and find out what they are; then write an essay discussing them.

What is rumination: two podcasts

“Mini episode 6: rumination” (tape script available)
“Rumination”

Reading material to make notes on or annotate:

Videos to watch and make notes on:

By involving listening, deep reading as well as writing, such an activity is an effective way of studying. During this process, the student will hear various words and collocations in context and learn the word so completely that he will actually be able to use them flawlessly. This he will be able to do because he will not only have learnt the meaning of the word, often including subtle shades of meaning, but also how it relates to the sentence as a whole and the text. Students, even the most intelligent ones, are tempted to assume that words in a foreign language have a list of synonyms all of which can replace the said word in question: take important, significant, crucial and vital for example. I usually enquire of the student why a language would have a set of words which mean exactly the same thing and whether it makes more sense for these words to be in the same ball park if you will, and reflect shades of meaning. The fact that many dictionaries list groups of words as synonyms is confusing of course but what I like to tell my students is that they can’t learn words out of dictionaries and there is no alternative to reading. Thesaurus’ are also to be discouraged as students assume that all the words provided as ‘synonyms’ actually all mean exactly the same thing and are used in exactly the same way. Gone are shades of meaning and words like livid, furious, angry, irritated and annoyed all end up meaning angry if you like. Students have to be made to understand that there is no magic repository of vocabulary that will replace deep reading.

Fortunately, thanks to modern technology, there is something for everyone out there on the World Wide Web, enlightening the students about which is also part of the coach or tutor’s remit. That first conversation with the student should also include information about websites and apps that may be useful, and research techniques. Even the reasonably tech savvy youth may not immediately realize the extent of the material available online. There is an app for just about anything that can be imagined and it is only natural for ELT to feature highly among the countless choices. Nowadays, it is even possible to find apps for old favorites like Raymond Murphy’s English Grammar in use. Those days when stacks of graded readers circulated the class are also over as they are available free of charge on the internet; on most sites, an audio recording of the book is also available. In fact, the number of language learning websites that combine reading and listening is growing every day. The same is true for grammar with numerous teachers posting videos covering every grammar point under the sun. There are even complete courses at beginner level, which I recommend to our program one students who are having difficulty or falling behind. There are also more advanced grammar videos available for pre intermediate and intermediate students. (See the appendix for the list of websites I give the students). One could argue that the modern youth could easily think of all this and find these websites but this is far from being the case; at least not in our neck of the woods.

Independent study is an alien concept for our students and just like the toddler needs to be encouraged to stand up, test his legs and explore, so do our students. It takes time to persuade the uninitiated that a teacher explaining a concept on a video can be just as effective as one in flesh in blood but with most, the curtain eventually rises revealing a whole world where everything a student could possibly wish for is there for the taking. The students should be discouraged from running to mummy when they have the slightest problem; instead they should Google it or check for an app. By doing so, they are forced to combine skills such as listening and grammar or reading and listening for example, which is also a step in the right direction as far as language learning goes. It takes only a few such forays into this wonderful new environment for students to see the advantages. After all, technology comes naturally to the modern youth so it makes perfect sense to incorporate this extension of their lives into the learning process. An important advantage of this new teaching aid is that it is pretty much equal to “learning without borders”; the bus journey to school, that half hour before you drop off at night, the walk home all become learning opportunities. Where is the harm in increased exposure to the target language; especially, when this exposure is such fun and you may be quite sure that it is highly enjoyable. There are even such sights as “Jokes in Levels”, a super gap filler, or lyrics.com where once the language has been selected, the visitor to the sight is presented with famous songs in four levels. The student then watches the video and fills in the gaps in the lyrics as he listens. There is also a similar sight where students watch an excerpt from a movie and select the correct answer to questions posed. Language learning is a budding industry, and the degree of proliferation is astounding.

This initial talk with the student makes or breaks the relationship the coach or tutor is trying form with the student and therefore, no effort should be spared to make it work. Delivering the talk on auto pilot like a bored sales clerk at a department store may be acceptable on paper but will not achieve its purpose. Keeping the momentum and enthusiasm going as far as the coach is concerned is no easy matter; especially if it is the fiftieth time he has done it and this is why the role of learning coach or tutor should be saved for the truly dedicated; for those single minded individuals who have found their vocations by entering into this role. It is important to remember these words of Winston Churchill: The further backward you can look, the further forward you can see. By looking backward, the coach is able to get truly acquainted with the students he has set out to help and is thus in a position to make a real difference.

Providing feedback

Once the metaphorical roadblocks have been cleared out of the way and the whole vista has been laid bare, it is up to the student to follow along the path and discover all there is to be seen, with encouragement and positive reinforcement from the coach or tutor. It is recommended that the coach have an open door policy and not be too much of a stickler for formalities: a relaxed easy going atmosphere will encourage students to share more, which will in turn guide the coach in the way he deals with the student. As familiarity grows and problems become more obvious, solutions also emerge. Once the correct approach to language learning has been ingrained in the student, he will also venture to address problems he encounters using techniques he has learnt. Hopefully, the habits thus formed will continue for a lifetime helping the student throughout the rest of his time at university and later on in life by showing him how to stand on his own feet, get a grip of unfamiliar situations and tackle problems without being put off or intimidated. Working with a good learning coach can thus be a life changing experience.

Once the student has been familiarized with the process, he is expected to do his research, write an essay and return with it to the coach or tutor. I personally encourage students to bring soft copies of the essay which we go over together or as a group. A good learning center needs to be equipped with all that the digital world has to offer and first and foremost among such gadgets is a large flat screen television which should be linked up to the desktop. Such a set up enables each essay to be reflected onto the screen and studied in small groups. Most students are creatures of habit and will come into the writing center at around the same times thus meeting and forming friendships with each other. Thus, the group round the table facing the screen and discussing the essay quickly becomes a very amicable and close knit one; breakfast is shared, study groups are formed and everyone learns from each other.

The first time round, it is a good idea to highlight the areas with problems in the essay and then allow the group to discuss and try to correct them. There will always be some errors which the students, in all fairness, cannot be expected to be able to correct; those should be tackled while underlining the errors and not left to the students. The coach or tutor should then step aside and let the students workout the problems. Jumping in with the correct forms before students have had time to think is counterproductive so the coach or tutor should bite his tongue and keep quiet. The students often end up correcting a majority of the mistakes, a process that draws their attention to similar mistakes they themselves make. This system is designed to raise awareness, which speeds up the process of learning. Once the students have done what they can, the tutor or coach should step in and go over any remaining problems. Any misunderstandings or misconceptions should also be cleared up at this point, which means that the presence of a white board or smart board is required. Last of all, the students should be given time to read the final version of the essay from beginning to end one last time before being advised to file away their essays and check back on them once they have completed their next writing task. Keeping track of problems is the student’s responsibility; a task which is much easier to do on the computer.

There is an added bonus of correcting essays in the way described above: it allows for sharing. I have started compiling zip files of essays we have corrected this way with the students’ permission to share with the larger student body and fellow teachers. Most are very happy to let me do whatever I like with them and relish the idea that they are helping others. I have now accumulated numerous files of essays which I share with the student body so that they can practice error correction; a very efficient way to eliminate chronic mistakes and clear up misunderstandings. The students are told to click open the essay, click “review” on the ribbon along the top of the screen and then click “final showing markup”. The next step is to click “original” and hey presto, the essay the student first wrote opens up before their eyes. The students are then told to try and correct the essay and click “final showing mark up” to see the corrections and comments. I have found this a highly effective study method and an almost infallible panacea to most ills essay-related. The added bonus is that such an integrated approach speeds up the process of language acquisition helping students become competent in the target language. It also helps develop habits of reading and listening that continue for a lifetime thus making sure that competence in the target language does not diminish but continues to increase. This is the ideal but the path is not so smooth with some students: enter the mavericks.

The more exceptional cases

There have been certain students in my career who have presented a more serious challenge and helping whom has required a concerted effort and hard work. The first of these types of students has been those with ADHD and it is to a particularly extreme example that I shall now turn. My first encounter with M was when she darted into my office like a creature possessed and proceeded to zip round the room like Ussein Bolt on speed. The Olympic gold for the high jump and the long jump in the animal kingdom goes, I am reliably informed, to the flea, but said flea would be relegated to second place had M been competing too. M proceeded to explain her predicament in short sharp volleys but I had already surmised that she had ADHD and should be on drugs. In desperation, I offered her tea, the worldwide panacea for all ills, and fortunately, it transpired that she was a connoisseur. Why tea you may be forgiven for wondering; you see you need to be stationary to enjoy it. She did continue jiggling her legs and gesticulating madly as she explained that she was a graduate student in environmental physics and needed to pass the proficiency in order to be able to enter her department proper and I knew what that meant: mastering deep reading and serious academic essay writing; two activities where speed is a serious handicap. M was perfectly comfortable with skimming or scanning but deep reading was something else all together. She found it very difficult to slow down the wheels in her mind from 150 m/hr to a decent 30. We did get there in the end and thanks to the patience of my teaching assistant, help from one of our resident counselors and M’s desire to succeed; she passed and entered her department. We were thus able to help one very special individual who, hopefully, will go on to do great things. In working with her, I got to see glimpses of a brilliant mind and a wonderful principled and conscientious environmentalist. If we didn’t have the safety net in place at our university, she would have slipped through the cracks of the system and we would all have lost out.

The second type of problem I wish to describe is not one with which I have had the same degree of success: the precrastinator. There have been various students in my career as a tutor and coach who have started out writing their essays at a steady 30 miles per hour if you will and come a certain point, have hit the accelerator reaching speeds of a 150. The milestone is something I like to call “the yippee moment”. The most recent such student was S, a highly intelligent graduate student who needed to pass the proficiency to continue her studies in the department of business administration. She was well read, bursting with ideas and straining at the bit by the time we had covered the basics and before you could say Jack Robinson, she was away rather like the road-runner and like him, came to a very sticky end. Essay writing has nothing in common with the 100 meter dash. The yippee moment came when she fully grasped the task in hand and her brain started churning out ideas like a machine gun. S’ reaction was to replicate this speed while putting finger to key board or pen to paper with disastrous consequences: absolute drivel. When questioned, S’ response was that she felt confident she was actually capable of expressing all the wonderful ideas that were crowding her consciousness. We would go over her essays in the manner described previously and she would identify her errors and lament her carelessness but continue to act in the very same way the next time round. Having been made to understand that at this stage, she could not possibly express all her ideas in the target language and that she should restrict herself to what she was capable of doing, she tried very hard to do so and I am confident will succeed but I haven’t been as successful in getting through to two other students suffering from the same unfortunate tendency and only hope that they don’t develop lasting complexes concerning language learning. The problem here is both one of concentration and of attention to detail and is one of the toughest problems a tutor comes across.

The third type of problem I have come across involves what I will call an extreme analytical mind typical of engineers, especially, in my experience, civil engineers. I am at a loss to explain what the reasons are but every such problem student I have had has been a civil engineer. The common passion of such students according to my observations is a desire to dissect something within an inch of its life. If electron microscopes could be successfully employed in language learning, they would be the preferred learning tool of such students. Forget about seeing the whole picture; that is out of the question. Enter analysis to an extent that would make any language teacher cringe: words are dissected with the assumption that it will help to understand sentences and grammar exercises are placed on a pedestal as the solution to all ills. As a result, reading a single page takes a painful couple of hours and writing takes even longer. Error analysis and feedback result in the student reaching for a good grammar book and more word lists. The obvious problem of a wrong approach to language learning isn’t as easy to tackle as may be imagined because the student is very hard to convince of the efficacy of a more integrated and holistic approach. Such students I have had have listened politely but continued to insist that such methods wouldn’t work for them and they couldn’t write properly or read comfortably unless they understood each clause properly. They shared a desire to translate to their native language and use their native language as a yard stick. They have also had great difficulty both making notes from reading material and drawing all the research together to form a coherent piece of writing hinting at problems related to certain cognitive skills. They have begged for formulas to cling to rather like Linus’ blanket in the famous Peanuts cartoons. The tutor has to scale the piles of grammar books and fight his way through to the student; a process that takes time because he has to make sure he continues to be respected and trusted by the student. Telling the student not to be fool and pointing out that learning a language is in no way similar to determining the best mixture of concrete will alienate the student and effectively put a stop to any positive development as far as language learning goes. Determination, patience and plenty of good will eventually gets the job done earning the lasting respect of the student and bringing a tremendous sense of achievement to the tutor.

Conclusion

These are only three of the language learning problems tutors and coaches are likely to encounter; there are many others as the human population is extremely diverse and each individual language learner is, to some extent at least, unique. The tutor or coach needs to remember this while trying to help remove obstacles, indicate the correct course of action and check progress. By doing so, he will be able to serve a larger purpose in addition to tackling the immediate problem of language learning: he will be able to help shape habits, ways of thinking and even personality traits. He will be able to foster a more constructive view of failure as an opportunity for self improvement; he will be able encourage greater patience and determination; he will be able to help enhance certain cognitive skills and effectively contribute to the overall well being of the student by helping him reach his full potential. The opportunity to work with a good learning coach is a privilege but the job of the latter is one that involves a lot of responsibility, a love of people and desire to help them.