Humanising Language Teaching
Year 2; Issue 4; Jul 2000

by Herbert Puchta
Pädagogische Akademie, University of Graz, Austria

There is general agreement among language teaching methodologists and practitioners alike that there are no easy answers to the question of what it is that determines success in the foreign language class. Earl Stevick claims that "success depends less on materials, techniques and linguistic analyses, and more on what goes on inside and between the people in the classroom" (1980: 4). This implies that there is a wide range of factors that influence the outcomes of the teaching / learning process. Whereas Stevick does not maintain that materials and the skills and techniques that teacher training generally tends to focus on are insignificant, he stresses the even greater importance of less obvious processes in language learning. In this paper, it is these less obvious processes that I am mainly going to look at. l will stress the focal role in these processes of the positive and negative beliefs of both learners and teachers, and I will discuss the significant influence that higher order beliefs, beliefs about capabilities and beliefs about identity, have on the students' learning outcomes, and in particular in determining their motivation and influencing their self esteem.

This should not be dismissed as advocacy of what might be called 'flower-power teaching'. I do not claim that all the teacher in the EFL classroom needs to do is think positively and everything will be all right. Nor do I propose that the only reason for failure in language learning is, or even can be, a lack of positive beliefs. Quite the contrary: we should be wary of simplistic propositions of this kind, which in reality amount to nothing more than wishful thinking. However, there is more than anecdotal evidence that beliefs do play a significant role in areas of life as diverse as art, sport, health and learning. In medicine, for example, it is well documented that placebos do have a surprisingly high healing effect, although when one looks at their ingredients from a scientific point of view, they definitely should not make any difference. Likewise, even the most traditional representatives of the medical profession will not deny that patients can significantly support their healing process if they truly believe that they can get well again. In the same way, in the foreign language classroom, who would not agree that a student who has supportive beliefs will have a better basis for success than someone who is convinced that they are a hopeless case when it comes to language learning? Two examples from case- studies may illustrate this.

Some time ago I was asked to do work as a consultant for a senior business executive of a large company. He was learning Spanish as a foreign language. His mother tongue was English, and his aim was to develop enough competence in Spanish to be able to communicate with business partners from Spanish-speaking markets both professionally and socially. After a semi-intensive course of about a year or so, his listening and speaking skills had reached intermediate level, and both his teacher and he himself were quite pleased with the results. Soon, however, one striking problem arose. Whenever he was supposed to make a telephone call in Spanish, especially, when he was rung up by someone speaking Spanish, he experienced total failure. "I just don't know what to do," he commented. "As soon as I hear the other person's voice, my mind seems to go blank and I have a total blackout. Then I feel like an idiot."

The man's 'failure' certainly could not be explained using any of the standard arguments. Neither did he show any lack of motivation: on the contrary, he was highly motivated. Nor was he a person who one could in any way call unintelligent. In addition, he was receiving up-to-date practical language teaching. In fact, his teacher tried everything she could think of to help, from intensive practising of repair strategies in the foreign language (for example, asking the other person to repeat what had been said, to speak more slowly, etc.) to simulated phone calls in the classroom.

I set up a simulation that came close to the 'real' situation that he would normally fail in. We arranged for his teacher to telephone him from the next-door office and talk Spanish to him while I was sitting with him in his office in order to be able to observe what was going on. It turned out that he had a very powerful strategy of blocking himself off from his own resources. The process he went through was more or less like this: as soon as he heard someone speaking Spanish to him over the telephone, he would get a very strong feeling of what he called "incompetence". Almost at the same time as this feeling occurred, he would see a picture in his mind's eye which he described as "very negative". He found later that the picture was a memory of a situation at school in which, as a twelve or thirteen-year-old, he had been ridiculed by a teacher in front of his classmates. Finally, in addition to his feeling of incompetence and the memory of the situation at school, he would go into an inner monologue, saying to himself something like, "I'll never be able to do this."

It is common knowledge that making a telephone call in the foreign language is much more demanding than talking to a person face-to-face, partly because of the lack of visual clues that could assist us in the process of interpreting meaning. Instead of using his undoubtedly rich cognitive resources which he needed to support him in the task, the business executive experienced stress stemming from a combination of affective sources (his emotions), visual memories (of a past negative experience) and auditory processes (his inner monologue). This complex activation of his neurology led to an emotional block and a limiting belief, which he actually verbalised when he said to me, "I'll never be able to do this."

The second case-study was carried out in a class of eight-year-old Austrian learners of English as a foreign language. One of the children in that class was a girl called Barbara. She was the child in the class who clearly excelled in learning the foreign language. Not surprisingly, an interview with her, focusing on her thought and emotional processes during the language lessons, showed that she found the lessons highly enjoyable. It also turned out that she had clear ideas concerning why it was good for her to learn a foreign language and what she wanted to achieve. When we were talking to her, one of the things we were particularly interested in was her perception of learning situations in which she was not successful. Below is an excerpt from the interview. (The interview was carried out in German, and has been translated into English.)

At this point in the interview, Barbara has just commented on how much at ease she is with remembering sentences or words that she has previously heard her teacher use, and how she finds it enjoyable playing with these sentences and trying to use them meaningfully. She was then asked:

I: OK, let's say you can't remember it, even if you think very hard. What do you do then?
B: (laughing) That doesn't matter.
I: It doesn't matter? What do you mean?
B: Well, it doesn't matter if I can't do it now.
I: Uhuh.
B: Yeah, then I just tell myself, one day I will be able to do it, it doesn't matter that I'm not able to do it now. One day I will be able to do it, I'm sure I will.

When we continued to press her on what made her so sure of this, it turned out that she had clear representations of future situations in her mind. She obviously perceived herself as a successful future user of the foreign language, and this belief was there in spite of any possible momentary failure in the learning process:

B: I can see myself when I am older. And I am somewhere else, I mean, for example in London or somewhere. And I am older, and there are friends with me, but they don't understand me when I speak, I mean they don't speak German. I can see myself speaking English with them, and I feel like I am one of them.

Beliefs are strong perceptual filters. They serve as explanations for what has happened and they give us a basis for future behaviour. This is why sports professionals, for example, regularly work on the development of positive beliefs. Picture the state of concentration of professional skiers before the start of a run. They engage in meditative mental routines, visualisation techniques and positive affirmation exercises aimed at releasing as much as possible of their resources. Barbara's inner representations of her future successes as a foreign language user can be compared to the supportive inner state of successful sports professionals.

The businessman described earlier, however, is like a skier who, before catapulting himself down the slope, feels that he is going to fall. Metaphorically speaking, during the first few seconds of the race he sees pictures of a time when he went skiing as an adolescent and broke his leg. These not very supportive memories are further worsened by an inner voice that tells him that he is a failure. The effect of learner beliefs on learning outcomes, often materialising in negative or positive self-talk, has been discussed in various studies, for example by Seligman (1991), Oxford & Shearin (1994), Ehrmann (1996), and, most recently, Arnold (1999). The latter stresses the impact that such negative belief patterns exert, without students (and teachers I may add) being aware of the power that such beliefs commonly have. "Many learners, especially low-achievers, have been strongly affected by years of negative self-talk, much of it on a semi-unconscious level." (1999: 17).

In order to discuss the systemic dynamics of beliefs on the outcomes of the teaching / learning process, I would like to examine three specific questions:

- Why do beliefs have such a powerful effect on students' learning?
- How are beliefs formed and maintained?
- What can teachers do to influence their students' beliefs in a respectful and positive way?

Why do beliefs have such a powerful effect on students' learning?

In order to answer this question, we need to consider the complexity of human thinking from a systemic point of view. Following on from the work of the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, Robert Dilts (1990: 60) developed a model that specifies the different levels of influences on the human thinking process and shows how these different levels organically influence one another.

Dilts claims that human thinking is organised on five different logical levels. The basic level of influence on an individual's thinking is his or her environment.

What are the factors that can be regarded as environment in the foreign-language class? Examples include the teaching materials, the availability and quality of technical equipment, the seating arrangement, the size of the classroom and the number of students, and the structure of the timetable. These are all important factors, although some may be more influential than others. The teacher and the students (inter)act in that classroom environment through their behaviour. Behaviour, in this case, does not mean only disciplinary behaviour, although any teacher of, for example, teenager learners will certainly agree that this is an important element that does have a serious impact on learning outcomes. Behaviour implies all the teaching and learning routines, everything that the teacher and students do in the foreign language class. The students' behaviour is, to a certain degree, influenced by their capabilities. A student who has efficient learning strategies will learn better and faster than a student who lacks them. The students' capabilities, in turn, are organised by their belief systems, and these are influenced by their identity, their sense of who they are.

Dilts stresses that the model is a hierarchical system. The higher the logical level that we operate on, the more influential it becomes on the outcome of a thinking process or an act of communication. Change on a lower level might influence a higher one, but change on a higher level will always have some effect also on the levels below. Somebody might study under very poor environmental conditions and might not have very effective behavioural and mental strategies. Such a person might still be successful in achieving the planned outcome as long as they have strong and supportive beliefs that they can be successful and an identity that is in line with the outcome they want to achieve. This person will probably also gradually develop proper behavioural procedures and find the proper mental strategies to help to achieve the aim.

The argument can also be turned on its head: students in the most comfortable classroom with the most modern equipment will nevertheless remain unsuccessful if their level of motivation is low or if they identify themselves as poor foreign language learners. This will be the case in spite of attempts by the teacher to teach them efficient behavioural routines and learning strategies.