Humanising Language Teaching
Year 2; Issue 4; July 2000

by Herbert Puchta
Pädagogische Akademie, University of Graz, Austria

To return for a moment to the two case-studies presented earlier: what we can see is that the beliefs the two people display are so powerful because they are higher-level beliefs. Both refer to situations of failure in their learning processes. What is clearly different in the businessman's reaction in a situation of failure and that of the girl is the inner representations of the failure and the generalisations they each make from them. When the business man says, "I just don't know what to do. 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," he refers to his identity. And because for him his failure is an issue of identity, his problem is extremely difficult to overcome. If someone perceives a failure as a consequence of the environment in which they find themselves, they can react by changing the environment. It is relatively easy to learn new behaviour or adopt a different cognitive strategy. This, however, would not have helped the businessman. In order for him to be able to tackle his perceived problems, what was needed was change at the level of beliefs. This is also the reason why all the repair strategies that the teacher was using were bound to fail - they were aimed at enriching his behavioural and cognitive skills, and did not take into consideration that what he really needed was a change on the belief level.

What we have here is a confusion of logical levels - something that also frequently occurs as a consequence of insensitive error correction in the classroom. When we correct a student's error, the student may interpret our feedback as a negative signal about his or her capabilities or identity. Over time and through repeated similar negative experiences, the student develops a higher-level limiting belief and this pattern can then have detrimental effects on his or her learning outcomes. As O'Connor and Seymour put it,

Behaviour is often taken as evidence of identity or capability, and this is how confidence and competence are destroyed in a classroom. Getting a sum wrong does not mean you are stupid or that you are poor at maths. To think this is to confuse logical levels, equivalent to thinking that a No Smoking sign in a cinema applies to the characters in the film. (1990: 90).

Let us return to the little girl for a moment. She has a very strong positive belief that refers to the highest possible level of an individual's thinking - identity. What she says is that she can see HERSELF in a future situation, using the target language with ease. In addition to this, she has a strong positive belief about her own capabilities that supports her in spite of possible failure and which she reveals when she says, "It doesn't matter if I can't do it now. It really doesn't matter. One day I will be able to do it, I'm sure I will." How are beliefs formed and maintained?

Let us now turn to my second question, that of how beliefs are formed and maintained. Beliefs have an important function because they serve as our guiding principles. They are generalisations about cause and effect, and they influence our inner representation of the world around us. They help us to make sense of that world, and they determine how we think and how we act. There are certain beliefs that have a high level of testability and stability. These are beliefs about the physical world. They are based on laws of nature. We do not need to find out every day anew that we need to look right and left (or left and rigth) before we cross a road, for example. Beliefs like that are learned at a very early age, and we can trust them and rely on them. However, there are other beliefs, for example, beliefs about identity or capability, where the evidence we use in order to form them can be much less reliable. And yet, once we have formed such beliefs, we take them as reality.

When we believe something, we act as if it is true. And this makes it difficult to disprove. Beliefs are strong perceptual filters of reality. They make us interpret events from the perspective of the belief, and exceptions are interpreted as evidence and further confirmation of the belief. In contrast to the conclusions we draw about the laws of nature, however, many limiting beliefs are not based on reality. How then are they formed? Primarily through the modelling of significant others, and through conclusions we draw from repetitive experiences. Especially for young learners, their foreign-language teacher is a significant other. According to O'Connor and Seymour,

The expectations of the significant people around us instil beliefs. High expectations (provided they are realistic) build competence. Low expectations instil incompetence. We believe what we are told about ourselves when we are young because we have no way of testing, and these beliefs may persist unmodified by our later achievements. (1990: 93).

It was as early as 1966 that Rosenthal and Jacobson stressed the significant influence that the teachers' beliefs and the teachers' expectations have on the results of their students' learning. Although their work was initially criticised for major research design flaws, a vast number of articles, documents and dissertations published since about the phenomenon of the so-called 'self-fulfilling prophecy' have shown beyond any doubt that, as Babad put it, "expectancy bias is an undisputed phenomenon" (1985: 75). An excellent overview of such studies can be found in the recent book Self-fulfilling Prophecy by Tauber (1997).

It is widely acknowledged these days that teacher beliefs and teacher expectations can turn into self-fulfilling prophecies. However, what is a lot less commonly known is that self-fulfilling prophecies have a systemic pattern to them. These patterns are the often covert forces behind the phenomena described.

Tauber (1997: 17-31) also gives an overview of various studies into how the patterns of self-fulfilling prophecies manifest themselves. Teachers have certain belief systems, and these belief systems influence their expectations. If a teacher is to teach a class that she has strong and positive beliefs about, her expectations will be different from the ones she will have for a class that she does not think very highly of. The next step in the pattern is that we do not leave our expectations in the staff room. We take them with us into the classroom, just as we take with us the teaching materials that we need. And we communicate our expectations to our learners. Some of this communication is done verbally, but most of it works on an unconscious or semi-conscious level, because it is carried out in non-verbal ways. This communication in turn evokes certain behaviour on the students' side. If this process is repeated, over time what we get is that the students' actual behaviour comes close to what we initially expected. If we look at how expectations are communicated to students at the micro level, various studies show the following pattern of interaction between teachers and so-called 'Lows' (students of whom we expect little), on the one hand, and 'Highs' (students of whom we have a high level of expectation), on the other:

- We tend to smile more often and have more eye contact when we interact with Highs than with Lows.
- Lows get less time to answer a question, whereas we tend to give Highs more time to think. While we wait for an answer, we tend to send out non-verbal signals to the Highs that are perceived as supportive - for example, we nod our head or smile. Lows often do not get any non-verbal communication in this phase at all, or they get signals that can be interpreted to mean that the teacher is impatient or is sceptical that the student can provide a good answer.
- When a High gives a wrong answer, the teacher tends to reframe it. For example, "That's an interesting answer. It's not quite correct, but..." Or the teacher repeats the question, and gives hints that enable the student to self-correct the answer. Or the teacher asks another question. When Lows give wrong answers, they more frequently get negative feedback from the teacher, often followed by a reprimand.
- When Lows give a correct answer, teachers frequently do not react at all. They call upon the next student without giving the learner previously called upon any feedback at all.
- Lows generally get less challenging tasks. It often seems we have given up on them. Interestingly, Highs not only get the more challenging tasks, they also seem to get more support from the teachers in solving them.

What can teachers do to influence their students' beliefs in a respectful and positive way?

In looking for an answer to my third question, relating to what teachers can do to influence their students' beliefs in a respectful and positive way, I shall draw mainly on work in young learners' classrooms, although the suggestions may be relevant for older learners as well. I do not claim to have any complete theory here - what I suggest is based on experience rather than on any perceived sense of expertise.

I would like to make five suggestions. The first can be summarised in the saying that Success comes in 'cans', not in 'can'ts'. This is in line with what Veronica Andres (1999) suggests when she calls for the creation of a "can-do spirit" in our classrooms. We will achieve such a can-do classroom culture if we can manage to involve our students in language practice where the emphasis is on the construction of meaning - certainly not a new claim, but one I believe that still awaits implementation in many classrooms. Likewise, students need to be given plenty of opportunity to assess their own learning progress, preferably also in the form of portfolio and process-oriented testing, as convincingly advocated by Kohonen (1999) and others.

Secondly, I would like to stress the importance of teaching thinking skills and learning strategies alongside the teaching of the foreign language. As Robert Fisher (1992) stresses: "Thinking is not some natural function like breathing, walking, seeing and talking. Thinking does not necessarily improve with age and experience. Thinking needs to be developed." For the practitioner, this means facilitating the development of learning strategies and the students' metacognitive thinking, considering the students' individual learning styles and multiple intelligences (See Gardner, 1993) and also taking into consideration the affective dimensions of learning.

Thirdly, I believe we need to give learners opportunities to explore the language they are learning rather than being solely recipients of it, and, depending on the students' age, to get them to take part in the construction of learning paths (as suggested by, for example, Williams & Burden, 1997) and in the development of their creativity. Involving learners in constructing tasks can, to a certain extent, be initiated at quite an early age.

My fourth point concerns building an atmosphere of trust and rapport with the students. When the students are accepted not only as learners but also as individuals, and when the classroom culture (See Puchta 1999) is one that allows for the strengthening of the students' self-esteem and confidence, there is less danger of confusion of logical levels. Then errors are more likely to be seen as what they are, signs of learning, and not messages about one's capabilities or one's identity. Rinvolucri stresses the specific role that the teacher has in such a classroom culture:

The teacher will be the sort of person who is aware she is teaching forty individuals, not a mass. She is likely to be a good observer and a good, empathetic listener. If the humanistic exercise is to be relevant and adequate to the task of offering students a new experience of themselves, then the teacher's attitude must be positive, her interpersonal skills good, and her training adequate. (1999: 198).

My fifth and final point is my belief in the need to use pedagogical placebos. Studies carried out by Bandura clearly show that if we can manage to raise students' expectations of themselves, the level of their performance will rise accordingly. However, students reach plateaus in their performance. This means that the student has reached a considerably higher level of performance than previously, yet subjectively might interpret such a plateau as getting stuck. A frequent pattern then is that students fall into a crisis and lose their confidence when the point of greatest difference between expectation and actual performance has been reached. This crisis point is also the point where they need our support most. If they do not get it, their level of performance can easily fall below their initial level, whereas if they do get support from us, their level of performance can go up almost to the level of expectation.

I encountered an unusual pedagogical placebo about a year ago, while working with a group of European secondary teachers from a grammar school-level context. The language teaching standards in the country concerned are rather demanding, and so are the tests that students have to pass. In the seminar, we were discussing different ways of strengthening students' beliefs, and one participant raised the question of what teachers can do if they have a student who they know has studied hard, but who is about to completely lose trust because in spite of studying hard, he or she keeps failing tests. Another participant made the following contribution: he said, "If this happens in my class, if a student really works hard, and yet there is a danger of this student failing yet another test, although he or she has studied intensively for it, then I cheat." We all asked, "What do you mean, you cheat?" "Well," he said, "I take a pen that has the same colour ink as the student used to write his or her test, and I correct some of the mistakes so that the student does not notice, and I can give him or her a positive mark. And then of course I follow this up with a lot of appraisal and support." This teacher claimed that he is very careful about when to use this strategy, but he also claimed that he had learnt it from his father, who was a teacher as well, that it had worked for his father, and that it worked whenever he applied it. This colleague spent the rest of the seminar defending himself from the attacks of the other teachers in the group, who claimed that what he was doing there was illegal. References

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