Humanising Language Teaching
Year 2; Issue 3; May 2000

"Bending the rules: the transforming power of metaphor"

Janet Braithwaite

S, a Japanese technical salesman for main-frame computers in a large Japanese company, had already spent a month in England studying English at a different school when I first met him. He seemed to be deeply discouraged by what he called his lack of progress and his inability to communicate and in particular to express himself. In fact he said that he felt that he knew less English a month after leaving Japan than he had when he was still there. This was accompanied by physical symptoms of fear - tension in his neck and shoulders, pallor, swallowing as if his mouth was dry, a stiff and awkward stance sometimes, when standing, which gave the feeling he was on the point of running away, and when he was most nervous I noticed his breath smelled slightly. During our first session his eyelids fluttered up and down at great speed for much of the time. All of this seemed quite incommensurate with his actual ability level which seemed quite good to me. He was able to pitch his flow of speech at a speed at whichhe was able to handle structures accurately and remain completely coherent. He said he was now able to think in English, and certainly there was no sign of him translating from Japanese. Both the mood of discouragement and the physical symptoms came and went during the first week, and the low mood was accompanied by extreme tiredness.

During our introductory session I noticed that his tension level was much higher when he was talking about his job, and his speech patterns were more frequently fractured and had a certain rigidity which was mirrored by physical stiffness in his body. At the same time it was clear from what he was saying that he was most used to speaking English in the context of his job, and I was reasonably sure that he would have been asked to talk about his job before. I had chosen it myself as an area which would be familiar to put him at ease. At no point did he mention anything about his lack of English being a problem in his job, but he did say that "internal procedures" in his company were a considerable problem and that they held up his work, although he didn't go into detail. When I asked him if he'd been born in Tokyo, his reply that he was from Hokkaido, the northern island, and his description of his native town, Sapporo, and his time at university there were accompanied by a dramatic change in his body stance and manner of speaking. His shoulders relaxed, the strain disappeared from his face and was replaced by a softer, more emotional expression, his voice became more supple and charged with feeling and his language flowed more easily.

It was thus clear within the first half hour of our conversation that his outward physicality responded immediately and intensely to changes in his mental and emotional states, and that in this sense he was deeply at one with himself. Observing these changes was to be a crucial part of our work in that I knew immediately when a change in subject or even mention of a particular word excited him or became a focus of interest. His moods were clearly readable.

It was equally clear to me at a surface level that his presenting problems and symptoms and his actual performance didn't add up. Here was a person who in spite of a good grasp of structure and being able to communicate accurately and coherently over a range of subjects was in despair at being unable to express himself. Even taking into account the likelihood of his being defensive because of making very high demands on himself and being afraid of appearing stupid, the intensity of his mood didn't make sense on the surface. At an intuitive level I felt, in a rather unformed way as yet, that his problems came partly out of some kind of block due to dependence on formulaic approaches to the language, and that we would need to go through some process of deconstruction to free it. When I tried to discuss this directly with him in simple terms, there was an immediate marked increase in his tension and fear, and his resistance was physically palpable as well as expressed verbally, so that I at least knew that I was on the right track. It was also obvious from his degree of resistance that we would have to work indirectly to effect this deconstruction in practice before we could work directly on the possible causes of the block.

It was also clear that he suffered from a lack of belief in his own abilities, so deep as to be almost a state of delusion. This engendered fear which then reinforced his desire for safe formulaic usage which in turn limited his range of expression and created frustration and despair in a self-supporting vicious circle. I felt that deconstruction would help to break through this circle, together with a massive input of energy to help to help him build up his belief in his ability to express himself.

To start this off I completely broke down what little structure the sessions had. I work reactively anyway but I usually begin a day's teaching with some prepared ideas of things to do which adapt freely to what comes up in the classroom. From Wednesday of the first week I came into the classroom with nothing prepared at all, and either brought something up at random out of whatever I felt at the moment or waited for him to initiate something. Emptying my mind of props felt risky and difficult, but I believe that in this kind of work one has to go through the same process together. I also felt that if I asked him to do more difficult and unaccustomed things out of the blue he would fall into stretching himself beyond his limits without having time to think about it, and I looked constantly for complex subjects to talk about which engaged a high degree of interest and emotion on his part and which had a positive focus, so that he was swept along by the emotional impetus and thus forgot his fear. One of the things which happened spontaneously was that at some point in each session he described something to do with his life at length without comment or interruption, and I wrote down what he said verbatim. When he came to an end I then pointed out obvious errors, which were relatively few, and then later the same day I typed out exactly what he'd said with the errors corrected and a second version, as little altered as possible, but with stylistic alternatives to make it read as native English. This gave him daily material evidence of his actual ability in expressing himself and the relatively small extent to which it differed from what I would have said. At the same time it gave me some measure of his flow and accuracy.

The work we did on Thursday and Friday of the first week proved to be a major breakthrough in terms of his resistance and fear. He came in on Thursday morning apparently exhausted and demoralised. His face was pallid and he walked as if he was almost too tired to put one foot in front of another. He said he was sleeping moderately well but it didn't seem to make any difference. We spent the first hour talking through how he felt. By coffee time he seemed more relaxed and less disconsolate and he brightened further during coffee which we took together. Afterwards I asked him to tell me about his childhood and he launched into a detailed and fluent description of any idyllic childhood with parents who spent a lot of time with him and encouraged his interest in science, and of how this interest was nourished by experiments he made using equipment bought by his mother from a scientific magazine. He also said that he hadn't pursued his scientific studies beyond school level because he found the theoretical study of science from books and without experimentation extremely boring, although he remained keenly interested in scientific matters. As usual the force of emotion behind his words freed his expression and enabled him to make use of latent vocabulary and an increasing range of structures. I suggested that as the work we were doing was very demanding, it was probably not very productive to then tire himself further by studying in the evening and that he would be better joining the group and relaxing. By the end of the morning, though still tired, his mood had calmed and, according to my co-teacher who taught him in the afternoon in a group, he worked very well the rest of the day. In the evening he joined the group at the pub.

On Friday morning he walked in with a brisk, bright step and more colour in his cheeks and announced that he felt better. He then gave an unprepared presentation on his job and the structure of his company. He was extremely nervous at first but quickly calmed down as he spoke, and he drew some good diagrams. On the previous Wednesday in response to a prompt from me to tell me about something which he felt was an achievement, he had described a stressful and frustrating day at work when he'd rushed about all day trying to pass through some information from one of the factories to a distributor outside Japan, which he'd finally managed to do. There was a sense of tiredness and elation at the end of his description and he threw up his arms in excitement to show me how he behaved at the office when he'd managed to do something like this. During this he'd mentioned the company's "internal procedures" as a problem in his work but without going into detail. In his talk on Friday he went into much greater detail about these "internal procedures" which, designed for the domestic market and "ineffective and illogical" when applied to the export market, were a major obstruction to his work in the overseas sales department. He talked about the "internal procedures" again on the following Monday, and they became an important theme running through our work.

I had been moved and struck by his childhood interest in science and also reminded of the fact that I'd seen a notice about a science exhibition somewhere in the town. I managed to find out about it and it was accepted that we should spend the rest of the morning visiting it. I was taken aback to find it was mainly for children but he seemed thrilled by it, and we spent a pleasant hour or so trying out the gadgets, playing tunes on a set of tubes, watching demonstrations and listening to explanations. It was invaluable as a source of interesting vocabulary and it prompted him to all kinds of comments and explanations, especially as he is well-read and very much more knowledgeable on scientific matters than I am. I felt a surge of interest from him as I explained the word "catalyst" which he'd picked up from one of the demonstrators, and I pointed out that it had a metaphorical use as well. This also became a theme. We walked back on a wave of enthusiasm and a running commentary from him on how one of the gadgets demonstrated the principle of flight in aeroplanes. The previous day he had talked about his childhood experiments as "embodying" the beginnings of his interest in science. I felt that our experience of the exhibition "embodied" my comments made from time to time that week on the need to experiment with language in order to express oneself more freely.

I suffer from a massive block concerning the use of computers but I had decided that I had to get to grips with the problem. That afternoon I had just finished typing up his morning talk on "internal procedures" when I must have accidentally pressed something and the computer appeared to swallow the second page. As I had already mentioned my difficulties with computers to S as a parallel to his difficulties with expression and I knew he had just finished his afternoon class, I went into the classroom and asked him for a "consultation". He rapidly retrieved the page and printed it off so that I could present it to him. We sat in the staffroom practically falling about laughing at the absurd coincidence of the computer "blocking" precisely on the page of the obstructive "internal procedures".

During the weekend I felt a pressing need to get down on paper some kind of diagrammatic structural pattern of what was happening. I usually feel this pressure to write when intuitive processes which are already active are about to become more conscious. I thought around what I felt was involved in communication and expression and came up with a list of six aspects:-

1. idea - the intellectual aspect
2. emotion
3. the medium - language, gesture, intonation
4. sensitivity to the other person
5. style - the external pressure and the internal pressure
6. the given base - culture, personality, experience.

On the Monday morning he gave me a long and expressive letter on how it felt, as an intelligent and articulate person in his own language, to feel so limited and frustrated in his powers of expression. This was in response to a letter from me given to him on Friday. I often start an exchange of letters with students. Writing letters to someone you see every day always has the quality of surprise, and students who take advantage of it in a positive way always in my experience make highly effective use of it to increase their range. We exchanged letters daily the second week. The subject matter of his letter was complex and difficult and I was excited to see that the immense effort he had made to mediate his ideas had stretched his grasp of structure to the edge of where it began to break down. It was a letter on incoherence constructed on the very borderline where what is coherent in terms of structure begins to slip. It was highly experimental.

I kept the letter to read until later. Letters are personal and sometimes intimate communications and I never use them as exercises to be corrected, although I sometimes pick up words and structures and use them in my replies. I showed him the diagrammatic patterns I'd written down the previous day, as we discussed them briefly with particular reference to the six aspects of communication and his relative skills in these areas. Throughout our work together I was constantly emphasising the wider aspects of communication in order to widen his focus of attention away from the purely linguistic and to embrace aspects, such as inter-personal sensitivity, where I suspected he felt much more confident of his abilities. I asked him to feel free to comment. He didn't say very much at the time, but I could see that he was interested and would probably reflect on it.