Humanising Language Teaching
Year 3; Issue 3; May 2001

Meanderings of an EFL so-called applied linguist on the role of anxiety in 'The good, the bad and the loony' debate.

by Peter Grundy
University of Durham, UK

[ editorial note: HLT would like to thank the editor of the IATEFL TT SIG Newsletter for permission to re-print this article which first appeared in Newsletter Issue 3/2000, December 2000. Thanks also to the author.
Background: In 1999, Jane Arnold published AFFECT IN LANGUAGE LEARNING with CUP. The book was reviewed in the SIG Newsletter by Scott Thornbury and the review drew reactions from Arnold and Rinvolucri. ]

Who do you think should be thrown out of the Big Brother debate this week? The three people nominated are Jane from Seville, "writing..simply as someone involved in teaching", Mario from Canterbury, who has admitted that he is "very happy to countenance therapy discourse", and Scott from Barcelona, who has been accused of being incongruent with himself and whose allergic reaction started all the trouble. What voyeuristic pleasure it gives us to look in on our colleagues stripping off in the July edition of The TT SIG Newsletter!

Thoughts like this prompt the suggestions that it may not only be our students for whom affective issues are relevant and that part of our 'denial' (I borrow the scare quotes from Scott) is to focus on affect as though it relates only to learners.

This is why what caught my attention in Scott's review of Affect in Language Learning in the March Newsletter was the apparently innocuous sentence "..the literature on anxiety is informed by research studies from a number of feeder disciplines - as reported in the excellent overview by Oxford." In fact, one notable feature of Oxford's overview is the absence of any comment about the ways in which anxiety motivates the behaviour of teachers (let alone the affectophile or affectophobic writing of ELT professionals).

Whilst learner anxiety is usually thought of as an individual phenomenon which manifests itself in the kinds of ways listed in Oxford's overview (arriving unprepared, hesitant speech, over-studying, etc.), it seems to me that the most significant manifestation of language teacher anxiety is not in individual behaviours such as over-planning, absenteeism, and trying to retain control by shouting, but rather as a collective, intra-cultural phenomenon which goes largely unrecognized by the individual.

When I first began my teaching career in the late 1960's, methodologists believed that the audiolingual approach was a scientific application to language teaching of the North American Structuralist theory of language and Skinner's behaviouristic account of learning. Nowadays, we use the generative account of second language acquisition to advance the argument that language is more learnable than teachable and that naturalistic communicative practice amongst learners is more effective than teacher-led instruction. Increasingly, I wonder whether such rationalizations blind us to the much more challenging fact that we constantly seek to repress: that our methodology is principally driven by our attitude to uncertainty. Looked at from this perspective, audiolingualism and its sickly offspring, PPP, are clearly attempts to reduce the uncertainty associated with language learning by ensuring that as much as possible is controlled by the teacher. As a practice-based method, audiolingualism provides a perfect illustration of the harnessing of technology to the uncertainties associated with the human behaviour of language learning. By way of contrast, recognising the role of affect in language learning requires a good deal of tolerance of uncertainty and ambiguity.

Earlier this year, I heard Alan Maley giving a talk on the role of repetition in the language learning. In this talk, focus on sameness was distinguished from focus on variation, fossilized repetition from instantial or original repetition, mechanical repetition from context shaping or integrated repetition, repetition of form from repetition of function or meaning, recognition of repetition from production of repetition, explicit or exact repetition from implicit or indirect repetition, institutional repetition from intimate or personal repetition.

As Alan talked his way through this list, I noticed how the first item in each pair was motivated much more strongly by uncertainty avoidance than the second. Thus, if students repeat the form the teacher has used, the teacher can check that they are performing the task assigned. Since they are likely to do this relatively successfully, the teacher's anxiety about their performance is reduced. But if the teacher invites repetition of meaning, the form of the original stimulus will be altered in the repetition and the teacher will then have to deal with the resulting ambiguity. It follows that repetition of meaning will normally be favoured by teachers with weak anxiety avoidance needs and a greater willingness to tolerate ambiguity.

So far I have referred to the concept of uncertainty avoidance in an entirely non-technical way. In Hofstede's classic study of 116,000 informants, the extent to which societies adapt to uncertainty was identified as one of "the four main dimensions along which dominant value systems…can be ordered and which affect human thinking, organizations and institutions in predictable ways" (1980:11).

Although the future is equally uncertain for every human being, the extent to which individuals and cultures take steps to try to resolve the ambiguities which surround them vary considerably. For some individuals and societies, living with uncertainty is relatively easy and provokes little anxiety, for others impossibly difficult and strongly anxiety provoking. It is unrealistic to suppose that methodology, curriculum design, and classroom management will be immune from the level of uncertainty avoidance prevalent in the wider society. Indeed, as suggested earlier, the very rationalizations on which we suppose our methodology to be based will have been selected precisely because they reflect our culture's degree of uncertainty avoidance.

In our culture's present schizophrenic state, there seem to be two contemporary methodology stances, one reflecting a weak anxiety avoidance psychotypology. We might call the former Learnability methodology and the latter Teachability methodology.

Learnability, or L-methodology is essentially post-methodic and accepts the mentalistic view that language is more learnable than teachable. It is the learner's own in-built syllabus, as Corder (1978) termed it, which determines the route of acquisition. The best approaches will be the most natural, and teacher intervention will be minimized.

Teachability, or T-methodology relies on descriptive linguistics to provide a syllabus in the form of a pedagogic grammar which is conveyed through instruction. Unlike L-methodologists, T-methodologists believe that language is more teachable than learnable - after all, it is the job of the teacher to determine the boundaries of the subject. This delimited 'subject' will be regarded as the knowledge to be conveyed to the learner.

Because L-methodology leaves more to the learner, it is intrinsically less anxiety driven than T-methodology in which the teacher appropriates the primary responsibility for ensuring learning. This is why T-methodology focuses on paradigms, both formal and functional, and L-methodology on contextualized language. In focusing on paradigms, T-methodology attempts to eliminate the natural indeterminacy of language. In contrast, L-methodology acknowledges the intrinsic indeterminacy of language which is necessary if we are to achieve the economy that allows us to use the same form in many different contexts to mean many different things.

I think there's good reason to believe that most language teaching methods (and learner styles come to that) are directed more to anxiety avoidance than to successful second language teaching and learning. As a result many syllabuses are unrealistically goal directed and much classroom language teaching is conservative and ineffective. In particular, collective anxiety causes teachers to favour methods that allow them to retain control over input, output and learner behaviour generally. The underlying methodology is teachability oriented.

This tangential contribution to the affect debate was partly inspired by the notion that those with higher uncertainty avoidance needs will have a lower tolerance for the less testable, more affect driven aspects of teaching and learning and for approaches such as NLP which, as Scott rightly points out, lack empirical underpinning. The point is not that there is a better way to handle repetition or a right response to Michael Berman's IATEFL Issues article, but rather that the methodological decisions the teacher makes when working with repetition activities or our intuitive reactions to Michael's opinions reflect the extent to which uncertainty avoidance is important to us. It's not that any of the protagonists in the Big Brother debate are right or wrong, merely that they are who they are - and that it may be worth thinking harder about why.

References
Corder, S Pit (1978) Language learner language In Richards, Jack C. (Ed.)
Understanding Second and Foreign Language Learning. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House, 71-93.
Hofstede, Geert (1980) Culture's consequences Beverley Hills: Sage.

Oxford, Rebecca (1999) In Arnold, Jane (Ed.) Affect in Language Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 58-67.