PERCEPTIONS OF PARENTS, STAFF, & EDUCATIONAL ADVERTISING

(BLOG #3 by Jeremy Eckert – UIC-Barcelona student)

The following is my attempt at listing and reflecting on some of the more noteworthy ideas about learning that I’ve encountered as a teacher/school owner which I would label as misconceptions, even if well-meaning. This piece won’t claim to reach any final answers on the matter, but it may give me a deeper understanding of where I stand on the question of how language learning works.

HOW SOME PARENTS THINK LEARNING HAPPENS: “CAN YOU JUST GIVE MY SON A LESSON WHILE YOU’RE BOTH IN THE GO-KART QUEUE?”

In the early days of starting my school in East Asia, some students’ parents requested VIP one on one ‘classes’ (more like playdates) and they told our school, “I don’t want you to teach my son in the classroom. Just take him to the carnival for an hour and speak English to him. Take him to a western restaurant and chat with him while you eat.” This kind of unstructured exposure could potentially have benefits if it happened every day, but none of our teachers would be willing to go on so many playdates. I think those parents’ rationale was as follows:

(1) “Students in this country are already taking too many extracurricular classes in this high-pressure study environment, so let’s try to minimize classroom time and increase play time but continue learning all the same. [I think this is a very understandable and rightfully empathetic stance.]

(2) “The learner is a vessel into which the teacher pours knowledge simply by talking at him or her, so there’s no need for lesson structure or lesson planning. Just teach my kid at the indoor trampoline park, or how about improving his listening comprehension in the wave pool?” [This is only slightly exaggerated for comedic purposes.]

Needless to say, a few of our teachers only had such unstructured playdate lessons with parent and child, and this was never systematized into the curriculum, nor made into a service we encourage.

HOW SOME PARENTS THINK LEARNING IS HINDERED: “TWO SYSTEMS MUSTN’T BE TAUGHT AT ONCE!”

Another misconception is related to being overly cautious about timing English learning with certain aspects of Mandarin learning. In first grade, children who speak Mandarin natively are taught a phonetic-like script based on the Latin alphabet called Pinyin. Some parents refuse to teach their kids the English phonics work I give their first-grade child because they think it will interfere with the child’s learning of “Pinyin”, when in actuality, I feel that learning pinyin HELPS the children’s phonics abilities, based on what I’ve seen of their phonic awareness. It’s true that some of the sounds are different, but most of the letters of pinyin share the same sound as English ABCs.

HOW SOME PARENTS THINK LEARNING IS SHOWN: “TELL ME EVERYTHING YOU’VE LEARNED THIS WEEK, RIGHT NOW. “

I’ve witnessed many instances of parents demanding their small children to perform for them on the spot with no prompt or scaffolding. Some parents overestimate the children’s ability to spontaneously speak English without being given a topic, specific question, or a motivating reason to speak (nor given any time to think or plan). They also overestimate young children’s ability to use metalanguage and summarize everything they have learned. Other parents also expect very young kids to read blocks of text with no pictures or scaffolding, even though we explicitly tell those parents that children at such a level are only expected to listen to the audio and follow along with their finger, not read it out loud without help.

HOW MARKET FORCES INCENTIVIZE PRIVATE LANGUAGE CENTERS TO PORTRAY LEARNING: LINEAR AND GUARANTEED

Over the past 8 years of operating, our school of 300 students has seen its fair share of success stories – impressive learners with noteworthy language acquisition results. We’ve also witnessed some heartwarming turnarounds. Students who initially didn’t like learning English or were seriously struggling, later became high-achievers and fell in love with English after joining our school. But then again, our school has also seen its share of less eye-catching results.

It can feel like a fool’s errand to try and fully separate our school’s contribution to the learner’s performance from the other factors involved in their language development (factors like parent involvement in English practice at home, motivation, love of English), especially since the maximum requirement for students to attend our school is 3 hours per week. By itself 3 hours is simply not sufficient for deep language uptake, which is why we encourage the students to do the homework and read the books we provide for them, but not all students follow this advice.

I say all this to make the point that it is very humbling to be held responsible for the learning outcomes of so many young minds. But when your primary concern is keeping the school’s lights on, and you’re trying to compete in the market, there is no room for being humble in your advertising. One must portray learning as if it’s an assured, linear process. (Come to class a lot, learn a lot.)

And if you don’t guarantee results, good luck, because every other tutoring center will. When I watch advertisements for certain language tutoring schools in my region, I can’t help but cringe. They claim to show a lesson in action but it’s obviously scripted and rehearsed, and not representative of the average students attending that brand of school. But who wants to attend a school whose advertisements show the sometimes less than picture-perfect reality of teaching/learning?

There are times when our school’s dilemma is: in what situations should we adapt ourselves to meet the expectations of consumers, and in what situations should we work to adjust those expectations themselves? We naturally do a bit of both. Sometimes the parents need us to give them a bit of education on how learning happens, and how not to push their children too hard. Other times, we have to change some of our school practices to respond to feedback from customers.

HOW SOME NOVICE TEACHERS VIEW LESSON AIMS: “NOBODY DIED, SO IT WAS A GOOD LESSON.”

One of my roles at the center is to give orientation training, as well as on-the-job skill development. I routinely conduct observations of our teachers during class. A teacher and I always have a discussion before the observation, then I conduct the observation, and then we have a discussion afterward as well. Observing lessons has made me confront some of the common oversights committed by new teachers, as well as some things which I overlook in my own teaching as well.

One time, I observed one of my teachers, and then we discussed what she did well in her lesson. Then I pointed out that there was one core aim of the lesson – which she had previously set with me during our pre-class conversation – that she hadn’t accomplished during the lesson but could have achieved. “Yeah, but it ended up fine.” She replies, as if the bar for the lesson *not* going fine was someone ending up with a pencil stuck in their eye socket. By a hospital’s standards, yes, everything went fine, because nobody was hurt or killed. But that’s not the bar we can or should use for effective teaching. We need to take note of the lesson aims which we successfully achieved, and those which we didn’t.

Running this English center has taught me just how important outside accountability is for teaching. While an emergency room surgeon feels intrinsic motivation to do a good job because they don’t want to face the trauma of another patient dying on their watch, a semi-qualified, less motivated teacher might feel that they have done a good job as long as no one is violently upset or bored enough to complain. Another important thing to look for in a teacher is identity. Does the teacher identify as an educator? Or does he/she identify as a world traveler, just doing this job for now in order to fund their plane rides?

HOW SOME NOVICE TEACHERS THINK LEARNING IS SHOWN: “THE STUDENTS ARE PRODUCING THE PHRASES, THEREFORE THEY UNDERSTAND THEM.”

Another point I have needed to make to new teachers is: “You practiced the forms a lot, and I heard the students producing them accurately, but you breezed over the meaning part. Are you sure they knew what they were saying?”

New teachers sometimes underestimate how easily form can drift away from meaning. Students can say structures fluently while remaining unsure of their communicative function. Centering meaning is not automatic, it must be protected. I try as often as possible to re-orient the goals of my teachers toward meaning-based communication, rather than form-based drilling. I have also taken steps to structurally revamp the curriculum to reward communication rather than accuracy.

HOW SOME TEACHERS MISINTERPRET STUDENT CONDUCT: “STUDENTS ARE ACTING UP. IT MUST BE BECAUSE THEY ARE A NAUGHTY GROUP.”

Some teachers misinterpret student behavior by assuming that disruption is a fixed trait of the group rather than a response to the learning conditions. When students “act up,” it is often less a sign of naughtiness than of boredom, fatigue, or disengagement with repetitive materials. In many cases, the students are not resisting learning itself, but the narrow range of activities which the teacher is allowing in class. This places responsibility back on the teacher to plan varied, meaningful activities while also remaining flexible and able to adapt to the classroom vibe.

These anecdotes reveal a set of shared assumptions about how language learning is believed to work. These assumptions are held by basically anyone who doesn’t study the field of SLA or have experience in teaching. Across the situations I mentioned above, language learning is often treated as something automatic, immediately visible, and easily controllable, with an emphasis on surface behaviors rather than less immediately observable long-term processes through which meaning and communicative competence develop. Common assumptions that emerge include:

• exposure alone is sufficient for acquisition
• teachers pour language into learners’ brains
• learning systems interfere with one another rather than reinforce awareness
• real learning must be instantly performable and unprompted
• accurate production of forms guarantees understanding
• student misbehavior reflects character rather than learning conditions
• progress in language learning is linear, cumulative, and guaranteed

Over time, running this center has pushed me away from these simplified models and toward a more cautious view of language learning as complex, non-linear, and only partially visible. More to come in my next, bonus blog post.