S6E26: The ideal has changed

Full transcript:

Good morning, happy Monday and welcome to the Language Confidence Project, the daily dose of language courage for people who love languages and those who really don’t, but have to learn one anyway. And just a reminder, the Language Confidence Project is now on YouTube too, with daily videos of encouragement to help you make language learning more creative, compassionate and meaningful! So please support me by subscribing, the link is in the show notes, and maybe even by leaving me a comment! It makes such a huge difference in helping more people to find my work, and word of mouth is absolutely the best way to get more people to know that The Language Confidence Project exists and help me to help them too.

Now, one of the things that we talk a lot about in The Language Confidence Project is how our schoolday experiences of language learning affect our adult experiences of trying to teach ourselves a language. 

And today, I want to invite you to remember what the ideal language learner looked like during your schooldays? Which language learners were praised the most? Got the highest scores?

If we imagine a table where we invited all the best kinds of language learners together, from our school days, who would be on it? 

Who made for the dream team in your school language learning environments?

Here’s mine: 

The one who always wants 100% in every test

The one who gets on quietly, doesn’t complain, just puts their head down and does the work

The one that’s really independent and works everything out for themselves

The one that’s always trying to help others

The one for whom presentation is everything, and everything they do is in their neatest handwriting. 

And a lot of these things will be the things that worked really well for us when we were 11, 14, 18, 21 if we also include our university days. They might have been rewarded by our teachers, our peers, our parents, and we might attribute our success to all those facets of ourself that we consider really served us.

But the thing is, and this is something I’ve been reflecting on in my own internalised messages about learning and productivity, some of that was about learning and grades and learning to learn. But some of it was about getting on well in a classroom of 30 or more other students. It was about fitting into a collective. For some of us, we were rewarded for not needing to much, not questioning too much, not taking up too much of the teacher’s time, for being the good one, the helpful one, the serious one. 

So then as adults, we take that stuff with us. We internalise it as part of the act of learning rather than part of being 14, and we find it really hard to shed or modify those parts of us that earned us stickers or meant we shone on parents evenings.

But what served us then, might not be serving us now. Because if we’re not careful, the quiet one who puts her head down, doesn’t learn to speak. The helpful one has just  done a language exchange, again, but they spoke English the whole time, and congratulated themselves on their generosity to their language partner.

And if you’re self-teaching, which even if you are attending classes, you will be self-teaching some of the time, you don’t need to be the quiet one. The good one. The helpful one. It’s just you, and your journey now. 

So now I want to ask, in your language journey now, you as an adult, in 2024 or whatever year you are listening to this, who else do you want to invite to your group? What other members, maybe completely new facets of yourself, would you love to invite to your round table now?

The one that always asks for help when they need it?

The one that can just chat, to anyone, and isn’t afraid to approach new people?

The one who always questions everything… WHY do we have to do it like this? WHY isn’t there a shortcut?

The one who’s always looking for the most sociable/creative/interesting/meaningful way to do things?

We have to update the idea of what makes a perfect language learner from when we were at school, because the adult version of us needs a different kind of language learner in order to succeed. The adult version of us is seeking different things, and the adult version of language learning rewards different things. So what would your updated model look like?

Have a wonderful day, and I’ll see you back here tomorrow.