Professional or aspiring marathon runners, soccer players, golfers, musicians
or salesmen, all understand the decisive importance of psychology. Most of them
become interested when presented with scientific evidence or psychological
techniques to enhance their performance. Many of them even do consult with a
psychologist before key events. Rightly so, they understand that their success
depends not only on their professional skills and work ethics, but also on their
mindset.
This is in no way different for language learning. It being a long way to
mastery, psychology comes into play whether or not a student chooses challenging
tasks, makes enough effort and develops resilience to overcome obstacles.
Unfortunately, most students view the process as something “fixable” just by
the right technique or app, and by putting in time. As a result, even if there
are millions, if not billions, of foreign language learners worldwide, drop-out
rates are equally high. After buying a lot of books, playing with online
material, nonetheless, at a certain point, they feel that they are not making
enough progress. And than they discover that learning that language what really
not that urgent.
Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck has
been researching for decades on learners that give up and those who do not. Her
key insight is that the way we think about our intelligence can set us up for
success or failure. People with a growth mindset think that their own
intelligence is malleable, that it can be improved upon by practice and effort.
Those with a fixed mindset believe that their abilities are more less
unchangeable. Every one of us has a growth or fixed mindset in different areas
of life.
Think about the following activities:
·
Speaking in public
·
Cooking a dinner for a family reunion
·
Playing tennis
·
Singing karaoke
·
Playing a musical instrument
·
Writing poetry
·
Repairing home appliances
·
Dancing
·
Writing a scientific paper.
You will have noticed that in some activities, an inner voice has
alarmed you by saying, this is not for me, I am not gifted enough for it.
People with a fixed mindset are obsessed with looking smart. Believing
that their abilities are fixed, they fear that every impression they make on
others is irreversible. Thus, they avoid looking dumb at all costs. This leads
to avoiding any kind of challenging task that could contain the risk of
failure. In consequence, they tend to choose only activities they feel
confident in. On the other hand, people with a growth mindset love challenges
because they see them as learning opportunities. Knowing that they can change
themselves, failures are non-threatening to them. In the light of negative feedback, those with a growth mindset become
defensive and look for external causes for their failure. They tend to give up
easier.
Now, how does look like with language students? The statements below are not based
upon any scientific study, but upon 10 years of teaching groups in Eastern Europe.
·
There is a high proportion of fixed
mindset students in foreign languages (maybe because society tells people that
you need to be talented to be really good at it, like in music?)
·
Fixed vs. growth mindsets vary
according to the classroom activity
·
Fixed mindset students love to hide
behind some kind of authority: the Textbook, the Teacher, the Course Structure.
·
Fixed mindset students love external
structures imposed on them which they can predict, that is, knowing that they
will pass the textbook page by page, thus being able to overprepare and
minimize uncertainty.
·
Fixed mindset students prefer to learn
and work visually (easier to control time- and content-wise) than with audio
·
If forced to communicate in the
classroom, they will request to tell them the topic well in advance, that you
give them word lists, and they will come with written-out phrases or dialogues.
The problem is, we as language teachers need to think about how our
students perform after the course. In reality, most communication is audio and
improvised. Just adapting to fixed mindsets of our student is unethical, and
not profitable in the long run. Nonetheless, students will find out that even
if they felt in the comfort zone with you, they cannot survive reality.
How to instill a
growth mindset in your students?
·
Lead by example. Develop a growth
mindset yourself as a teacher.
·
Show students areas where you yourself
are still learning (pronunciation, grammar, but also other things than languages).
·
Tell students about your own obstacles
in language learning and how you overcame them.
·
Talk with students about fixed and
growth mindsets. Share a video with them or recommend them books.
·
Give feedback to students based on
their effort, and not on their intelligence or talent.
·
From lesson 1: provide for exercises
that force students out of their comfort zone (improvised communication;
constructing their own sentences), and make them realize that, in reality,
nobody was harmed by making some mistakes.
Tell me
what you encounter and think. Or send me your questions. If you want me to hold
a live seminar for your school on the, just send me an e-mail.
If you want
to read more about quality management in language teaching, please check out
the other articles on this blog. If you have not read it yet, I recommend those
on student feedback
questionnaires and on how to standardize
your teaching.
Stay tuned!
Gerhard
About the
GO Method
The GO
Method is a quality management system for language schools. It conforms to
key elements of the ISO 9001 standard, while being more specific on
teaching-related issues. Customers get access to easily adaptable document
templates.
About me
Psychologist
and polyglot from Hamburg /Germany (*1979). Married with children. MA in
psychology from the University of Hamburg. More than 15 years of experience in
quality management and foreign language teaching. Coordinator of the GO Method
network, with representatives in more than 90 countries worldwide.
Connect with me on Linkedin or send me an e-mail.
Connect with me on Linkedin or send me an e-mail.
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