How dangerous is positive pop psychology in language learning?

We know it all. The constant exhortations to put on a happy face, smile, show gratitude, frame mishaps and illness as „challenges”, „learning-opportunities” and even „gifts”. It seems to be the cultural dominant, nowadays. The self-help industry is thriving. 18-year-old „life” coaches are popping up everywhere, letting us in into „the secret” – for hefty amounts, of course. In the past, psychological consultancy was mainly perceived as necessary for those in distress. Today, everybody’s „mindset” is up for coaching – to become a millionaire, or just to live your „passion”. Probing into the ever more fantastic claims of pop psychology, deserves a less than superficial treatment than the present text. We will not examine the scientific validity of positive thinking and „mindfulness” interventions pretending to make you a millionaire, cancer-free or older than 100 years. Instead, we will discuss the implications on language teaching.

Mindfulness. As with every concept, there are many definitions. We will just stick with these two: a) „the quality or state of being conscious or aware of something.” b) „a mental state achieved by focusing one's awareness on the present moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting one's feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations, used as a therapeutic technique.”

It should be straightforward that if we want to improve any skill (be it singing, typing, playing golf or speaking a foreign language) we need to become as aware as possible during the act of doing it. It should be clear that a pianist’s concert performance would suffer it there were thoughts and worries floating around in his or her mind.

But, it seems, the whole idea of mindfulness is to apply Eastern meditation to all areas of our life. That is, learning how to stay “unattached”, “non-judgmental”. It should be clear that, while learning a language, we need to constantly judge and discriminate, and look for areas of our speech we can improve. If “mindfulness” leads to applying a “non-dualistic”, relativistic approach (there is no right or wrong) to our speech, it will be certainly detrimental. However, if “mindfulness” leads to be mindful of our unproductive reactions (our “inner censor”) to making mistakes (blaming ourselves, remaining stuck in the negative present; vs. productive reactions, focusing on actions to improve our speech) it is certainly helpful. Many language learners (and teachers) indulge in negative self-talk when encountering difficulties, without translating them into corrective activity.

Gratefulness. A key element in pop psychology cures is training your gratefulness “muscle”. Making it a daily routine of finding something or someone to be grateful for. Oncee again, when not linked to absurd expectations, there is nothing wrong with it. It is also nothing new, not even in our own oft-despised Western spiritual traditions (Christianity). As with many other techniques in positive psychology, its impact depends on what you will do or not do. If you use “gratefulness” exercises just to feel better, without action, it certainly leads nowhere. On the other hand, if you link your feeling of gratefulness to a moral obligation on your part to become the best form of you, go ahead. For example, if you compare all the resources for learning and teaching foreign languages at your fingertips, with what previous generations had, you should feel both grateful and obliged to make the best use out of it.

Positive thinking. Despite of what its academic originators will tell you, the relevant issue to discuss is what mass audiences make out of it. And, here, most understand positive thinking as blocking out negative thoughts, emotions and information. This means, of course, news, but also any information that threatens our belief systems, because being challenged in our positions makes us feel “negative”. In language learning, this may lead to several undesired situations:

·        Teachers may avoid all but positive feedback, out of the fear to be perceived as “negative” by their students.

·        Teachers may fear that giving negative feedback on a student’s performance, but also on his attitudes and levels of commitment, may put the student somehow at risk of dropping out or having deep psychological distress.

·        Teachers may emit a lot of phony “positive” messages (“You are so smart”, “You are my greatest class”), which will most certainly backfire as soon as they encounter difficulties in real life.

If you want be notified about the upcoming book or more articles and materials on the psychology and quality management of language teaching, please subscribe to my mailing list.

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 applies research in psychology as well as principles of quality management to the language teaching process. 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.

Check us out at The GO Method.

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 as a university lecturer in psychology as well as a consultant for UNICEF, Terre des Hommes, IOM, the EU and private companies. 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.

The seven sins of language schools

Talking about disruptive entrepreneurship has become commonplace. We all know about the Amazon, Twitter, Uber, Airbnb, and what not, revolutions. Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Cuban and myriads of others have become modern-day saints, to be emulated by younger generations.

We have come to associate market disruptions with big business. With the hotel, retail, music, publishing or media business. However, many entrepreneurs in smaller niches – consciously or subconsciously – consider that all those changes will not affect them. They may think that their market segment is or too niche and small to be attractive for disruptors, or that they are simply irreplaceable. Where we come to the language learning business.

How are language schools in today’s world?  Extremely vulnerable, I would say.

Let us look at seven “sins” (=vulnerabilities) committed by many schools. It may not be yours, for sure, but it is, nonetheless an observable phenomenon (join the discussion if you disagree and send me an e-mail at gerhard.j.ohrband@gmail.com).

1.      Arrogance. There is no way people can “seriously” and “thoroughly” learn a foreign language, other than through our “accredited” school with our “certified” teachers. - Do you know what, your customers care about their results. As soon as they get them somewhere else, independently of how “unserious” and “un-certified” that service provider may be, they leave. Results speak for themselves. As in other crafts or skills, one can immediately see or hear whether someone has mastered it, or not. One either speaks fluently, or not.

2.      Relying solely on status. In the language learning world, there are quite a lot of “renowned” institutions: the Alliance Francaise, the Confucius Institute, Berlitz, the British Council, the Goethe Institute, the Instituto Cervantes, and others. If you happen to be one of them, beware that customers, in the end, will value outcomes. For the first courses, the image of a prestigious institution alone may attract them, but at higher levels, it really depends on the quality of the services. Now, the more prestigious the institution, the less flexibility in experimenting with new techniques and formats, and the greater the vulnerability compared to startup competitors who do not care for how language teaching should be done “correctly”.

3.      Focusing too much on standardized testing. At the moment, preparing for the TOEFLs or Goethe Certificates of this world may seem a profitable long-term business – for some schools even a local monopoly. However, these certificates may lose their standing quickly, as soon as technology advances. Their current function is just as intermediate proof to employers (and educational institutions) that a person possesses certain linguistic competencies. With the possibility of speech recognition and text analysis, and the respective tools becoming cheaper and cheaper, why should a company rely on those certificates and not just let candidates pass through fresh exams, tailored specifically to the company’s needs?! Administered and analyzed automatically by online tools. How would your school fare in a world in which there are no more monopolistic language certificates around, and customers value most highly speech production, in the areas of their individual interest?!

4.      Disregard for actual science. What has always baffled me is to what degree education, in general, relies mostly on traditions that are not tested in experimental settings. You may say that we cannot afford to run controlled experiments at our school and to check what teaching style, materials and learning techniques yield the best results. Nonetheless, there is so much actual science done in educational psychology that offers easily applicable hints on how to improve goal-setting, giving feedback to students, managing the classroom, helping students set up home routines, memorizing words for the long term, dealing with difficult students, or overcoming obstacles and frustrations. I just remember one school that had students fill-in questionnaires with more than 60 strangely worded and often outright biased questions on how they liked the course. I suggested adapting the questionnaire according to some basic standards for surveys, shortening it and making the analysis more transparent for their feedback-ed teachers. To which the reply was: “We do not want to get to scientific with that. We will just leave it as it is.”

Disregarding real science on motivation, memory and learning does not only mean ending up with something more complicated, unreliable, invalid and inefficient, it may also translate into leaving profits on the table, preventing you from making your processes more productive.

5.      Losing sight of the essential added value to customers. Faced with the advent of new technology, many schools try to incorporate tech by giving their website a new make-up, including interactive functions, buying touch-screens for the classroom, eliminating paper in favor of apps and shared Google Drive documents. This bears the risk of investing a lot of time and effort in areas less relevant to the outcome (speech production), which should be scrutinizing the actual teaching process and its underlying assumptions.

Other schools try to make themselves more attractive by offering all kinds of events in and outside the classroom: movie showings, games, competitions, excursions, discussion clubs, etc. This may pay out (or not, by blurring your key value proposition to customers) in attracting new students. However, they will stay (!) for more courses, only if lessons are more productive than anything else on the market.

6.       Lack of quality management. At this topic, school administrators often become angry. “What do you insinuate here? That we do not know how to run our school?! Look, our school exists for more than 20 years. That means, we know how to do things.” But, how much of that is written down somewhere on paper (or computer files)? What would happen if you had to leave your school for half a year upon short notice? What do you have to hand over to your replacement? Will that suffice so that he or she can run the organization competently and smoothly? You may say we are no franchise; we are not McDonalds or Starbucks, nor BMW or General Motors. Why should we care? Well, how do you expect to scale your business, open new schools in other locations, double or triple your teachers, languages and services in general, without having systems in place?

7.      Unproductive lessons. In the previous materials, we have repeatedly pointed out that often extremely unproductive (=time-wasting) lessons are THE Achilles’ heel of language schools. I have yet to come across a school that explicitly doubles down on maximizing productivity as their core value-added proposition. And I have been on hundreds of language school websites.

If you want to be prepared for the tide, this is the key element to fix to stay alive and thrive. And, then engage in all the fancy stuff.

If you want be notified about the upcoming book or more articles and materials on the psychology and quality management of language teaching, please subscribe to my mailing list.

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 applies research in psychology as well as principles of quality management to the language teaching process. 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.

Check us out at The GO Method.

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 as a university lecturer in psychology as well as a consultant for UNICEF, Terre des Hommes, IOM, the EU and private companies. 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.