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FOREIGN language teachers and researchers have become increasingly interested in the student's role in the language-learning process. In recent years, moving beyond comparative studies of the “best” language-teaching methodology, researchers have investigated the contents of natural second language acquisition, the characteristics of successful language learners, and the interactions between the learner and the language-learning environment. The relatively new academic field called second language acquisition has arisen to address these questions. While such studies increase our understanding of how languages are learned and, consequently, of how they should be taught, we must remember that typical American foreign language learners are classroom students at the same time they are language learners.
The psychologist George Kelly describes the cognitive dimensions that people use to understand the world around them. For example, when confronted with a new best-seller, we might judge it as “light” or “heavy,” “trashy” or “literary,” “mundane” or “exotic.” As language teachers we must consider that the learner's—or perhaps more properly the student's—perspective and the teacher's perspective on the foreign language classroom can conflict. Influenced by our training and personal philosophies, we think of our classrooms as “communication-centered” or “grammar-focused,” as dominated by “teacher talk” or “student talk,” while our students are more likely to think of their courses as “hard” or “easy” and of their instructors as “strict” or “lenient.” In my work with student teachers, I have often been struck by this clash of dimensions between instructors and students. My student teachers speak of listening-comprehension activities, guided compositions, and structural practice. Typically, their students are more concerned with grading practices, due dates, and extra-credit policies.
Language teachers and students can also differ in how they understand specific tasks. In interviews, Hosenfeld found that high school students were able to complete grammar exercises without comprehending either the grammatical paradigm or the meaning of the example sentences. For these students, a practice sheet on using direct-object pronouns in French became an exercise in turning to the underlined phrase, deleting the second word (the one we teachers call a noun), and moving the first one (the one we teachers call an article) to another place in the sentence. Garrett also offers a number of unsettling examples of rules about German syntax that students have developed from their limited classroom experience.
Differences in student and teacher perceptions of the classroom climate need to be considered as well. In the context of communication-centered and proficiency-oriented instruction, foreign language teachers have become more sensitive to the effect of instructional practice on student comfort. But teachers, like any other outsiders, cannot know their students' experience directly. We can try to make the classroom environment more comfortable, but we cannot always know when or even whether we are succeeding.
To emphasize the dual role of the foreign language learner, this paper is subtitled student perceptions of language and the language classroom. It focuses on recent research on classroom anxiety and student beliefs about language learning, two areas where the role of student and the role of learner may genuinely conflict.
By student beliefs about language learning, I mean preconceived ideas about the language-learning process rather than attitudes toward the target language and the target-language group. These popular notions are the ones we encounter in our day-to-day lives. While many beliefs about language learning are seemingly prevalent in American culture, they can also be contradictory. Advertisements for private language schools that promise fluency in a few months of part-time study would appear to rest on the assumption that languages can be learned quickly and easily by everyone (Acheson). In contrast, Senator Paul Simon notes the existence of “a widespread belief in the United States that acquiring another language is a special ‘gift’ that some people have and that most people do not have” (74). Other popular beliefs concern the best techniques for learning a language, the “right” age to begin language study, and the nature of the language-learning process. It is my contention that students bring many of these conceptions to the classroom, where these notions, in turn, have a substantial impact on performance.
I have studied the language-learning beliefs of a group of 241 university students enrolled in first-semester classes in French (63 students), German (80 students), and Spanish (98 students). (For a full report on the findings, see Horwitz.) The study used an instrument called the Beliefs about Language Learning Inventory (BALLI), which surveys student opinions on a variety of issues and controversies including (1) the difficulty of language learning, (2) foreign language aptitude, (3) the nature of language learning, (4) learning and communication strategies, and (5) motivations and expectations.
Several responses highlight the kinds of preconceived notions about language learning that instructors may find among their own students. (The “correctness” of the opinions is not at issue here; I am concerned, rather, with the effect of these beliefs on learning strategies and students' expectations for language learning.) For example, the students had definite opinions about the time needed to learn a foreign language. Asked how long it would take if someone spent one hour a day trying, from 5% to 8% of the students in each group answered under a year, and well over one-third of each group chose a year or two. Thus, a substantial number felt that a maximum of two years, a period equivalent to the typical four-semester sequence of beginning language courses, was sufficient for learning another language. Many, if not most, foreign language teachers would probably consider this a significant underestimate.
Student beliefs about aptitude were also noteworthy. For example, students strongly endorsed the idea that some people are born with a special ability to learn a foreign language, and they overwhelmingly concurred with the common wisdom that it is easier for children than for adults to learn a second language. (They did not feel, however, that women were better language learners or that math and science whizzes were poor ones.) On the other hand, most of those surveyed believed that everyone can learn a foreign language. Thus, while most students could envisage better language learners than themselves, they presumably felt personally adequate to the task.
The subjects were also asked what they thought was the best way to learn a language. Although most of them agreed that the process differed from learning other school subjects, many of the students seemed to have a limited view of exactly how it differed. For example, 25% to 39% of the students in each group felt that the most important part of language study was learning vocabulary words, and at least 25% of each group believed that their main goal was to master a lot of grammar rules. The item concerning the role of translation drew the only sharp disagreement among the three groups. German and Spanish students overwhelmingly supported the idea that studying a foreign language consists largely of learning to translate from English, while the French students disagreed. Since the BALLI was administered after classes had commenced (during the first three weeks of the semester), instructional practices may have already affected the students' responses. Thus, these reversed responses would seem to indicate that classroom experiences have at least some potential for altering student beliefs about language learning.
In summary, then, upward of 40% of the students surveyed felt that it was possible to become fluent in a second language in two years or less, and more than 60% of the Spanish and German students felt that learning a foreign language is mostly a matter of translating from English. Thus, there would seem to be a serious mismatch between language-learning expectations and classroom reality. Students who anticipate fluency in two years of part-time study are likely to become frustrated, perceiving their required sequence of courses as an ordeal or attributing their incomplete fluency to poor instruction. Negative experiences probably reinforce beliefs that special abilities are necessary to learn a language. The orientation of these students to the task of language learning should also be of concern to us as a profession. Although research indicates that more successful language learners tend to adopt such holistic strategies as reading extensively and seeking out native speakers (Naiman, Froblich, Stern, and Todesco), many of the students in this study would seem to rely primarily on translation, word lists, and grammatical paradigms—a practice that would seem to limit their potential for linguistic achievement.
For adults—and university students would be classified as adults in this context—language learning and language class can be traumatic. Those who typically perceive themselves as reasonably intelligent and socially adept can find themselves having difficulty using a foreign language to express the most basic concepts. The complex and nonspontaneous mental operations required to communicate at early stages of learning can threaten students' confidence in themselves as competent communicators and lead to self-consciousness and, for some, even fear. Moreover, when students finally succeed in constructing target-language messages, their efforts are evaluated according to unfamiliar linguistic and sociocultural standards. Thus, even the most self-assured individual can find second language communication anxiety-provoking. Although such other academic disciplines as mathematics and science have been associated with anxiety reactions, probably no other field challenges a student's self-concept in the way that language study does (Horwitz, Horwitz, and Cope).
To learn more about foreign language anxiety and to help those troubled by it, researchers invited students in beginning language classes at the University of Texas, Austin, to participate in a “support group for foreign language learning.” (See Cope for a full report on this intervention.) Surprisingly, more than a third of the students informed of the opportunity were concerned enough about their foreign language class to indicate interest in joining the group. Support-group participants, as well as student clients at the Learning Skills Center at the University of Texas, describe a number of specific learning problems. In addition to symptoms commonly associated with anxiety reactions (e.g., tenseness, trembling, perspiring, heart pounding, and sleep disturbances), group members speak of “freezing” in class, standing outside the door trying to summon up enough courage to enter, and going blank before tests. Difficulty speaking in class is probably the most frequently cited concern; students report that they feel reasonably comfortable participating in structured language activities or delivering prepared speeches but tend to freeze when required to speak spontaneously. During support-group sessions, student participants often offered the responses that they were unable to articulate during the previous day's class. Listening comprehension is also a problem; some have trouble discriminating the sounds and structures or grasping the content of a target-language message. In an extreme case, one male student claimed to hear only a loud buzz whenever his teacher spoke in the foreign language. Many students complain that they have little or no idea of what the teacher is saying in extended utterances.
Testing situations can be particularly traumatic. Students frequently assert that they “knew” a certain grammar point but “forgot” it during a test when they had to attend to many grammar points simultaneously. Anxiety seems sometimes to manifest itself as carelessness. Students realize, after the test, that they knew the correct answer but put down the wrong one because of nervousness. A related response might be called “overstudying.” One young woman reported spending all her free time on her first-semester French class at the expense of her other courses as well as her personal life. Of course, some anxious students react conversely. They avoid studying and even skip classes entirely, in an attempt to alleviate personal feelings of inadequacy.
I delivered an earlier version of this article on a panel entitled Three Perspectives on Language Learning: The Student's, the Teacher's, and the Linguist's. In representing the student perspective, I chose to discuss student anxiety and learner beliefs to highlight the different classroom realities experienced by students and teachers. I am aware, however, of the presumptuousness of a nonstudent presenting the student point of view, nor do I mean to suggest that anxiety and learner beliefs are the only factors to be considered.
To gain a broader perspective for this presentation, I visited two language classrooms where I asked the students what I should tell foreign language teachers and scholars about being a language student at the university level. The first class, composed of second-semester French students, spoke of their difficulty in speaking and understanding the language. They wanted teachers to know that learning a language was “hard.” The second class, third-semester French students, said nothing about learning French; they spoke instead of the time—which they considered inordinate—they had to spend to get an acceptable grade in a subject outside their major. No one mentioned actually learning how to speak French.
I do not want to make too much of the unsystematically collected comments of two possibly unrepresentative groups of students. On the other hand, their somewhat troubling comments underline the two main themes of this paper. First, the classroom realities are often perceived differently by students and teachers. Because language students are not sophisticated language learners, they are likely to view class activities in ways their teachers do not; for this reason, many classroom requirements make them feel nervous. The first group of students complained that their teacher talked so fast that it was impossible to translate every word. When I asked whether it was important to translate every word, they all agreed that it was, a belief probably not held by their teacher. In fact, the teacher may have been unaware that they were frantically trying to translate while she hoped only that they were getting the gist of the spoken material. Thus, in their expectation that the teacher shared their “commonsense” assumption about the necessity of translation, the students turned casual listening experiences into anxiety-provoking speed-listening tests.
Second, the demands of being a foreign language student may conflict with the demands of language learning. The second group of students seemed to be so caught up in completing their course that they had lost the connection between the class and learning to speak a living foreign language. This is, I think, an important and complex problem. While the second language acquisition literature describes a process mediated by individual differences and needs, the typical language classroom does not, and perhaps cannot, allow for such individuality. We teachers must evaluate progress over the term with a letter grade, even though we recognize that some people simply learn a language more quickly than others do. We realize that motivation plays an important role, yet it is hard to convince American students that knowing another language is both useful and personally enriching.
For these difficult problems, I see no easy solutions. It would be simple to add them to an ever-growing list of admonitions to language instructors and to hope for increased teacher sensitivity to produce a miracle, but many of these issues would seem to have roots far beyond the classroom in the culture at large. And yet, because these problems are difficult and deep-seated, it is essential that we as foreign language professionals come to grips with them. We need to continue to think seriously about how languages are taught in real school contexts. We need to continue to examine the conflicts that may arise among teacher expectations, instructional practices, and individual student differences. Otherwise, we may unwittingly thwart those students who aspire to become genuinely proficient in a foreign language.
The author is Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction, specializing in foreign language education, at the University of Texas, Austin. This article is based on a paper presented at the MLA convention, 27–30 December 1987, in San Francisco.
Acheson, Palmer. “The Time Factor in Language Learning.”Invited presentation, U of Texas, Austin, August 1987.
Cope, JoAnn. “Foreign Language Anxiety: An Institutional Response.” Unpublished paper, U of Texas, Austin, 1988.
Garrett, Nina. “The Problem with Grammar: What Kind Can the Student Use?” Modern Language Journal 70(1986): 133–48.
Horwitz, Elaine K. “The Beliefs about Language Learning of Beginning University Students.” Modern Language Journal 72 (1988): 283–94.
Horwitz, Elaine K., Michael B. Horwitz, and JoAnn Cope. “Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety.” Modern Language Journal 70 (1986): 125–32.
Hosenfeld, Carol. “Learning about Learning: Discovering Our Students' Strategies.” Foreign Language Annals 9 (1976): 117–29.
Kelly, George A. The Psychology of Personal Constructs. New York: Norton, 1955.
Naiman, N., M. Frohlich, H. H. Stern, and A. Todesco. The Good Language Learner. Toronto: Ontario Inst. for Studies in Education, 1978.
Simon, Paul. The Tongue-Tied American. New York: Continuum, 1980.
© 1989 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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