“I’m just not good at languages”

Have you ever thought that you just can’t “get” a foreign language?

I felt that way too. I tried studying Portuguese for years, and even after a ton of effort, I felt like I knew next to nothing. I blamed myself.

However, I’ve since learned that many popular teaching methods are largely to blame. People have even performed experiments on the various methods used by language teachers and found that many either don’t help or make learning more difficult!

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read the data. One experiment took place in 1970 at Stanford^[1] . The methods of French teachers were closely observed and monitored for their effectiveness. They found that only about ⅓ of the various methods seemed to increase the proficiency of French in the students in a reliable way. The rest were either neutral (did not help) or seemed to harm the students’ ability to learn – unless they were done infrequently.

Generally, even when effective methods were used, if they were used too much, their helpfulness would drop. (perhaps the students got too bored)

The most disappointing thing, in my opinion, is that the research was largely ignored. I would have thought – naïvely it seems – that the education establishment would have taken the results on board and changed things accordingly. Have they?

I’ve never encountered a language teacher who has even heard of this research or any other of a similar kind. When I’ve asked teachers what methods are known to work and which don’t, they can’t tell me what any published experiments say. They can say what they prefer, or what they think works, or what their training tells them to do, but that’s all.

For some teachers, their favorite method is one that worked very poorly in the experiment!

I spent many hours in language classes that used the very methods found to be ineffective back in 1970. Why wasn’t my teacher aware of this? I certainly struggled, as did many others. I think it was rather unfair; we were all being taught using methods known to have serious problems, yet we were effectively told it was our own fault for not paying attention, not trying, or just “not being good at languages”.

Well, now I know the truth. Also, I believe I‘ve found a method that works, at least, for me – language mixing.

[1] Politzer, R.L. (1970), SOME REFLECTIONS ON “GOOD” AND “BAD” LANGUAGE TEACHING BEHAVIORS. Language Learning, 20: 31-43. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-1770.1970.tb00043.x

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