Many of us seem to have come to
associate teaching with the kind of structured teaching that we also
associate with schooling. We need set times and places in order to be
taught things, we need set syllabuses, preferably with statements
about things like teaching purposes, and we need details about things
like learning outcomes, preferably complete with a battery of tests
which make sure that the learner fits both purposes and outcomes,
through the application of things like bell-shaped curves and normal
distributions. And, of course, we need teachers.
Many of us also associate teaching
children with this kind of teaching. Regular questions that I get
from parents in multilingual families reflect these twin beliefs.
They want to teach their language(s) to their children, and they
wonder about hiring people to do so, about timetables, (online) books
and exercise books, and about must-dos and must-not-dos like, you’ve
guessed it, accidentally flouting the OPOLicy.
Some parents are adamant that teaching languages means teaching their grammar.
This isn’t easy, because learning things is never easy, they
concede, but it must be taught anyway “because children need to
learn something”. Many of us, it also became clear to me from
similar correspondence, thus associate learning with laborious
no-pain-no-gain kinds of processes.
There are several issues here. First,
the assumption that learners can’t learn by themselves. The
teaching philosophy behind structured teaching is that learning means
being aware that you’re learning, failing which you’re
unable to learn at all. Structured teaching is but one kind of
teaching, of course. Perhaps not the most effective, either,
precisely because it takes learning as dependent on (adult-bound)
structured prompting. Second, the assumptions that if you teach
little Jenny biology, then little Jenny will have learned biology;
and that if Jenny has learned biology, then Jenny must have had
biology taught to her. We can, of course, learn without dedicated
teaching, just like, alas!, all of us teachers are familiar with
dedicated teaching without learning – if you’re into teaching
linguistics, have a look at those Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know. Not
to mention all those bits and pieces of “hidden curriculum” that
we do teach, though unwittingly. One of my students once told me that he had
learned two things from my linguistics courses: linguistics, which I
knew I was teaching, and my way of teaching linguistics, which I
didn’t know I was teaching. And third, the assumption that learning
carries effort, which is the point I wish to expand on.
Children learn best when they’re not
being taught. Do keep in mind that we’re talking children
here, often toddlers, so let me rephrase that: children learn best
when they’re not being taught in the ways that we adults think that
things should be taught. Take, for example, what some adults perceive
as “doing nothing”, as when children are mumbling away to
themselves in some remote corner of the house, or staring in silence
at the moon. To me, respecting the brain activity which must be going
on there and then is a brainy activity in itself. Or take play, which
many parents view as a waste of precious childhood time
and/or as irrelevant to learning.
“Idle” people strike us as no-good layabouts, including where
they may be, simply, thinking – which is something that a lot of us
may well have forgotten how to do, since we’re all so busy engaging
in “real”, tangible activities, in order to avoid being seen as
no-good layabouts.
Predictably, then, “idle” children
strike us as prospective no-gooders. This is why we enrol the tiny
things in assorted “schools”, to “teach” them to become
proper adults like us – and this is why I have scare quotes in the title of this
post. We believe that babies in nappies should be taught to sit
still, obey instructions, listen to adults, do things on schedule,
say things on cue. We believe that children should learn about their
new world like so many of us learn about new countries, by following
the hoisted flag of the standard tourist guide. We believe, in short,
that children should not be children, in an intriguing revival of
Victorian ways of looking at childhood.
Jean Piaget’s take on matters of teaching children
makes a lot more sense to me: “When you teach a child something
you take away forever his chance of discovering it for himself.” If
the “his/himself” in this English version of the quotation irks
you, by the way, it does me, too. Piaget’s original words are:
“Tout ce qu’on apprend à l’enfant, on l’empêche de
l’inventer ou de le découvrir.”
This is all the more true of languages,
for two reasons. One, that children, like the rest of us, learn best
by doing. We may not know that we’re teaching language,
without scare quotes, when we’re talking about something else in
that language, but we are. As I wrote in an article about child language acquisition, “language
learning is going on whenever language is used around children.”
The other reason is that learning languages has much more to it than
following the guide. In my book Multilinguals are ...?, I noted that “the
best language lessons are the ones that don’t target the languages
themselves at all” (p. 72).
Structured teaching deliberately steers
attention away from what we
want to learn, whether we’re children or adults, to what someone
else has decided we should be learning. No wonder our learning of
languages, whether we’re children or adults, is often fraught with
stumbling blocks. The next post has some more to say about this.
© MCF 2013
