I met a Scandinavian couple the other
day, who had visited Portugal countless times. They waxed lyrical
about the country, its beauty, its history, its food, its people (I can, by the way, impartially confirm that their comments were spot
on), and told me they would be moving there soon. Paperwork,
housing and banking matters were all good to go, and they were
delighted to have found a native who could answer their less
bureaucratic questions.
“So when will you start learning
Portuguese?”, I asked in turn. “Oh, no need for that!”, they
waved me aside, “Everyone speaks English there”. They do?, I
thought, wondering what everyone and English might mean, whenever anyone says what they’d just said. Okay, I
went on thinking, so they’re aiming to make a home of Portugal’s beauty, history, food, and people in a language that is neither theirs nor the country’s.
How will that work itself out?, I wanted to ask next but, before I
could, they added: “Besides, we’re not good at languages.”
I must have mumbled something in
response, and we probably went on talking about the marvels, the
enrichment, etc. etc., afforded by travelling the world. I can’t
remember. I’ve learned to switch to sociable autopilot after that
line, one that I’ve heard countless times and as infinitely tried
to counter, to null effect. The cumulative facts that I use more than
the magical number of just two languages in my daily life and that I ‘work with languages’ apparently make me
unsuitable to speak for the learning of new ones. “You’re gifted
for languages”, people nod knowledgeably at me and, as far as
they’re concerned, this compliment ends the argument.
Gift-wrapped language skills?
Image © Clipart Panda
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The issue is, of course, that this is
no compliment at all. It makes light of the tremendous amount of time, will, engagement, openness to input, readiness for practice that goes into learning any language, any time, whether we’re big or small. It tells me and other language learners that
we’ve learned our languages because we were, literally, given
something that we didn’t need to have merited to earn. It tells me
and other believers in hard work that we should believe instead in
easy handouts that we can’t help being awarded – or not awarded:
the corollary of gift theories of learning is that some of us “are
not good” at learning certain things, and can’t help it either.
The issue is also that the
gifted-for-languages reasoning is flawed. It says that in order to be
able to learn languages we must be good at languages. So are we all
gifted, since all of us are good at learning at least one language,
or does linguistic giftedness apply only to multilinguals? In that
case, the gift can only reveal itself after we’ve learned a couple of languages, since nobody is born using them. So was there a gift to
start off with, or did we acquire language learning skills on the
job? Are we talking nature or nurture?
Understand me right: I’m not denying
giftedness. I’m saying that arguing that you can only learn to use
new languages if you’re gifted for languages makes as much sense as
arguing that you can only learn to use new smartphones if you’re
gifted for smartphones. I can’t deny giftedness because the single
most important thing I’ve learned from my 40+ years as a teacher is
that we’re all gifted. The trick is to find where that gift lies,
which is not necessarily where entitled education policy-makers keep
telling us where to look.
In order to be good at what we do, what we need to be given is
the chance to develop what we’ve got. Francis Bacon dixit, in Novum Organon, 1: CXXI:
“So again the seeds of things are of much latent virtue, and yet of
no use except in their development”. Or, as Edward M. Hundert puts
it in the last paragraph of his book Lessons from an Optical Illusion. On Nature and Nurture, Knowledge and Values, we
must strive to “nurture that nature that has nurtured us”.
Let me leave you with two other nuggets
of wisdom about learners and learning: Aristotle’s “Consuetudo
est altera natura” (‘Habit is second nature’) and Quintilian’s
“Consuetudo certissima est loquendi magistra” (‘Usage is the
best language teacher’). Consuetudo is where we find the gift.
I’m sure that my new friends will
enjoy living in Portugal – their way, with expat English among English-speaking Portuguese. They won’t notice, and I
won’t tell them, what they’ll miss about Portugal’s consuetudines. Or about exploring unsuspected language learning skills, more on which next time.
© MCF 2016
Next post: Language learners and linguistic resourcefulness. Saturday 17th
September 2016.
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