The English Culture Club article of the month
Doing things with words
What does it mean to know (and to learn) a language?
Languages - and knowledge - are inherently fluid and hard to pin down. After all, how do you know what you know or what you've learnt? Maybe you can look at how many exercises you've done, or perhaps you can take an official exam or a placement test. But then again, what on earth does it mean that you're upper intermediate or a B2+? Still, for foreign language students and people looking to jazz up their CV, getting to know what you know (and being able to prove it) is becoming quite a pricey but necessary quest.
Luckily for us, the Council of Europe developed some twenty years ago the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (usually shortened to CEFR) with the aim of solving this conundrum. In the CEFR, everyone is classified into three major levels: A for basic users, B for independent users, and C for proficient users. Each level is then subdivided into two levels (literally called 1 and 2). If you google up the CEFR, you'll see that the global scale, which provides a general definition of the levels, takes up less than one page. If you're into this sort of thing, you can easily find more nuanced descriptions within the Council of Europe's webpage, but the general one is good enough to begin with. The CEFR includes traditional descriptors such as “can understand a wide range of demanding, longer text”, which you may recognise as something your teacher wrote in a report about you; but there are also mentions of other more wide-ranging abilities such as “can deal with most situations likely to arise whilst travelling”. The true game-changers in language teaching and assessment here were 1) the fact that levels of proficiency are now set according to the things speakers are able to do rather than their grammatical accuracy, i.e. the currently pervasive notion of competence; and 2) the connection between one's learning and the world beyond the classroom, the emphasis on learning to communicate and do genuine real-life things with language.
Key notions
This approach to what it means to know a foreign language is one of the key notions we try to communicate to our student teachers at the Master's for Secondary School Teachers, and it's also one of the core principles underpinning current school curriculums. But rather than trying to shove the notion of competence-based learning down poor students' throats, we came up with the idea of reversing the process: We'd start talking about their own experiences as learners and then move on towards the concepts. Hence, at the beginning of the course we asked student teachers to fill in a survey in order to gauge their views about this topic, which we then discussed during the first session of the course. Just in case, first we asked them whether or not they knew English (luckily, they all said yes), and how they could tell that they knew English. Interestingly, all answers fell into two categories - people who declared that they knew English because they could use it in some way, with many of them saying that they could use it to communicate; and those who knew English because they had studied it forever or because they had some certificate to prove it.
Because most students naturally used the notion of competence to describe their own knowledge of English, it would seem then that we're all on the same page and there's nothing to worry about. However, we found evidence of conflicts when we asked them about where and how they had learnt English. Even though most students said they learned English in a private academy or as part of the regular school curriculum, when we asked them what their secret trick to learning was we found that hardly any of them mentioned a teacher or anything to do with formal education: It was all about watching shows, reading books, living abroad, listening to music. So there was a mismatch between what they perceived the context of learning to be (school and language academies) and the context in which they actually learned it (their lives and interests beyond school and language immersion situations).
I guess that in my students' own experiences as learners there wasn't much emphasis on real communication, which surfaces as they develop their own practices and beliefs about teaching. For example, when students go off to schools to do their practicum, we find traces of this conflict in the kind of materials they prepare. Yes, they include listening to music, watching bits of shows or chatting online, but it's easy to tell that these are not considered as proper learning activities. There always needs to be an exam, a list of irregular verbs, a test on prepositions. And it is on these “serious” contents that the assessment is going to be focussed, just as it was when they were young, as it always has been. The y feel guilty if they focus too much on the fun, meaningful part of language learning.
To overcome this impasse, we all need to change our mindset: teachers, students, families. Kids internalise adults' conceptions and act on them. They'll never watch shows in English if you never do; they won't feel confident speaking to foreigners if they never see you do it. It's no use investing money in language academies or trips abroad if we're unable to first change our own beliefs about language competence. It seems that out of guilt we're throwing money at the problem rather than trying to solve the causes underlying it. So perhaps, next time you want to ask your kids how much English they know, ask them to list all the things they can do in English, compare this list to all the things they can do in their other languages, tell them about your own abilities or lack of them. You'll find it's a lot more informative than having them tell you they got a 6.32 in the test.