Learning a foreign language can be an exciting and highly rewarding process. After all, language classes, exchange meetings, and overseas travel can all lead to new friendships, and enhanced language skills can aid career advancement and the forging of new business relationships. Successful language learners also report an increased appreciation for other cultures as well as a greater sense of global togetherness.
Yet, when it comes to studying a language, many of us will remember time spent in classrooms and alone at home with course books, struggling to grasp the concepts at play. And when presented with opportunities to use the language – whether that be in real-life scenarios or artificial ones designed to test our language proficiency and knowledge – the feeling that we are underperforming is common.
The fact is that studying a foreign language doesn’t always result in language learning, and even when it does, this doesn’t necessarily guarantee effective language use. What’s more, our performance can vary from day to day depending on how much contact with have with the language, and factors such as our mood.
Given this situation, it is understandable why many aspiring students become frustrated with the language learning process. They feel the time investment is not producing results quickly enough and to the extent that they had hoped for and expected. As a result, they may lose the motivation to keep up their studies and thus miss out on the benefits outlined at the beginning of this article. But this needn’t be the case, and I’ll explain why.
The root cause of our frustrations lies in a simple truth: we have unrealistic expectations and unclear goals. It’s certainly true that with the right motivation and study techniques, we can amass a great deal of language knowledge rapidly, but if we make the mistake of equating language knowledge with proficient language use in communicative situations, we are setting ourselves up for failure. Without practice, language knowledge cannot be activated and language skills cannot be developed.
Given this reality, the key to feeling successful as a language learner is to set more realistic and achievable short-term goals. Take this scenario: you’re abroad and your aim is to say ‘Hello, how are you?’ in a foreign language and be understood. To achieve your goal, what you need to know are the individual words (lexical knowledge), in the correct order to form a question (grammatical knowledge), and how to pronounce them (phonological knowledge). So, when you practice doing this and when you say it in a real-life scenario, and you’re met with an acknowledging smile, you feel good about yourself. You feel successful.
However, how do you feel if the listener enthusiastically responds by sharing how they are actually feeling today and you don’t understand a word? A degree of discomfort I’d venture to say. After all, feeling confused is never good and nobody wants to have to ask, ‘Can you repeat that, please? (especially if you misunderstand a second or third time).
Sadly, this is where many language learners come unstuck. They think of themselves as failures because of the gap between what they want and expect they are be able to do (understand everything!) and their ability to do so. Successful language learners, however, are more realistic in such situations. They realise that it’s impossible to fully prepare for what someone else will say. What’s more, the message might have been more understandable had it been written down, delivered slower, or in an accent they were more familiar with.
Viewed in these terms, we can begin to see language practice as a way to identify our language gaps – the difference between our present language skills and knowledge and what we would like to know and be able to do. The successful language learner is confident that with time and practice and the right language goals in place, these gaps can be bridged one at a time. For example, in the aforementioned scenario, they could set a listening language goal like, ‘I will listen to 10 short social exchanges to understand what people frequently say after greeting one another’, or ‘I will make a list of common responses to the question, “How are you?”‘.
I guess what I’m saying is that negative past experiences of communication breakdowns like these as well as those in the language classrooms needn’t dictate how you feel about your future ability to improve. It’s about accepting that a certain strategy didn’t work or there was an area of language you hadn’t studied, learned, and practiced. Your only job is to reflect on and identify what these are, set smaller, achievable, short-term goals to bridge these gaps, and test out new strategies until you reach your ultimate language goals.
