Tuesday's Tip for Language Learning #12: Wrong Thinking vs Right Thinking

Excerpt from Think Yourself into Becoming a Language Learning Super Star

Wrong Thinking That Impedes Your Learning Progress;
Right Thinking That Speeds Up Your Progress

All too often learners are held back from complete success by obstacles of their own making through just plain wrong thinking. We call these kinds of wrong thinking cognitive distortions. They creep into our thinking rather naturally, but we need to fight them off because when we let cognitive distortions creep into our thinking, we end up interpreting events in such a way that fuels emotions such as anxiety, depression, or anger—and that puts up barriers to language learning success. 

For the sake of space, in this book, I am including in the sections that follow those cognitive distortions that I have found to be especially pertinent for language learners. If you are interested, you can Google the term, cognitive distortion, and find quite a long list of cognitive distortions that researchers have found.

All-or-Nothing Thinking

 In this kind of thinking, there is no shade of gray. There is not even black-and-white. Rather, everything is perceived as an extreme. Good or bad. Right or wrong. Success or failure. In all-or-nothing thinking, there is no middle ground though we all know that life is general is mostly middle ground.

Here are some ways in which learners exhibit all-or-nothing thinking:

• ·      When you do not receive 100% on a test, you tell yourself you are failing and will not be able to pass any future tests;
• ·       When you make mistakes with a couple of expressions in an important conversation with a native speaker or as part of a role play, you feel depressed all evening;
• ·       When others in the class seem to do better at a role-play than you, you know that you do not have the same level of talent as your classmates, and you despair; and
• ·       When you cannot understand all the words in a reading assignment, broadcast, or movie, you know the language is beyond your abilities, and you give up, not crediting yourself for all the words you did understand.

The first step toward avoiding anything successfully is to recognize it. Are you often or occasionally exhibiting all-or-nothing thinking? What prompts it? When did it start? Was there a single event or a bad week?

Use metacognitive strategies to take control of any situation in which you find yourself exhibiting all-or-nothing thinking. Rather than letting feelings dominate your reaction to imperfections in your performance, keep track of how you are really doing, recording how much you have learned and what you can do in the language. You will see that your dire predictions about not being able to learn the language are not true.

Overgeneralization

Overgeneralization is somewhat related to all-or-nothing thinking. However, it is not marked by swinging between extremes (either all is fine or nothing is fine), but in overgeneralization you assume that one small thing is typical of everything or apply the characteristics of one event to all events.

You can also make linguistic overgeneralizations, as well. Seeing an emerging pattern in some grammatical phenomena or in word formation, you assume this pattern applies to all circumstances, but it does not. This is not a cognitive distortion; it is good thinking and probably how you learned your first language. Unlike cognitive distortions, which are unhelpful, linguistic generalizations are helpful and overgeneralizations will, at worst, land you in a situation where your language is wrong (but often understood), as in saying the equivalent of foots, instead of feet, or pluralizing a deer as some deers instead of some deer.

Here are some ways in which learners exhibit overgeneralization that is indeed a cognitive distortion:

• Your teacher points out some errors you have made on a homework assignment, and you assume that you do not understanding anything about the assignment though most of your answers were correct;
•  One of your classmates makes a joke about you (really, the classmate did not mean to be offensive and thought that you would laugh at yourself), and you assume that your classmate does not like you—or that all your classmates do not like you; or 
• You meet someone from the native culture with whom you do not click and assume that all native speakers are like the one you just met.

As stated with the previous cognitive distortion, the first step toward avoiding anything successfully is to recognize it. Are you often or occasionally overgeneralizing? What prompts it? Finding the prompt for overgeneralization can help turn it off.

With overgeneralizations, you can get help. First, start with yourself. Ask yourself, am I overgeneralizing? Then explore whether your assumption is true. Don’t stop there. Move beyond yourself and ask your teacher for clarification if you think you are overgeneralization; the teacher can also confirm whether or not you are overgeneralizing.

 

 

Mental Filtering

Although we might think that filtering out bad thoughts and experiences could contribute to a happier experience in life, mental filtering is generally considered negative. It is a cognitive distortion that filters out the positive and retains the negative. That often leads to depression and anxiety. So, mental filtering is not something to be embraced but avoided.

 Life has good, bad, and neutral moments. However, learners who are trapped by the cognitive distortion of mental filtering see only the bad moments. Whatever is neutral or good gets interpreted as bad. In this kind of thinking, you cannot march past or squeeze past the “filter” or obstacle that you have unconsciously placed in front of yourself. By focusing out positive events and focusing exclusively on negative ones, your view of reality becomes distorted.

Here are some examples of mental filtering: 

•        Your teacher corrects your pronunciation—even though your pronunciation in general is good (you actually know that and your teacher has told you that, after the correction, you find yourself tongue-tied, focusing on how “bad” your pronunciation is and reluctant to speak in front of others because you are not embarrassed by your pronunciation;

•        On a test, you make a mistake with correct usage of one class of verbs, and after that you start making mistakes on other classes as well, growing increasingly certain that you cannot understand how verbs are conjugated when really you had a good handle on them until this particular test; and/or

•        Two of your classmates who are working on a project with you tell you they really like how you organized the Internet research results that all three of you have gathered and, noticing that they both gathered more, you assume that the compliment about your organization was really a way of telling you that you had not done your fair share of research.

Once again, the clear way to avoid mental filtering, or any cognitive distortion, is to move beyond cognition to metacognition. In this case, you need to prove to yourself that there are many positive aspects of your learning progress—and to know that because feeling it will not come until after you remove the filter.

Here are some ways to use metacognition to help you eliminate the filter:

• ·       Keep a journal for a week, and every time something positive happens, write it down—this requires you to focus on the positive, not the negative;
• ·       Read your journal at the end of the week, note down the number of positive events, and allow yourself to realize that perhaps you are in a mostly good situation;
• ·       Especially if you are having trouble staying focused on the positive to capture all the good moments, ask a friend in the class to help you (perhaps you can even both keep journals and note down your own positive moments as well as the positive moments you have noticed for each); it never hurts to have someone who can help you with putting a positive spin on things; and/or
• ·       Find the incurably optimistic learners among your classmates and start palling around with them.

Mustification

I love the word mustification. You will not find it in any dictionary. Dr. Maurice Funke coined it, based on the word must, to indicate the unreasonable expectations we set for ourselves. Too many expectations, and we cannot move; we have tied ourselves up on our own with our own requirements not necessarily having anything to do with what is externally expected of us.

Mustification ends up adding too many tasks to be handled well and on time. This creates a sense of guilt.

Here are some ways to know when you are under the spell of mustification:

• ·       You find yourself saying things like “I should have done that differently” or “I have to do this” associated with guilt feelings;
• ·       Knowing that reading a lot improves proficiency so you plan on reading 5-10 pages of authentic articles every night—and when you don’t succeed in doing that, you feel guilty and mad at yourself; and/or
• ·       You spent too much time on grammar and did not have time to review vocabulary for your test (it happens), and you tell yourself: I should have studied more

 

Realize that all the “musts” in the world really come from you. Yes, you have deadlines and projects that have been assigned, but you chose to take the course, right? Or, if the course is part of a career pattern or job, you chose that career pattern or job, right? All those other musts are coming from within you.

That does not mean taking it easy in class or blowing off assignments but rather being aware of the reality in which you live. Prepare to meet the deadlines coming your way (that will turn into musts if you do not prepare for them) by setting up a schedule with what you can reasonably complete each day—and then do it. If, instead of that or even in spite of that, you did not do a good job of time management for test preparation or project turn-in this time, learn from it and do better next time.

You have enough “musts” in your life; do not arbitrarily add more!

Personalization

Language students and teachers use the term personalization to mean taking something new being taught in the foreign language and adapting the information to your own circumstances so that you can use the information (text, phrases) whenever you need it in your personal life. For example, you might be listening to a clip that shows two people ordering something from a restaurant. Then, you re-enact the scene with your classmates, but you make your own choices, not the choices from the clip: the food you want to eat, how you address the wait staff, how you discuss the menu with your eating partner, and which of the various expressions used to order you will take for your own use (“I would like,” “how about,” “could I get,” “would you please bring me,” etc.—you probably never noticed that there are some many correct ways to order. This is not a cognitive distortion. This is a helpful and needed form of personalization.

When we talk about personalization as a cognitive distortion, we are talking about something very different. It is about making everything about you, and it is a negative way of going about learning. Every mistake is your fault. Every culturally inappropriate expression is your fault. Did you get a bad test score? Your fault. (Test results, really, are an ascertaining of two things: how well a teacher has taught and how well a student has learned.) Didn’t get your homework in on time because you got sick? You are a bad person. This type of personalization is debilitating; it erects barriers in your learning path.

Here are some examples of what learners who personalize say:

• ·       “Even though I was sick, I should have completed all my work;”
• ·       “I should get my classmates to be less unruly because it is really interfering with instruction in the class and disconcerts the teacher;” and/or
• ·       “My group did not do well on our project; I should have put more time into it.”

 Personalization is deviously a difficult cognitive distortion to overcome. It is easy to say, “it’s not about you.” (It really isn’t about you, you know.) It’s easy to tell you what not to do: don’t blame yourself for the general state of things that you have no control over. (You did not create that state, right?) Negative advice is equally easy: don’t think you should have done something more, longer, or better—and because you did not, you are a bad person. (You do really know that you are a good person, right?) What you did is what you did. What happened is what happened. Don’t blame yourself; don’t blame others.

Don’t is easy to say but hard to do. How do you verify that the absence of something is actually occurring? Obviously, that is difficult, but not impossible. But why go there? Why try to avoid a tendency to personalize the hard way. Instead, look at what you can do—and then do it.

Here are some examples of what you can do:

• ·       Look for things you can control: good study habits and doing your best;
• ·       On a regular basis, make a list of all the things you have done well that day or week, including non-language activities (and definitely non-testing activities)—perhaps what you did to help someone in your class or in the community (that counts a lot) or your involvement with a special cause (if you are going to personalize something, personalize how good you are);
• ·       When you feel like something is your fault, make a 2-column list and write in the left column the things that you have no control over or that are the fault of something or someone other than yourself and in the right column the things that truly are your fault (likely, there will be none or just a few—and if there are some, make a plan to fix them); and/or
• ·       Find and do things at least every other day that you do well and that make you feel good about yourself.

Life is personal, almost always, but try to find objectivity within it!

Jumping to Conclusions

I think we all know what jumping to conclusions means—drawing conclusions that are no based on an adequate amount of input. Almost always, these conclusions are negative in nature. (There is also the situation in which someone jumps to an unwarranted positive conclusion—I really am going to win the lottery because our store won the last two months. This is delusion or extreme optimism, but it is not a cognitive distortion.)

As a cognitive distortion, jumping to conclusions occurs when you reach a conclusion without having all the facts. When you do this, the conclusion is unwarranted. This happens when you don’t distinguish between what you have observed and what you have inferred or assumed. Psychologists call this the “inference observation confusion.”

Jumping to conclusions is, really, mind reading and forecasting the future and is usually quite inaccurate. It frequently happens when you take one or two facts and build a picture with them that may very likely be unreal. Here are some examples: 

•        You did poorly on a test even though you studied for it (you just had a bad day) and now you are scared and certain that you are going to fail the course;

•        • You are having trouble remembering idioms that your teacher has assigned you (for the first time), and you assume that is because you are just not someone who can learn idioms; and/or

•        Your teacher made what sounded like a negative comment about you (the teacher did not; you misheard), and now you avoid the teacher’s eyes because you know the teacher thinks poorly of you.

 When you are sure that things are going really, really bad, take a deeper look. Very likely, you are jumping to conclusions. Things don’t typically go really, really bad in language classes, and, of all teachers, most language teachers want their students to succeed and are open to helping them. About those idioms, give yourself time to learn them. Time helps with many things. 

Some specific things you can do to help yourself:

• ·       When you have reached a conclusion, check your conclusion against facts, lining up whatever objective information you can find;
• ·       Ask someone—a teacher or a peer—if your conclusion is justified, as in

o   If you think you have no aptitude for language, as your teacher (or take an aptitude test);

o   If you think you are coming across as unprepared or incompetent, ask your teacher;

o   If you think your teacher does not like you, ask your peers;

o   If you don’t think you are the greatest thing since sliced bread, ask your mother! and/or

• ·       Write down all the conclusions you have made about you and your course and undertake some research (documents, peers, teachers) to see how many of them are justified (probably not many).

See more posts about/from this book.

See more posts about language learning.

                                Sign up for the MSI Press LLC newsletter

                          Follow MSI Press on Twitter, Face Book, and Instagram.