Daily Excerpt: Working with Advanced Foreign Language Students (Shekhtman) - Some Characteristics of Advanced Language Students (Student-Language Relations)
Today's book excerpt comes from Working with Advanced Foreign Language Students by Boris Shekhtman.
Some Characteristics of Advanced Language Learners
SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF ADVANCED STUDENTS
Student-Language Relations
So, what does having an advanced student mean to a teacher? It means, of course, that the student already speaks the foreign language with finesse, that the student already knows the host country pretty well, along with its history and culture, that he or she has seen quite a few foreign language teachers before now. (Typically, the advanced student has studied, if not mastered, several foreign languages [Belcher and Connor, 2001; Leaver and Atwell, 2002] and has already developed his or her own ideas about how to learn a foreign language [Ehrman, 2002; Leaver and Shekhtman, 2002].)
Language Learning Motivation and Goals
The advanced student is extremely motivated; rarely do such students study a language simply, so to speak, for personal pleasure. Rather, most advanced students need the foreign language for work; it is directly linked to their career success. Of fifty students interviewed by Leaver and Atwell (2002), in a study of professional language users, tested at the Distinguished level, 82% indicated that their motivation in studying the language was essentially instrumental, i.e. needed for work (Leaver, 2003). Some students in that study have even said that they would not have taken course work at the Superior-Distinguished level, had it not been required for work because socially they could do anything they needed to in the foreign language (Leaver, 2003). Similarly, at the SLTC, 96% of students enrolled at this level in our programs came to class for one specific purpose: improving their language for work.
Language Learning Expectations
Advanced students significantly differ from students who are just starting to study a foreign language and those who have studied it without great success. The most obvious of the differences is that advanced students have already developed a critical relationship to any language program. That criticism is completely healthy. It comes from the student’s knowledge of the language and experience in language learning, typically acquired from the study of multiple languages. For this reason in particular, working with an advanced learner is not an easy task for any teacher. Sometimes, one feels like a sapper in a mine field: the smallest mistake is punished. The teacher is not an authority figure for such students simply by dint of being a teacher. Giving these students unclear explanations is fraught with dangers: they immediately see through the teacher. Further, any grammatical weakness on the part of the teacher is not forgiven.
Student Knowledge of Grammar
As for grammar, these students are experts. They understand it very well; they usually really love it and sometimes even pose questions to which they already know the answer. Why? For a number of reasons.
One reason can be to show that they already know something-an achievement of which they are proud. Students at this level are typically ambitious, at least in the sense of wanting to be very, very good at using the language they are learning, so when they ask questions to which they already know the answer, it is often a matter of satisfying their ambition to reach these high levels, in other words, to compare what they know with what the teacher knows (and, if in reality, they know it less well than the teacher, they will, upon hearing the explanation, usually tuck the information away for safekeeping and personal use immediately and for the long term).
A second reason is quite related to the first. At the same time, it is the polar opposite and comes up in a different way. Usually, it comes up when the language instructor starts to explain something that the student already knows. For highly advanced students, these can be a source of disproportionately strong irritation. They already know this information; they are in class to learn what they do not yet know; the teacher, by explaining the obvious, is wasting their time. Whereas students at lower levels of proficiency are often happy for such “review,” most Superior-level students want to “forge on.” There is often a sense of urgency about their ambition to reach near-native levels that turns very quickly into irritation when they see the path ahead temporarily blocked because of a teacher-felt need to explain something. Some students, particularly ectenic ones (those who are very detail-conscious and analytical by nature; Ehrman and Leaver, 2003), as well as left-hemisphere dominant (displaying greater tendencies toward processing the world through words rather than through images; Leaver, 1986), have difficulty accepting foreign grammar and vocabulary on its own terms and in its own contexts. The tendency to compare Russian grammar with English grammar is a seemingly inborn trait for these kinds of learners (Leaver, 1998), even when they are already highly proficient in the foreign language. This trait can be quite “dangerous” for the foreign language instructor, considering that language instructors for highly advanced students almost by necessity are generally native speakers of the foreign language; even if the language instructor has an excellent understanding of English grammar, it generally does not correspond to the level of English grammar that the student has acquired, learned, and intuited over a lifetime of becoming and being an educated native speaker of English. Often, these students simply want to confirm their own knowledge, but sometimes they do want to check out the teacher. After all, there can be more than one way to describe any given grammar feature (e.g., tense, verbs of motion, aspect), and some high-level students want to compare the explanations of the current teach er with explanations they have been given in the past. Sometimes, they have the best of intentions in doing this kind of probing and checking, and sometimes, their motivations are not entirely positive. Any teacher, as a matter of course, tries to explain lexico-grammatical details that are unclear to the students. As a rule, these are related to some complex linguistic issue, requiring precision in use--and if the instructor does not know the necessary details, he or she may encounter a fair amount of woe. It is difficult to foretell what questions an advanced student might ask. All that you can foresee with near certainty is that questions will concern micro, not macro, issues; particularities, not generalities.
Advanced students are like linguistic snakes; they slither into the most unnoticeable language cracks. For example, one student approached me once in front of the whole group and calmly said, “Boris, you made a grammar mistake.”
“What mistake?” I asked.
“You said, ‘две политические партии [two political parties]’ and you should have said ‘две политических партии [two political parties].’"
“Why do you think your variant is the correct one?” I asked him.
“Because it says so in the textbook,” was his response.
Actually, the phrase in the textbook that he showed me was “two beautiful girls,” which from the grammatical point of view was the same thing. The textbook was an American edition. I showed him my corresponding reference edition and explained to him that two variants were possible. He read it carefully and, satisfied, stated “Hmm, you are right; thanks a lot.”
Curiosity, Self-Knowledge, and Independence in the Learning Process
Such is the advanced student. There is no limit to his or her curiosity, but he or she is not inclined to overlook methodological transgressions. Advanced students know how their teacher should work and take careful measure of a teacher’s strengths and weak nesses. Moreover, students at this level rarely hide what they want from the teacher. Once, I came to the first hour of class with an advanced student, began to teach, and he said to me softly and gently, “Excuse me, teacher, I don’t need that. Thematically, I would like to concentrate only on nuclear warheads and, for grammar, I am only interested in participles.”
Nearly every advanced student is like this. Once, we had a student at our school who did not want to work with the texts that the teacher had selected and brought her own to class. The teacher had to work with these texts without having the opportunity for any preparation at all, and the texts were complex, specialized, and about the refining of oil deposits.
Advanced students are always prepared to undertake any form of independent projects or self-study. They are ready to complete scores of complicated grammar exercises with minimal teacher assistance and to use the foreign language in writing up research in their areas of specialization. They willingly agree to prepare for making professional presentations before large and small audiences. They are not opposed to participating in ethnic-based social groups and using the foreign language to do so. They do all of this, in spite of the fact that they are usually buried up to their eyeballs in their own personal and professional affairs.
For more posts about Boris and his books, click HERE.
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