How to find your perfect language teacher
“When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” Or so they say. We haven’t found this to be the case.
We’ve spent the last couple of months talking about how we learn languages, why language learning in schools is often so ineffective, and the mindsets we need to succeed.
We’re primed, we’re ready, and we’re raring to go on our language learning expedition…but we’d probably benefit from a guide to help us on our way.
Which is why, in this issue, we’ll start our exploration of how to find the perfect language teacher for your needs.
What is the role of a teacher?
Almost every language learner could benefit from some contact with an advanced speaker of their target language.
Why? A teacher is a source of input that’s very likely to be compelling because it’s addressed directly to you. You’re not passively taking in content from a screen or a page; you’re engaged in an act of communication with a real, live human being.
A teacher can also provide valuable structure and accountability. It’s easier to skip an appointment with a book than with a human being!
Plus, especially as a beginner, it can feel really overwhelming to know where to start. A teacher can guide you through the different stages of learning a language.
It’s worth noting here that not everybody needs a teacher. If you’re at an advanced level, for example, you can participate in the native speaker community on your own and get all the input you need that way.
But let’s assume you are looking for a teacher! Should you look for a native speaker or professional teacher?
It may sound counter-intuitive, but native speakers don’t always make the best teachers.
If the native speaker is monolingual in your target language, not only will you have to be at a very high level to communicate with them, but they may not understand the process (and challenges!) of language learning.
As a result, they may find it hard to put themselves in your shoes, which could lead to some frustration - on your part and theirs!
That said, native speakers are tremendously valuable sources of input because their internal model of their language is the gold standard: the very thing you’re wishing to acquire yourself. And native speakers who are seasoned language learners themselves are the best of both worlds!
A non-native speaker, by contrast, will not have the same internal model. This may or may not matter: the difference between an extremely advanced non-native speaker and a native speaker is unlikely to cause any issues for you as a learner, but you may want to avoid non-native speakers whose level is only intermediate. (For some languages, this may prove difficult or impossible; in these cases, you will have to work with the resources available to you.)
If you don’t have a high level yourself, it may be hard to tell the difference between the two, so exercise some caution here – if a prospective teacher is a non-native speaker, you may want to run a sample of their speech by a native speaker if you can.
Don’t let this dissuade you from using non-native speaker teachers: some of the best experiences we’ve had in language learning have come from non-native speakers who were (a) at an extremely high level in the language, and (b) extremely gifted teachers.
In fact, it’s more important to find someone who knows how to teach – and more importantly, how to teach languages – than almost anything else.
What does “knowing how to teach” look like?
Some of these are soft skills: patience, kindness, friendliness, and so on. You’re looking for someone who has the right temperament to sit with you (and others, if it’s a class) while you work hard to process the input they’re giving you.
Occasionally you’ll struggle! This is totally normal! So you need someone who doesn’t fly off the handle when you need something rephrased a few times.
Another big thing to look for is whether they know how languages are learned, and whether they incorporate that knowledge into their teaching.
Knowing what we know about how language acquisition works (and how it doesn’t), which of the following class formats do you think would work better?
A. The teacher tells a story in the target language to the class, asking questions about the material along the way (“The boy had a small dog. Is the dog big or small?”), and incorporating the students’ suggestions into the plot (“What should the dog be named?”).
B. The teacher gives a lecture (not in the target language) explaining a grammatical point, such as the conjugation of a particular irregular verb. Then the teacher calls on students one by one to translate sentences which use this grammatical construction into and out of the target language.
C. The teacher gives the students a page full of questions and answers on a particular topic (“Where do you like to go on vacation?” “I like to go to the cottage.”) and asks the students to practice asking and answering questions in small groups.
Of these three formats, only class A is based on the principles of language acquisition we’ve been outlining in this newsletter.
In class A, the entire class is comprehensible input. The interactive story format makes the input compelling, and the teacher’s periodic comprehension questions ensure that things are kept at the comprehensible level.
Class B teaches the students about the language by lecturing on a grammatical point. This sort of thing gives very little comprehensible input and – unless you’re a linguist – the examples given to illustrate grammatical points are not particularly compelling. Finally, calling on students to translate using material they have not yet acquired (How could they have? They’ve only just seen it for the first time!) is a recipe for anxiety. And as we know, these negative emotions interfere with language acquisition.
Class C gives a bit more comprehensible input than Class B, but let’s be honest, there’s nothing more boring than these thematic units. Oh joy, today is the unit on clothing: time for me to learn 40 words for pieces of clothing which I’m going to mix up forever more because I learned them all at the same time. Not only this, but Class C too is based on an inaccurate understanding of language acquisition. It makes the faulty assumption that you’ll make progress by repeating basic phrases in the language over and over again. This may be how learning scales on a piano works, but it’s isn’t how language works.
So when you’re considering a class or tutor, always ask “Where’s the input?” Make sure they’re willing and able to give you the magic ingredient you need to build your model of the language.
Next week, we’ll give some more practical tips for finding a teacher, including how to decide whether you’ll benefit more from a private tutor, small group lessons, or bigger classes.