BE SURE, YOU ARE NOT PROBLEMATIC!
For how many years have you been learning English? Four, six, eight years perhaps even more? Depending on the length of duration, how do you evaluate your communication proficiency? Let’s suppose you have been learning for approximately five years. In spite of such a long process, are you still cannot communicate in English? If your response is “yes”, have you ever investigated the reason behind it?
High rate of students leaving their schools unable to communicate in English and especially my friends’ saying “Am I problematic?”, urged me to think that, depending on not all learners are problematic cognitively, there should be definitely some other contributors (!) to learners’ failure in communication irrelevant to them. They reveal why learners are not problematic, but there are already many things going wrong.
This is my defense of learners’ justice in “failure in communication.”
Firstly, what about the amount of spoken interaction carried out in the classroom? Because it is too little, it is fairly normal that they are unable in speaking. In fact, teachers do not have the right to expect them to be fluent speakers because what is experienced in the classroom directly conflicts with what is expected. As extra information, this case is not compatible with validity factor.
If teacher sees her students as passive input receivers instead of output producers, it is almost a miracle that students can speak in English. The quantity of learners unable in communication, no need for any extra evidence, proves what role was accepted to be adequate for them.
One of the most significant matters in language education is to attract learners’ attention to have a more effective speaking process. Choosing interesting topics, using different techniques and methods, maintaining learner participation via entertaining activities such as playing games, role playing, and simulations etc. are some means to attract them. What if a class is deprived of these elements and generally within a monotonous atmosphere? In this case, as a teacher, how can you justify yourself in their unwillingness to speak?
How the language is used (reading, writing, speaking, listening) in the classroom is totally different from real life language. The learner who is accustomed to scripted language will, of course, be shocked when he finds himself in a real conversation. This condition discourages the learner from speaking because he witnesses his own inability in real life. So, carefully chosen authentic materials should be carried to the classrooms to balance the gap between the language in the classroom and outside the classroom.
An obstacle in speaking for learner is that teacher attaches more importance to form than meaning. For the fear that she would be interrupted and corrected in her every attempt, the learner prefers not to speak. Besides, since it forces the learner to form her sentences as accurate as possible, fluency that is a priority in communication may be underestimated.
The other problem is the way how they are exposed to the target language. Their exposure mainly consists of written language at sentence level. As a result, it is not surprising that they are extremely major in written examinations and awful in communication.
So, if your experiences in English class are parallel with what I cite above and if you still cannot communicate in English, you have the right for not being able to speak. Be sure, you are not problematic!
As a recall, it certainly does not mean there is no problem with learners. Yet, what I want to stress here is just to make some outside learner factors more clear.
