Putting the right spin

Even if students know it makes sense to be fluent in English, many view learning the language as negative.

I HAVE this thing where I pick at food in front of me. Even if I’m busy doing something else, if you put something edible before me, it’s very possible that it will gradually shrink in size.

Of course, this is bad for me. As my mum says, I’m nibbling out of habit, not out of hunger. It’s an automatic response where I do something in reaction to a trigger. It just so happens my trigger is nice food within arm’s reach.

As my waistline demonstrates, these automatic responses can have real- world implications, and sometimes they may be serious.

For example, a recent episode of the Freakonomics podcast highlighted that in Chicago, around 250 public school students were being shot each year, resulting in about 20 to 30 deaths. Most of the time, the violence is the result of an automatic reaction that is more instinct than thought.

In Malaysia, a recent conversation leads me to think that we have a more mundane issue involving automatic responses. A friend of mine who is an educator told me that one reason why it is challenging to teach English to Malaysian students is because of how they react to the idea of speaking English.

He says they are afraid of being made fun of and that if they show interest in learning English, others might call them “berlagak” ( showoffs). Another problem is that of confidence; when students have low expectations of themselves, resulting in poor performances, it reinforces those expectations.

Given this atmosphere, I suspect that even if students know that it makes sense to be fluent in English, many view learning English as a negative experience.

How do you address this issue? One way, of course, is to make learning fun. The current curriculum includes the possibility of reading poems and short stories ( even graphic novels) and surely everybody likes to be entertained.

But I suspect the issue is not that learning is a drudgery, but that students just don’t like studying English.

They have no idea why. In order to address the bigger issue of stu- dents not wanting to learn, I believe you must also address their instinctive negativity towards the topic.

I agree I am dangerously wading into a snap judgment of what is certainly a very complex problem. But I think it makes sense.

For example, you would think that being able to get a better job by knowing English is enough of an incentive to study, but it doesn’t work that way. A survey by JobStreet in 2013 found that 65% of employers turn down jobseekers due to their poor command of the English language. They also said having a good command of English was the second most important deciding factor ( the first was good interpersonal and communication skills).

And yet, once you have to work in an office that uses English, eventually people become more competent as they accept it as a norm. What we need is a way to short- circuit the process. We need a way to interrupt that automatic response and redirect it somewhere more positive, at least in the short term.

This is precisely the kind of situation that calls for Cognitive Behaviour Therapy ( CBT).

The idea behind CBT is that how we interpret a trigger causes a positive or negative reaction. For example, perhaps somebody’s confidence is low because they notice their failures more than their successes.

What CBT tries to do is to replace negative thinking styles with more constructive ones – that every success, however minor, is a step forward.

This is done in several ways. Sometimes, a therapist challenges a patient’s underlying assumptions of the world, by getting them to try out things and observe what really happens. Other times, it’s by teaching patients how to manage their behaviour.

How effective is CBT? Good e enough that you can actually see p physiological changes in how the b brain works. Brain scans of patients w with phobias show that overactivity in the limbic system ( the part that controlsc fear) returns to normal aftera a course of CBT.

As far as I know, CBT has not been used to improve English education. But aspects of it have been used in Chicago’s school environments. The Youth Guidance’s Becoming a Man ( BAM) programme encourages troubled students to challenge their assumptions, and gives them skills to cope with day- to- day living.

A random clinical trial carried out by the University of Chicago Crime Lab found that the BAM programme generated a 40% decline in violent crimes and increased their engagement in school ( as measured by school attendance and class credits earned).

Stopping kids from shooting each other seems a long way from getting somebody to learn English. Yet in both cases, it’s about relooking at assumptions.

Clearly for me, my automatic assumption is that food in front of me is meant to be eaten. But it could also be that I have learned that my mum’s cooking tastes that good.