language anxiety: fight, flight, fawn, or freeze
In British Columbia it is mandatory for students who want to go on to university to study an additional language. Traditionally, that language has been French (due to the bilingual nature of ‘Canadianism’), but traditions change, and now students have the opportunity to study Spanish, Punjabi, French, Mandarin, Japanese, SENĆOŦEN, and a handful of the other 7,000 languages that exist worldwide— depending on the school district in which they are studying.
I opted to study Spanish in high school. The school had one Spanish teacher and he remains one of the few teachers I remember vividly from my public education; as I later became a language teacher myself, I would borrow from his educational style until I developed my own.
I was a smart, albeit quiet kid in school. I had a hard time speaking up in class– even when I knew the answer or thought I had something worthwhile to share– something was always holding me back. Spanish class was no different, only, sounding foolish in a foreign language somehow seemed so much worse than sounding foolish in English. So, like most students, I counted on the teacher going in order around the room rather than calling names at random, (popcorn style, I would later learn when I started teaching myself) and would ensure that the answer I had prepared was correct; holding my breath and repeating it over and over (while trying to listen to the others) and then breathing a huge (internal) sigh of relief when my turn had passed with nothing but a nod of acknowledgement.
Despite the obvious, anxious dread I felt about getting questions wrong, ultimately I walked out of high school Spanish with a respectable grade and, with a trip to Mexico planned, the opportunity to really see if I could speak with the locals.
I couldn’t.
Couldn’t understand much more than a few words, a greeting, and a basic understanding, that despite my teacher’s best intentions and my decent performance as a student, I hadn’t passed the test. I couldn’t communicate. What was the point of all that study if I couldn’t understand a word in the natural world?
Despite this misstep, linguistic communication continued to fascinate me and I have devoted much of my personal and professional studies trying to understand it better. Hoping to figure out the tick that made language click if you weren’t one of those linguistic savants.
Over the past twenty years, I have thought about this a lot. From the perspective of a student, a teacher, a researcher, and a counsellor, and amongst everything I have learned through the countless hours of lesson planning, research, learning, and highly intelligent people who have landed in my classrooms, the most important pattern I have come to understand is that language is emotional and the way we teach it isn’t.
Now, I am not saying that emotion is not involved, but it is not inextricably woven into the fabric of the curriculum the way I think that it could be. After all, communication is how we understand our place in the world. Emotions can be considered the language of the soul, but when you know more than one language, you have more than one soul (or so it is said). You are literally re-wiring your brain to think in a different way, but you are not simultaneously being taught how to re-wire your neurons so that the emotional connection is as attuned to nuance as it is in the language(s) you acquired in early childhood.
Now what does this mean when you have to learn a language?
Maybe you are learning English, Tagalog, Portuguese, or Korean for work or travel and you can’t understand when people mumble or use idioms or make jokes.
Maybe you have a language processing disorder, like autism or alexthymia, that makes it difficult to translate emotions or subtlety in someone’s words.
Perhaps you are learning the language of yoga, or soccer, or guitar, and you realize you have been out of your body for a long time.
Perhaps you have a parent, a child, or a relative with whom you can no longer vibe.
Maybe you’ve started a new job and you don’t understand the work culture at all.
Maybe you are realizing you don’t know your own operating language. That you have spent so long learning to camouflage to the world around you that you are a stranger to yourself.
Learning makes people anxious (which is another topic for another day) and in each of these instances above, anxiety has a tendency to emerge. It flutters in the chest, encouraging flight. It freezes the mind, the stress overwhelming the ability to think. It implodes, starting a fight with the internal monologue that berates us for not being better faster. And it fawns, making false compliments or false responses, like nodding understanding when there is none or chattering nonstop off topic. How do you halt it?
As cheesy as it sounds, you learn to love it. Not the anxiety per se (although be kind to that entity also) but the process. You learn to rest in your knowledge; that which you already know. You allow yourself time to digest and trust that the new information, like food, will be processed subconsciously by your nervous system and the nourishment will do its job. You create- you learn to play with what you’ve learned because language is organic, alive, and it wants you to have lighten up and make something new up. You emotionally connect to what you are learning. You remember that repetition is fun. That kids love reading the same book a thousand times, and that the details spring to life when that kind of fun is still present in middle life. And most importantly, you remember that fluency won’t protect you from miscommunication. True barriers exist not in words (although of course there will be some mixups in the learning process!) but in intent and emotional disconnect. Perhaps that is the additional languages we should aspire to teach.
Sources/Inspiration
Do Schools Kill Creativity? - Sir Ken Robinson (TED Talk)
Thou Shalt Not Be Aware- Alice Miller
How Language Shapes the Way We Think– Lena Boroditsky (TED Talk)
Eastern Body, Western Mind– Anodea Judith
How Emotions Are Made – Lisa Barrett Feldman
