Imagine you’re a general, and on your daily commute to the Pentagon you happen to be set upon by a salesman from Acme Swords Incorporated. The salesman is a real pro, and the sword he’s promoting is an absolute beauty — in fact, it’s the finest blade weapon ever produced by man. You decide to equip the entire military with these swords. After all, they’re the best swords evar.
Everything is fine and dandy until one day you send your sword-equipped battalions into battle against enemies fielding rifles, tanks, artillery, helicopters, and bombers. Things go … poorly … for your army. The president wants to know why.
Whose fault is it: the sword’s or the general’s?
I’ll concede that this is a pretty contrived example, but it’s exactly what I thought of when I saw Sinosplice’s The Tyranny of the Textbook, in which he castigates textbooks for offering an incomplete view of a language. The student in question learns Chinese in school, comes to China, and doesn’t know two really common words — 讲 and 棒. Hilarity ensues.
When he got back to the States, he had a conversation with his Chinese teacher that went something like this:
Why didn’t you teach us 讲 [speak] and 棒 [great]?
It wasn’t in the book.
But those are useful words!
We have to follow the book.
When I first read that post, I was totally ready to blame the teacher. Of course those are useful words! What kind of idiot teacher wouldn’t teach them? But, as John himself pointed out to me, and as several teachers indicated in the comments on that post, teachers aren’t as free as I might think they are. That is unfortunately true. I suppose I could blame the system that keeps the teachers bound to tightly defined curriculum and enforces worship of textbooks, but I’m not going to do that.
I’m going to blame the student.
Seriously, it’s the student’s fault (sorry Nick!). If you find yourself in this situation, it is, to borrow from Jimmy Buffett, your own damn fault.
Textbooks are, more or less, instruction manuals. Instruction manuals are terrific for rule-based tasks. Push this button, the machine starts. Turn this knob, it starts to vibrate. Immerse in water, it explodes. Et cetera. For this sort of instruction, instruction manuals are awesome.
So what’s a textbook an instruction manual for? It’s certainly not an instruction manual for a language (languages aren’t rule-based, kids, despite what the grammartistas whisper in your ear at night). Textbooks are instruction manuals for passing the test at the end of the semester. If you keep that in mind, textbooks aren’t all that bad. In fact, they probably do their job pretty well.
If just passing the test isn’t what you’re after, then you need to broaden your horizons. In many situations teachers can’t help you — like I said before, they’re not as free to teach what they want as one may think — and so you’ve got to take matters into your own hands. Hell, even looking at two different textbooks would help. Broadly reading, watching, and listening to content designed for native speakers will push you so far past your peers you’ll be left wondering what the hell they’re doing wrong.
Quit your whining
I envision feedback from students being something like this: “dude, seriously, like, I’m so busy with other school work, how am I supposed to ‘broadly read, watch, and listen to content designed for native speakers?’”
Firstly, you may well have more time than you think you do. But, supposing you’re really as diligent as you claim to be, what I’m suggesting will save you time in the long run. Two reasons:
- Learning through massive content immersion just works better, and while it may be a bit difficult in the beginning (getting everything set up, getting used to the routine, etc.), it will in short order result in language skills far in excess of what is required to pass tests. You’ll be killing tests without having to cram.
- You’ll actually develop usable language skills, which means that in the future if you ever want to use the language for something, you won’t have to relearn it all.
Even for the short-sighted among us, the first reason should be compelling enough. If on day one you start immersing yourself, I guarantee by the end of your second semester the tests and quizzes you’re given will be a joke.
Textbooks still suck
I’m not going to let textbooks off the hook. By and large, they still suck. But it’s like saying that a screwdriver is a really shitty hammer. Well, yeah, but it’s still a good screwdriver. A textbook is a great instruction manual for eking out good grades on your exams. Just don’t expect it — or anything else — to be the panacea for doing something as broad and complex as becoming fluent in a language.
Related posts:
- Blame the lack of method
- The tyranny of a single source of information
- Getting started with a new language
- My Cantonese tutor
- SRS == failure practice
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi there! This is Nick, the “student” referenced in Sinosplice’s post (I note again, that was 10 years ago…).
I think the source of my angst in that exchange has been kind of glossed over in this discussion and on Sinosplice, perhaps because so many teachers were involved in the discussion. *I* never blamed the textbook. I blamed the teacher/system.
As a learner with one year of experience, taking the language casually in addition to a host of other classes actually counting toward my degree, it’s simply not realistic to expect that I would have the time or initiative to go out and set up a “learning through massive content immersion” system. And I don’t think it’s unrealistic to ask that the teacher provide the needed knowledge and materials to help me set up that system instead of wasting time with an outdated textbook. If the teacher’s forced to use the book, then we can go up the chain of command and say that the administrator sucks. I think it’s reasonable, not lazy, for students to have expectations to be helped and guided by their teachers. Otherwise, why bother taking courses at all?
Your analogy itself betrays the logical gap in your argument. If I dragged my sorry sword-bearing ass off the field, beaten and bloody, I doubt I would turn to my sword and say, “Sword, you worthless device! I blame you for my crushing defeat!” I would probably go try to maul whatever fool set me up that way in the first place, or say “screw this” and go AWOL.
Highly aspirational learners do great, and more power to them. And many of us who continue to study outside a university eventually head off into some degree of self-study wilderness. But the way the comments on Sinosplice’s post and the tone of this post come off, it’s like you’re either hardcore enough to hang with the aspirational types, or you’re a total lamer. That’s not very encouraging to an early student of any stripe except the most intense.
Hey Nick, thanks for the comment!
I know you didn’t blame the textbook. I don’t think that John was blaming the textbook, either, but he did set the argument up that way. And I certainly didn’t mean to attack you personally — like you say, it was a decade ago.
I think you’re picking the wrong role in my analogy — the student isn’t the poor sword-bearing soldier, he’s the general that bought the sword as the be all end all of military technology.
I totally agree, though, that it is entirely reasonable to expect that the teacher introduce the needed knowledge and material, but it also is entirely at odds with the reality of classroom-based education (in general — there are of course awesome teachers and inspiring classes, but they’re unfortunately few and far between).
I still think it comes back to the student, though. No system that delivers general education is going to at the same time deliver exactly the education each individual needs in their individual context. I’m sure you went above and beyond the material you were taught in your major courses in order to fit your specific needs.
My question is: when you got back to the US knowing that what your teacher gave you was insufficient, what did you do? I think that’s the question that matters.
I should add, though, that it is also reasonable for you not to be super-motivated about things that are at best tangentially related to your goals. Most of us are aspirational learners of something, after all, but not of everything (ask my math teachers!).
I totally agree with you John. The responsibility for obtaining a high level of proficiency with anything is the sole responsibility of the individual. Teachers and textbooks are for help and guidance, like Nick said, but to get really good at something, you have to become it. I have a degree in classical guitar performance and while I had a renowned teacher, he couldn’t play my senior recital for me. He guided me on my path, but I had to do all the work. I think it’s the same with learning a language. I think even if teachers stick to the textbook strictly, the one thing they might tell their students is to seek out their target language outside of the textbook or the class. You never know what vocabulary is going to come up when you’re in China. I never really thought 哥们儿 would be very practical when I originally learned it, but it turned out to be when I was in China. The point being that you never know what vocabulary you might need in the future, so just keep learning to fill in the gaps.
哥们儿!? Your bro? Your Beijing-accented broth儿z? Since I’ve never even heard that in real life, I’m guessing you studied up north.
I’ve heard it a lot (along with its counterpart, 姐们儿). I think this helps prove my point — how can a class teach / textbook / teacher possibly be expected to teach the range of material that you’re going to encounter in the real world?