Perfectionism in speaking languages
By Akli Hadid
When trained as a language teacher in college, I was taught that a good way to start adult language classes is by asking students how their weekend went.
Asking students, “How was your weekend?” is a great way to break the ice, to engage them in class, gain their attention and make them comfortable using English for the rest of the class time. Students of all levels can answer the question: beginners will tend to make short statements about what they did over the weekend, while advanced students will be more detailed in their answers.
My experience in Korea is that my Korean co-teachers did not like it when I asked students about their weekends. They would constantly interrupt students who were trying to answer the question and judge students for their inability to recount using accurate English what happened during their weekends.
When I would ask my co-teachers to stop intervening during that phase of the class, they would tell me that “the students’ English is not good enough to answer your question.” I think what they meant is it’s not perfect enough.
That statement reminded me of all the frustrations I went through when I was trying to learn Korean. Fortunately, my Korean fiancée and close friends lent an attentive ear to what I had to say in broken Korean. However, the general Korean population would either speak to me in English or purely ignore what I had to say in my broken Korean.
In countries like the United States or the United Kingdom, characters like “Borat” can walk around the country, talk to random people in the streets with broken English and people will still listen to them. I am amazed at how people listened to Borat carefully even though he was saying the most outrageous things.
It took a lot of patience and tolerance on my part to keep studying and practicing Korean until I reached a near-native level. Experts say you need about 10,000 hours of practice to speak a language fluently. I’ve spent a little more than 10,000 hours practicing and it has paid off. I am now comfortable conversing with any Korean, old or young, from Seoul or from the provinces. But I would say the first 6,000 or 7,000 hours were very frustrating, because of the perfectionism Koreans expect from people when speaking languages.
I think the propensity of some Korean or native English teachers in Korea to tell students that they should either speak English perfectly or not speak it at all is not proper. I think language teachers in Korea should be language mentors, patiently helping students master the language, while keeping in mind that it takes about 10,000 hours to master the language.
However, unfortunately I have seen too many cases of native and Korean English teachers being “tormentors” instead of “mentors”, judging and criticizing the inability of Korean learners to speak the language perfectly.
Asking students what they did over the weekend is an icebreaker, to make the students feel comfortable using the language in class, no matter how many mistakes they may make or how hesitant their English may be.
Refusing students such limited free talking time because they don’t speak English well enough will not help the students gain the passion they will need to study the language for another few thousand hours.
The writer is a Ph.D. candidate at the Academy of Korean Studies. His email address is hadid.akli@gmail.com.