Fear comes in all shapes and sizes if you have a phobophobia. And trust me, when I say many students have fear of language learning, most of them are completely unrelated to language learning.
I am going to share my experiences which made me realise there are many other important factors that can create the fear of learning a language among students.
No, I do not mean only xenoglossophobia which is literally the fear of speaking foreign languages; I am talking about much more than that!
A. Fear of teachers:
I was conducting a session of spoken English (Speakfast) in the evening as usual. I was in the midst of teaching prepositions. As usual, my Preparation level students were giving me a hard time by not showing me whether my explanation of prepositions was getting across to them or not. And again as usual, Mohite dada, security guard aka the notice man entered my class! Already pissed off, I just told him. “Dada pleases nantar ya, adhi saglya classes madhe firaun ya notice!” (Please circulate the notice in all other classes and then come here!)
One of my students literally jumped out of his seat and exclaimed with joy- “Ma’am, tumhi kitti chaan Marathi bolta!!!” And I was like- What do you mean? I am a Maharashtrian and it is my mother tongue!
I don’t know what worked but the rest of the 90 minutes and even till the course got over, I had amazing sessions with my students.
It was a fear of the teacher who they thought might not have known their language, let alone being able to understand their issues with the language. After that day, I became one of them and I realised how important it is for us to make ourselves a part of our students. To teach them you have to be one of them.
B. Fear of peers
Most of the times, the cultural diversity, diversity in classes, and diversity in socio-economic backgrounds contribute to the fear of learning languages. I have always experienced that most of my Indian students who are generally good at spoken English, giving short presentations, and have almost no fear of starting communication, find it difficult to speak with my International students in English. They struggle for words while trying to communicate with students who come from a slightly better economical background. I specifically noticed it during the English Skit practice of last year’s Annual Day. We had difficult time in convincing DPELS (Indian) students to be the part of the skit where there were a couple of Afghan/ International students participating. Despite being good at memorising dialogues in English, pronunciation and basic acting skills, my Indian students seemed to be hesitant and have an inferiority complex vis-a-vis international students.
Teachers need to be very careful and tactful while dealing with such diversity in the class, so that the focus remains on language learning and nothing else.
C. Fear of the ambience
It may sound odd, but fear of ambience makes one nervous and contributes to their fear of using the language. In case of students who come to learn language from the outskirts of Pune or the rural part of Maharashtra, may get overwhelmed by the smart English-speaking staff, posh building and technologically equipped classrooms. Coping with the class and the overall ambience sometimes takes the toll on the best of the students and language learning remains their secondary objective. The fear of being left out and being a misfit in the smart ambience hinders the process of language learning. It is a real task for teachers to make such students feel at home.
D. Fear of ‘self’
Yes! The most difficult fear to overcome in my opinion is the fear of self that involves-
How will I look when I pronounce words which have sounds like f, v, th, s, sh??
What will I look like when I go and make a presentation in front of the whole class?
What if I mispronounce a particular word? Will my teacher/ friends/ classmates laugh at me?
What if I don’t remember words when I speak in English?
What if I say something funny/ something that doesn’t make sense?
To share something funny that happened in one of my classes, during the final oral presentation, a student stood up and said-
“I teeth my brush.” instead of I brush my teeth.
One of them said, I wanted to shave (save) the life of the poor dog!
A girl said, “I purchased milk from the supermarket”, instead of saying buy milk.
A boy said that “the person I admire the most is my mouth brother” (perhaps he wanted to say somebody who he considered his brother)
Do you think all this happens because they don’t know English or they are afraid or overly conscious because of the fear of speaking in English? Or could be a slip of the tongue?
Overcoming the fear of ‘self’ is the most important task in learning any language.
As a language trainer, I must say that students suffer more from such fears than the fear of language learning. If you as language trainers want to help your students overcome these fears, I urge you to put yourselves in their shoes first, empathise with them, and try to find out in what way you can help them.
At the end, I would like to quote Alice Wellington Rollince-
“The test of a good teacher is not how many questions he can ask his pupils that they will answer readily, but how many questions he inspires them to ask him which he finds it hard to answer”.
-Dr. Yogita Bhamare
ESL & EFL Trainer
ELTIS