Why Won’t My Learner Speak More English at Home?: Part I

Many tutors may find that, despite their continuous encouragement, it is difficult, if not impossible, to get their learners to speak more English at home. In fact, outside of the two hours of tutoring each week, learners may not be speaking any English at all. From a tutoring perspective, nothing would help a learner improve their English more than more practice; however, getting non-English speakers to step out of their comfort zone to achieve this goal is easier said than done.

To start, let me introduce the concept of “linguistic isolation.” Linguistic isolation is living in a household where no one over the age of 14 is comfortable with the English language. In these households, all the family discourse happens in the foreign language and there is often only one family member, a spouse or more unfortunately a child, who is able to translate. Linguistic isolation has serious implications when it comes to learning English as a second language, or any language for that matter.

I had personal experience with this problem when I lived in Nuremberg, Germany for a summer. The purpose of my trip, as with many study abroad programs, was to improve my knowledge of the German language through immersion - learning to communicate in German out of necessity. Many argue that there is no better way to become proficient in a foreign language. As a result, I entered the program with high expectations. I boarded the plane with limited conversational German vocabulary and grammar, but I aimed to return to the States practically fluent.

When I arrived in Germany, I was shocked - not only were my host mother and student comfortable with English, but also they had no desire to speak to me in German at all. While I saw my time there as an opportunity to learn from native German speakers, they saw my visit as an opportunity to learn from an English speaker. My anxiety over being thrust into a foreign country, with an unfamiliar culture and language, was eased now that I knew I had a comfortable way to communicate with my new family. I would no longer have to worry about how to ask how to get to school or use the phone to call home - I could simply do it all in English.

It didn't matter that I knew speaking German was the only way to learn the language. Since communicating in English was so easy and available, I rarely attempted to speak in German at all. Even though my host father and the youngest two children could not understand me, the mother and daughter were more than happy to use the opportunity to translate for them as practice. They repeated the words back to me until I assured them the pronunciation was correct. They laughed when they thought a word sounded particularly funny. I never really got to know them, but they enjoyed the few words I was able to teach them.

I learned a lot from my trip to Germany - it is only unfortunate that the German language was not one of them. I did learn, however, something very important about learning languages and about being in a foreign country. Even though I knew I wanted to learn German, I was living in a sort of linguistic isolation where I didn’t have to. Could I have forced myself to speak German more? Maybe. But it was easy and comfortable not to, regardless of my ambitions, and that environment was a major obstacle in me acquiring the new language as quickly as I had hoped.

Happy tutoring!

Natalie Howard
Social Media Intern, English at Large
Washington University in St. Louis, Class of 2017


ENGLISH AT LARGE
Literacy and Learning for Life
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