When your mistake is not your mistake

Sometimes it’s theirs

One of the big torments of language teachers is the type of student who entirely lacks the ability for self-criticism and will not admit his own mistakes, often blaming them on anyone but himself. Believe it or not, I’ve even had a few foreign students who blamed their own poor test scores on some imaginary “Jew”. Others may blame the teacher or some distraction.

However, in a minority of cases, students’ mistakes really might be caused by some factor outside themselves.

Here are some examples I’ve found in otherwise very good language teaching programs, books or tests.

Misleading photography

Rosetta Stone is an excellent language learning tool that mainly involves clicking on one of a choice of images in response to a verbal stimulus. It says, “The men are cooking,” and you click on the photo that shows that. It works very well almost all the time, but once in a while there are issues.

Nighttime photos taken in the daytime. Sometimes Rosetta Stone uses images taken during the day and expects the learner to pick them as the nighttime image. They compensate for this incongruity by superimposing a clock face showing the time, but the light sky can still lead you to choose the wrong image.

In case you think taking “nighttime” photos during the day is weird, you need only watch old sitcoms or movies to see that they sometimes shot nighttime scenes in blazing sunlight but manipulated the lens or aperture of the camera to give a somewhat convincing impression of nighttime.

Depth of field. If you look at photos by professional photographers, you’ll usually find them different from pictures you take on your phone, because of the photographer’s use of what is called “depth of field”. When you take a photo with your phone, you get a flattish image where everything is in focus. With a professional camera, you can select which objects are in focus and which are not by adjusting the lens for this. Rosetta Stone uses only very high-quality photographs, and the photographers manipulate the depth of field. There may be a crowd of parade-goers, and you may think of the image as containing “they”, but due to the depth of field, maybe only one girl is in full focus, and the program may want you to give a “she” answer.

This doesn’t happen often in Rosetta Stone, but enough to be noticeable, and you can adapt to it.

Failure to recycle vocabulary

To really solidify knowledge of a vocabulary word, the learner must see it many times in different contexts. If you learn a word the first time and then don’t remember what it means when you see it again five minutes later, that’s perfectly normal. Good language learning programs and materials take this psychological reality into account and keep recycling vocabulary periodically in different contexts to get it firmly lodged into the learner’s head.

But some materials don’t do it, or don’t do it enough. I have practiced a few languages on another excellent online program called Busuu, and some of its programs have exactly this problem. Many terms are recycled very little or not at all, leaving the learner unable to recall them when the test comes. It’s not just Busuu that has this problem sometimes, but quite a lot of materials.

Being tested on material that wasn’t taught

When I first started using Busuu, each level ended with a certificate test from the education division of McGraw-Hill publishers. This seemed like a great idea, but apparently the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing, and the certificate exams often tested you on material that wasn’t contained in the lessons. The learner was sure to get some answers wrong through no fault of his own. In the meantime, however, Busuu has largely fixed this problem and now ends its levels with its own certificate tests that fully reflect the material taught. However, the world is full of other programs that have the same problem Busuu used to, so look out for that issue.

Failure to teach theory

People love Duolingo, and they can learn a lot from it, but one of its failings for adult learners — at least in the languages I’ve used it for — is that it teaches only the subconscious mind and not the conscious mind. As we’ll discuss later, language is not acquired in the conscious mind, but through consciously learned material that is then processed and assimilated in the subconscious. It makes a lot of sense to mainly train children’s subconscious, but adults need to consciously learn theory, so that they can think back to the rules and correct themselves if need be. This is called training their monitor. If a program doesn’t train an adult’s monitor, the adult can’t easily supervise his own language output for errors.

Culturally or geographically biased questions

The tests that went along with one well-known English as a second language textbook I used to have to teach from had a question that looked something like this:

Egbert’s boss was angry at him for coming late to work. He ___________ driven to work when it was snowing.

The “correct” answer was supposed to be:

Egbert’s boss was angry at him for coming late to work. He shouldn’t have driven to work when it was snowing.

However, every single time, all my students wrote this:

Egbert’s boss was angry at him for coming late to work. He should have driven to work when it was snowing.

Their answer was deemed “incorrect”, but this was due to geographic and cultural bias. The test was apparently written by people in the northeastern United States, where people can take the train or subway to work if the weather is bad. My students and I live in the Motor City, and there are no trains or subways or even very many buses. Regardless of the weather, if you don’t drive to work, how the heck are you going to get there? My students’ answer was perfectly correct for their reality.

Failure to localize for students in the target country

The United States has the world’s largest economy, but for unknown reasons, the major textbook publishers almost never publish business ESL (English as a second language) textbooks for the United States. They are all written with a British orientation, and so they are often of limited utility for students in North America. If you’re the teacher, and you tell the students, “This isn’t how we say this in America, so here’s the term you should use,” the students will note down the term but study their textbook instead, so they come back using the wrong terminology. My way of determining which books would be useless to me was to look at the names of the characters. All the British business ESL books had characters in them named Nigel and Liam, so I’d scan the book, and if I found one or both of those guys in there, I knew the book would not be usable in my classes.

The same thing can happen to you when learning from online language study programs. British learners sometimes complain about the American English in popular American programs, but Americans can have the same problem with programs produced in the UK. Americans all think they know British English. They know what a “boot” or a “bonnet” or a “windscreen” is on a car, but they may not know that in the UK “the mains” are the household electrical wiring or that a “journey” isn’t only the arduous quest to bring home the head of the dragon, but in the UK could just mean a trip three bus stops away. They may understand “washing-up liquid”, although it sounds childish to Americans, but they may not know that “wash up” might mean the dishes and not the face and hands.

So when you embark on an online language learning program, or even start to use a textbook, be aware of which dialect of English (or Spanish, for that matter) it uses and be ready to find out the meanings of unfamiliar terms.

And in online learning programs, check the settings. It may be possible to switch from a foreign English dialect to your own.

“If you loved me, you’d just know!”

This is my name for a specific kind of test or exercise question that doesn’t straightforwardly call on specific knowledge you’ve learned, but expects you to intuit what the test writer has on her mind without any easily intelligible hints. These questions therefore do not test language, but simply the students’ empathy for and ability to think like the teacher. It’s as if the teacher is the student’s girlfriend who’s going to punish him if he doesn’t guess what’s bothering her but won’t tell him what it is.

Don’t go blaming everybody!

Just because sometimes your mistakes won’t be your fault, that doesn’t mean they will never be your fault. Learn to identify times when they are your fault and when they aren’t and adjust accordingly.