The Same Old Paradox: Fear of Speaking in a Foreign Language

For the last couple of weeks, I have been going through my memories and I have condensed all the stages I went through college when learning my first foreign language; all of this to see how I can use my own experience to help my future students. When I first started I had some English knowledge and I knew nothing about any other foreign language, the others came after learning English. I made up my mind of going to Foreign Languages School for I innocently thought that learning languages would be less stressful than any other hardcore field related to science or technology. I pictured myself in my hippie fields discovering language through reading and speaking to people from all over the world, all of us smiling and bonding. Now recalling all the process, what all the stages had in common was fear and stress.

It is rather paradoxical that learning a foreign language could cause so much stress on an individual. Language is the result of society and being social, there should not be room for fear if we humans are social by nature. I used to have this teacher who was a native speaker and who was an excellent teacher, nevertheless, we were all so afraid of not understanding was she said and making mistakes in front of her. Now that I think of it, I realized that regardless of her outstanding knowlegde, she was not approachable to any of us. My sister, who took classes with her later, told me she reminded her character of Mrs. Trunchbull from the movie Matilda and having fear greatly interferes in the way a student performs in a foreign language. 

I cannot think of a better example to illustrate my fear of speaking in a foreign language about 6 years ago when I first went overseas. At the time I was 22 and I went to France for my internship. I remember being at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris for 6 hours, starving to death and not being able to go buy a baguette for I was so scared of not being understood. Whenever I taught in the past, I have always told my students to be calm and relaxed. We all make mistakes, even in our native language. Any foreign language teacher must be understanding and to me assessing the students' progress must be done from many different angles. Not only what they can produce orally or in writing, learning a language is far more complex than what can be measured throughout production. We must be aware of Krashen's Comprehensible Input Theory, time is needed to store language and build up knowledge before students are able to successfully produce. Now it is my turn to make my ESL room more friendly and understanding now that I have the chance to make a change.