The Language Learner as Subject and the Language Teacher as Therapist?

            As anyone who has learned a foreign language knows, especially if you are an introvert and aren’t comfortable exchanging personal details with strangers, or are a perfectionist who hates to put forward anything less than impeccable work, progress can often mean forcing oneself to overcome those inhibitions or to accept those imperfections.   

            Learning to speak a foreign language means exposing oneself, making oneself vulnerable, putting oneself in situations where others might laugh at you or where the person that you pride yourself on—that eloquent, confident, and composed self you want to present to the world—suddenly seems like a stumbling, bumbling fool. 

            And yet one of the ways to make this whole process bearable is the fact that we often do it in the company of others who are in just the same situation.  The fellowship and camaraderie that develops in the language-learning classroom is as much an acknowledgement of this shared vulnerability and exposure as it is a product of the fact that we enter the classroom as strangers but often leave it knowing far more about our fellow students than we would ever otherwise imagine:  It begins with learning their names, their ages, where they’re from, where they live, their family context, their educational or work situation, their likes and dislikes…and as we move beyond the present tense : where did they grow up; what they did on the weekend, what they did on their last holiday, what was their most formative experience as a child or adolescent; and what are they planning to do on their next holiday, and what are their future career plans, or even, once we learn how to express more complex thoughts, what they would like to do if they won the lottery or if they could go back into the past and change something in history…all the things they feel conflicted about, the things that bring them joy, their burdens and responsibilities as well as their relationships with family, co-workers and friends.  With whom else in our lives, except perhaps our close kin (and that depends!) do we share so much, so freely? 

            I have been a classroom language-learner for almost all my life.  It began in grade four in Monsieur Nadal’s French class in Lusaka, Zambia and continued with minor interruptions through French in high school and freshman year at university, then German in my senior year and in graduate school for my master’s, continuing into further study in Germany itself…again, with minor interruptions, it picked up in a bizarre language class in Prague to learn Czech, where the teacher taught in a strange mish-mash of English and German (the only class I actually quit midway through the year).  When I moved to France after getting married, I entered the French classroom again at the university in Grenoble, after realizing that whatever I knew about French from those previous experiences, it was not sufficient for communicating on a daily basis in French, to native French speakers! Afterwards, when I started my doctorate back in the United States, I couldn’t break the habit and continued taking French classes on the side, before starting an intense year of Sanskrit (okay, in that class the camaraderie came about not through learning personal details about my classmates, since all we worked on was translating an ancient religious text; it was more like going through boot camp together…). There was a bit of a hiatus when my daughter was born and I became more of a language facilitator and teacher (a subject for another day), both in the US and back in France, and again when the pressure of writing my dissertation didn’t leave time for any other kind of study.  But when we moved back to France in 2012 I returned to language learning—first in an intense six-month French conversation class, then a class in Romanian for two years, and then again since 2015, when I went back to seriously learning Czech. 

            Along the way, I somehow also became a language teacher, something I hadn’t planned to do, yet which has come about as a natural consequence of my interest in languages, linguistics, and pedagogy, and which links well with my other persona as a linguistic anthropologist.  After all, the oft-repeated mantra connecting language and culture does have a real basis, even though most people aren’t thinking about the connection from a theoretical and analytical point of view. 

            But in my role as language teacher, I have come to realize that I have a certain privilege in becoming the repository of so many students’ thoughts and feelings as they progress toward mastering their expression through the medium of the foreign language.  And with that privilege comes responsibility, especially in my most recent job, teaching English online in one-on-one lessons.  When people share information about their home context, their problems, their aspirations, even just the ups and downs of their daily lives—it creates an interesting dynamic to our relationship, where I become not just teacher, but something more like ‘friend’, not just a language expert, but also a ‘therapist’, someone with whom they feel they can share their thoughts and whose advice or knowledge they might seek.  Working now with adult language learners exposes this dynamic, as I find myself listening to other (women in particular) speak about their experiences with racism and sexism in the workplace; about problems with their mothers-in-law; about the stresses of childrearing; and sometimes about life choices such as moving to a different country with a foreign spouse or choosing to raise a bilingual child or trying to decide on a career move that will affect the family…Having had personal experience with all of the above, it is difficult to remain professionally neutral and not offer insight from my own lived reality.  With this dynamic, however, come all kinds of ethical considerations, not least the fact that I have no professional training in therapy of any kind, so what does my role become?

              First, I have to ask myself if I want to be something more than ‘teacher’ and how to manage the boundaries between public and private in that case.  I have to recognize that ours is a relationship of disparate power as well—where I control how much they know about me, but they end up telling me more about themselves, not to mention the fact that I have more control over the language in which our interactions take place, also creating a lopsided power dynamic. When I teach in the context of an academic institution, and I learn intimate information that might have relevance for other teachers or administrators, should I (may I) share that if I feel the student’s health or well-being is at stake? Ultimately, I realize that I don’t have a choice about my role if I want to see my students succeed: if I want them to learn to communicate in the foreign language, then I have to be a listener as well as a teacher, and that means I have to listen to what they want to tell me.  But I can balance the power dynamic by sharing more of myself with them—and at this point I become less therapist than friend or counsellor who is willing to listen and sympathize and offer advice if asked.   After all, what is the point of knowing a language other than to be able to use it to share the human experience? And through the sharing of that experience we enter into a new relationship—both as teachers and as students—that goes beyond the usual boundaries of those roles.  I just don’t have a name for it yet.