In my last article, Four muscles you never knew you had,  I explored Guy Claxton’s distinction between learning skills and learning dispositions.  Positive learning dispositions can be cultivated, built up like muscles, enabling you to learn faster and more effectively. If you recall, Professor Claxton’s learning muscles are the four Rs: Resilience, Resourcefulness, Reflection and Reciprocity.

If you’ve ever found learning slow and frustrating and wanted to give up, or just found you start things but somehow drift off, life gets in the way and never finish them then it’s your resilience that’s being challenged.  The good news is, you can build up your learning resilience, but just like training for a marathon, don’t expect that you can go magically overnight from couch potato to running 26 mental miles in under two hours.  Resilience is something you’ll build up gradually with practice.  But what exactly is language learning resilience?

Let me ask you some questions with respect to you as a language student:

• How often do you break your word to yourself, especially around study?
• How prepared and willing are you to look stupid?
• Do you tend to give up or switch off when things are foggy or unclear?
• How determined and persistent are you when it doesn’t go well?
• How curious and adventurous are you in learning?  Do you learning actively or passively?
• How flexible are you?  Do you try other ways when one way fails?
• How focussed are you?  How easily distracted?

If you realise answering these questions that your resilience actually isn’t all that great you may find it a little depressing.  Don’t!  In fact, notice that’s actually low resilience talking.  Remember you can build up your learning resilience but you will need to start with baby steps.  Here are some ideas for improving your resilience. Why not pick one or two and commit to doing them.

• Keeping your word to yourself is as important if not more than keeping it to others.  Practise keeping your promises to yourself about little things, like homework or practice.  If you only set aside ten minutes a day or an hour a week to improve any one thing and kept your promise, just think how much you’d achieve? (be realistic though – commit to what you know you can do).  Put it in your diary so you don’t forget.  Tell someone else what you’ve promised to do and ask for help in sticking to it.
• Practise looking stupid and give up the need to look good in front of others all the time.  Learning requires you to make mistakes, to stand up and get it wrong, or to sound silly doing the accent.  In the long run, the ones who are prepared to look silly at the beginning are the ones who look great later when they can speak fluently.  Which of those would you rather be?
• Language is messy.  Words simply don’t have direct one-to-one translations and sometimes there’s just no exact word or sentence in a translation.  Give up your need for clarity all the time.  Practise keeping going through the fog and eventually it’ll clear.  Expect fog, it’s normal.
• Try “disowning” thoughts and feelings that pop up and stop you.  Just because your brain says “give up” or “I can’t be bothered” or “I’m tired” doesn’t mean you have to own that thought and run with it.  After all, your brain thinks up all sorts of rubbish all the time and you don’t say it all.  You have an internal censor.  What happens if you tell yourself that maybe that thought isn’t one you want to take on?  Practise censorship.  Now can you keep going?
• Practise learning actively not passively.  Bring yourself to learning, don’t think it must come to you or be spoon-fed.  Practise taking control of it.
• If you’ve tried a learning method and it didn’t work for you, what else might you try?
• Finally focus.  This one is a killer for me.  I’m like a magpie, distracted by any shiny new thing and for me the internet and email are evil twins.  If you can’t focus because of distractions try moving where there are fewer distractions for an hour or two.  The library.  A café without internet access.  If it’s sunny, maybe go outside and practice in a park?

Two more things to remember: Firstly, your learning resilience is often a function of the subject matter – you may be super resilient at Piano for example, but poor at German. However, you can always build up, and learning is way more fun when your resilience is high.  Secondly, just like muscle strength your resilience can go down as well as up if you don’t keep the truck rolling!  If you’re struggling to even start, here are five ways to get motivated.

What other ways can you think of to help build resilience?  Why not share them with us.

Gareth

Tags: accelerated learning, learning resilience

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 at 8:09 am and is filed under Resilience. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.