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What is a beginner?

This is a book for teachers of beginners and near-beginners. But what is a beginner?

This question could obviously be answered in many different ways. One fashionable answer is to claim that there is no such thing as an absolute beginner of English. Thanks to the status of English as a world language, it is frequently claimed that everyone is aware of isolated lexical items (‘President’, ‘jeans’), set phrases (‘made in Korea’), and sentences (‘We shall overcome’), and that everyone has a relatively developed idea of English phonology.

For these reasons, teacher trainers in Britain frequently begin training sessions on teaching beginners with the claim that there are no real beginners of English. Trainees are asked if they know Italian, and when they say no, are asked to reflect for a moment on just how much Italian they really do know. If we all know ‘spaghetti’, ‘pizza’, and a hundred other Italian words, the argument runs, how much more English will our supposed beginners actually know?

On the other hand, it would be hard to maintain this happy illusion if you found yourself, as I did recently, in front of a class of beginners from various countries of the world. The class included several students who appeared to have no English whatsoever and no knowledge of the Roman alphabet either. My task seemed still more difficult when I discovered that two were illiterate in their mother tongues, and that another was so taken aback to find that she had a male teacher that she refused to give any vocal indication of her presence. The only abstract representations we appeared to share were Arabic numerals and a few internationally-known symbols and logos. So much for the claim that there is no such thing as an adult beginner of English!

Because the term ‘beginner’ has such a range of connotations, it is often helpful to think in terms of categories of beginner.

Several of these categories are discussed below.

The absolute beginner

Described as a ‘pre-beginner’ by Earl Stevick, this rare species is not yet extinct. How to proceed with such a learner?

It obviously helps to be able to speak the learner’s language or to have someone available to translate. In the very first stages, pictures, board drawings, and realia will obviously be crucial. They enable the learner to understand a meaning before hearing the linguistic representation. One really useful technique with absolute beginners is ‘doubling’, where the teacher speaks for the beginner (perhaps speaking over the beginner’s shoulder) and the beginner then appropriates the model.

Reflection Think for a moment of a language where you would be an absolute beginner. Imagine you were about to have your first lesson. How would you feel? What would you be thinking? Do you think an absolute English beginner would have the same feelings or different ones?

The false beginner

This term covers a much wider range of competences than is sometimes recognized. Some false beginners have received no formal instruction, others may be self-taught, others have experienced at least some classroom teaching. All are likely to experience what we might call ‘recognition syndrome’: they will recognize, half-way through an exercise, that they do in fact know more than they (and the teacher) were assuming. The problem is that this knowledge is not always accurate. Other false beginners retain formulaic expressions. Most false beginners have strongly developed attitudes to the language and culture. These may be very positive (for example, where the language knowledge reflects popular culture) or relatively negative (for example, where the language knowledge is the remnant of a previous unsuccessful learning experience).

Reflection Think of a language where you would be a false beginner. What is the extent of your previous knowledge and how did you acquire it? Do you think that a false English beginner’s experience would be like yours? In what ways might it be similar or different?

The beginner with/without second language learning experience

If a beginner has already had a second language learning experience, this will colour their expectations of a further second language learning experience. Items from an established second language may also be transferred to the new second language, particularly when the two languages share common or similar linguistic items. Thus a student may be a ‘first time’ beginner (a beginner both as a language learner and as a learner of English), or the student may be an ‘experienced’ beginner who has already had a second language learning experience. Where both kinds of beginner are found in the same classroom, each will be making different kinds of discovery and undergoing different kinds of experience.

Reflection If you have learnt more than one second language, think for a moment of all the ways in which your later experience of learning a language was affected by your earlier one(s). Which of these effects made the second learning experience easier and which made it more difficult?