Articles
5/31/2024
When was the last time you were a beginner?
How language learning has helped me become a better instructional designer.
TLDR: Starting language learning helped me remember what it is like to be a beginner and gain deeper insight into the importance of positivity, pacing, and structure. How has being a beginner helped you become a better instructional designer/educator/instructor?
A little over two years ago (or 800 days ago according to my Duolingo “streak”), I identified learning Spanish as something that would benefit my career and my love of travel. I shopped around for learning experiences through all the top language apps. I wanted lessons that were supportive and met my needs for either travel or work use. With my background in education, I knew the most important aspects would be both how engaging and supportive (or lacking in frustration) the lessons were AND how well-structured they were for not just learning vocabulary, but achieving a degree of fluency in the language. My goal is not to sound like a native or to have deep academic or philosophical discussions, but just to be at a level where I can converse, be understood, and understand others on basic topics. And if I get far enough along even to develop rapport or friendships through language access.
I began with Duolingo. I explored other websites and tried free trials of several programs, but Duo’s quick lessons with gamification had me hooked. Soon, I paid the annual fee to eliminate ads and have fewer learning interruptions. Paying increased my commitment. Each night, I had a 9 PM appointment with Duo, no matter where I was. I uploaded friends from Facebook, added a profile pic, gained points, and moved up in leagues. I found myself doing things like sneaking in a quick lesson RIGHT before the airplane door shut because I wasn’t sure how the time change between the US and Sweden would affect my “streak”.
I kept going. About a year after I started, I had the opportunity to go to Mexico and stay with a friend for three days. I excitedly looked up language schools and decided to extend my stay and enroll in a language immersion program. I spent 11 days in Mexico, and during the last week, I took classes and spoke Spanish constantly. I met some nice people on vacation from Chihuahua, and we talked. We discussed life. We had a heartfelt conversation on how difficult COVID-19 made interacting with family. It felt AMAZING. I couldn’t believe my rudimentary language skills had taken me so far.
Despite this success, I was more aware of the gaps in my instruction. Language fluency is often measured in four areas: Reading and Writing which are more passive and usually not time-bound, and Speaking and Listening, which are active, requiring faster mental processing and greater use of working memory. Achieving reasonable fluency requires practice in all four areas. I had a good understanding of words and structures in writing and text and could write given enough time, but I struggled to understand spoken words and quickly retrieve words for conversation. Speaking was slow and laborious, and supplemented with many hand gestures and circumlocutions when I didn’t know or couldn’t recall the words. Listening often required asking the speaker to slow down or explain certain words.
I returned home and immersed myself in language study. I was easily spending an hour a day or sometimes bursts of 3-5 hours making flashcards, practicing sentences, or walking around the house describing my day in Spanish. I started attending local Spanish Language conversation groups and watching Spanish language shows on Netflix. In my conversation groups, I started hearing about other language-learning programs. I signed up for multiple apps. Some had human voices which had both benefits and deficits. Added cultural content that was helpful but at the price of speed. Some required a strong eye for identifying clues and patterns within grammatical structures. This could be very frustrating but also seemed to activate the code-searching part of the brain that is so important in language learning. Some required you to repeat long oral sentences with no visual text support. Some were all oral repetition, others had you identify or type words. Some felt overly easy while others felt like they were judging you if you skipped content or couldn’t repeat their sentences.
But all the differences, research, and frustrations made me think more carefully about my learning. It helped me identify what was successful and analyze WHY. I even did more research into language learning and what makes people successful in learning a language for different uses. What I’ve learned has not only improved my study but has also helped me better understand learning as a whole, fundamentally changing the tools I use in my instructional toolbox.
Let’s break it down a bit more:
Being a Beginner
Beginning something new is almost always challenging. You are going to fail, make mistakes, and feel confused. You won't always get answers to your questions, and you'll likely feel awkward and worry about the impact of your mistakes. Will you say something offensive? Will you look foolish? (In my travels, I've mistakenly said I was single instead of alone and hoped for a time of day that was less lonely instead of less sunny. Who knows what other errors I’ve made?) How well will you be able to get up and try again after a mistake or failure?
As instructional designers, we are told to make content engaging, to elicit buy-in, and to add gamification and storytelling to engage, entertain, or connect with learners. But how often do we, ourselves, tackle something as complete beginners? Being a beginner has a unique feeling. Instructional designers must understand this and recognize what material will feel risky, challenging, or exciting to beginners, as well as what is appropriate for those further along in their learning who may be offended by handholding and bored with a slow and simple pace. When will the learner wobble like Bambi finding his legs? When do they need support or encouragement? When do they need to just give it a go and see how their knowledge and skills hold up? How can you provide opportunities for supported struggle and productive struggle? How can you offer support that feels helpful rather than punitive, condescending, or judgmental? How much can we benefit from experiencing all the levels and feelings of learning at each stage?
Price
Price is buy-in. For me, that was a literal dollar amount for programs and apps, but whether it’s free to those who want it or is a requirement of employment, learning always has a cost both in creation and the time and effort put in by the learner.
As an Instructional Designer, it’s unlikely the learner is paying for your course. So what will make your learners not just finish a course but commit to the learning process and be ready to learn and change? We are never just asking learners to learn; we want them to think, implement, analyze, and improve. These all require an internal openness to change and a commitment to devoting mental resources and time. When I think about the price I’m willing to pay I always want something I’m going to feel good about and will not regret or feel like I’ve overpaid for the amount of use I get out of it. Are you respecting your learner’s time and energy and making it a positive experience AND a good use of their time? There’s a balance here. You can have a quick, boring course that gets the information across, but it might not create the change you want if it's not engaging. On the other end of the scale, you could make an elaborate escape room with great bonuses and rewards, but if it’s not a good use of the learner’s time to learn something that could be posted on a job aid and reviewed in a microlearning, it’s still not going to have the desired outcome and isn’t an efficient use of resources. Even an enjoyable task can seem like a chore when it keeps you from more important tasks. How are you making the price one the learner can commit to? What can you do to ensure they leave ready to use their training and may even approach future training with eagerness?
Repetition/Reward Structure
Language learning that doesn’t take advantage of spaced repetition is like trying to learn to ride a bike by doing so for 5 seconds once every year. It’s just not going to develop the neural pathways needed for quick and immediate recall/muscle memory. Most app or computer-based language learning programs are taking full advantage of their ability to use spaced repetition programs, providing the learner more attempts at the outset until they’ve demonstrated mastery, then reducing the frequency over time but never entirely fading out exposure. They are also a part of gamification and encourage nearly errorless-learning.
In instructional design, we have the opportunity to use this concept both within courses
and implementation strategies. Gamification offers learners repeated practice opportunities with positive reinforcement for correct answers and supportive feedback and additional attempts for error correction. Well-designed rewards enhance engagement, incentivize progress, and measure growth. Community learning allows learners to praise each other’s accomplishments and use challenges and competition to drive engagement. Knowledge checks not only assess content retention but also serve as active learning activities, fostering skill practice and application in virtual, low-stakes settings.
Speed/ Scope
A Speech pathologist once told me that the average student has to be exposed to/ hear a word four times for them to grasp its meaning. Diverse learners may need more explicit definitions and an increased number of exposures. This thought nugget stayed with me while I was language learning. While Duolingo won’t get you conversational as quickly as some other programs, it does teach in really small 2-10 minute blocks and builds vocabulary and language skills very intentionally. Our brains have an exceptional ability for pattern recognition far beyond our conscious knowledge base. With spaced repetition, as you progress you’ve had so many exposures to words and phrases that it often feels like difficult grammatical structures are “natural” and “just sound right.” This is because they are being learned the same way native speakers learn- through repeated exposure and subconscious pattern recognition. Still, the cost is time. Hundreds of exposures will impact subconscious learning, but consciously teaching the skills can improve the speed of learning and allow more explicit practice in both the receptive (reading/listening) and especially expressive (speaking/writing) domains.
Interestingly, children are much more likely than adults to start using a new vocabulary word in their speech and writing than adults. Perhaps it is their lack of fear of judgment or the fact that they are constantly learning new words and searching for ways to express themselves. When creating training for adults, and hoping to create change, we need to ensure that the scope of our project or the speed at which we roll it out gives adults the time they need to feel confident and get the amount of (receptive) exposure to content and (expressive) practice with skills that they need to implement the change. Recognizing that learners come from many different backgrounds might also mean creating courses with flexibility. Allowing one learner to progress after 4 exposures and another to practice 10 times or until they feel ready to move on works in language learning, why do we think a single bullet point among 5 others will sink in after a single exposure?
The amount of fact exposure and length of the course also have to be considered to ensure the learner is not covering too much content at once and has adequate opportunity for practice. In the case of learning behavior changes, this might mean that multiple short trainings, interspersed with real-life practice may have a greater impact than a single comprehensive course. This can provide the “expressive” skills practice that may be lacking in formal training. Facing a job task some small habits and routines present themselves in ways that can’t always be simulated in training. Are you able to pull out a binder and find the information while holding a phone and typing? Can you quickly recall or revise the scripted response when a few words of the question are changed? This “conversation” where the learner must both identify problems and recall solutions is akin to the listening and speaking skills. If we need learners to use significant working memory and rapid recall during job tasks we need to ensure ample opportunity for practice with similar speed demands either during our courses or between them or they will never develop the “fluency” we are after.
Reputation
I’m now preparing for a trip to Japan. I still practice a lesson or two in Spanish each day, but I’ve also started learning Japanese. It’s so exciting to be learning a completely new alphabet and seeing my daily progress. The buy-in I have for Duolingo is such that I felt no hesitation about starting this new language and even though I know that I will not learn much before my trip, language learning has been such fun that I WANTED to try learning Japanese. I keep excitedly telling people “I know hirigana” (in my best Neo/The Matrix voice.)
As an instructional designer, this is the ultimate goal: that the learner experiences I create are engaging and productive enough that learners are eager to learn. That training is not synonymous with boring, tedious, or frustrating, but with the excitement that comes from new mastery and from using knowledge to engage and make meaningful connections, whether they be with strangers in a foreign country, or a previously unknown software program, or even a challenging job task.
Summary
Language learning has been a fascinating and rewarding challenge, but more than that, being a beginner at something so (literally) foreign has helped me grow in more than just my Spanish Language (and Japanese) skills. It’s not the first time in my adult life I’ve taken on something completely new and experienced the joys of being a beginner, but the fascinating growth in language learning research and integration of technology has been revelatory for me as a learner and as an Instructional Designer. It reinforced ideas about the importance of positivity, pacing, and structure as well as getting into the mindset of a beginner and creating a welcoming, supportive, and flexible structure of learning.
I’m curious to hear from others about their experiences in being a beginner, whether in language learning or in some other area. How has being a beginner/learner helped you become a better instructional designer/educator/instructor?