'Yakka' is an Australian term for (hard) work. As I ponder the term and its usage here in Australia, statements like "it's pretty hard yakka", "not enough hard yakka" (to describe someone who is soft on account of not really having to work hard), and "a bit of hard yakka won't hurt ya" all spring readily to mind.
The idea of hard yakka leapt into my head today while I was doing a rather intensive and repetitive activity with my beginner adult students with Dolch sight word lists. We work on these on an ongoing basis, but every second week I dedicate a good two hours to really working hard on mastering the basic list of sight words for these adults who can't read anything yet in the country they've made their new home.
The reason I thought about this was that, if an outsider of the ELT sort were to observe this stage of my classes, I think I might get a bit of a negative review. The learners weren't overtly having fun, or doing something really interesting or engaging. They were working really hard!
That raised the question in my mind: Why do so many of our materials, resource books and blog posts appear to avoid this issue of 'hard work'?
I know it is important to keep learners interested and motivated, even entertained at times. But I'll tell you this: I have never yet met a learner who 'made it' into the upper levels of advanced proficiency without being willing to do some good old-fashioned hard work with the language.
Having a whale of a time and making the lessons "all about them" is good and all, but I honestly don't think that that alone is enough to consolidate and drive deeper language learning.
But we don't hear or see much about the very important work ethic involved in learning a second or foreign language. We see slogans advocating interesting content and motivating activities based on a fun factor, we are told to at all times avoid the risk of overwhelming or over-challenging the learners. Keep them soft and cozy, like a sponge, and the language will just miraculously be absorbed, sort of thing...
You may have read some of the articles out and about describing an emerging "helicopter parent" syndrome. To what extent has ELT developed a well-meaning but ultimately flawed "helicopter teacher" and "helicopter materials" mentality?
Personally, I think ELT needs more genuine attention to 'hard yakka' -- alongside all the other interesting and fun things we've managed to incorporate into our approaches and materials -- and I'll even go so far as to say that hard yakka can bring just as much motivation and sense of fulfilment to our learners as anything else we manage to do.
And I'm not blindly advocating a sort of 'hard labour/slavery' approach here. What I am calling for is attention to activities and materials that really do help to build up learners' strength and endurance with the language, and for this not to be automatically written off as unmotivating and ineffective.
=D
