Empowering foreign language learners: Steps to unlock limiting beliefs

The comparison of teaching approaches from the fifties to the present educational scenario offers a clear idea of how significant a transformation foreign language (FL) teachers (and teachers, in general) have undergone. The evolutionary process has affected both teachers and students and though students seem to have been favored, they still enroll at university with many limiting beliefs. Within this methodological frame, the present paper focuses on today's education as it is seen by first-year language students at university and investigates the students’ belief systems to focus on those aspects that have an impact and impinge on their emotional worlds, limiting or enhancing their FL acquisitional path and pedagogical evolution. The data for the present analysis comes from the P.Æ.C.E. Corpus, which contains authentic class-driven data that has been collected from 2005 to 2010 at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” and electronically systematized following the procedures proper to corpora linguistics. The corpus gives voices to more than 500 students of English who, via anonymously written texts, volunteered to describe (in English or Italian) their learning states at the beginning of their first-year course and after an immediately following guided visualization using Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) modalities. In itinere qualitative analyses of the data, besides showing that a good number of students do come to university with a vision of who they want to be, how they want to achieve their goals, and for which reason, have also allowed for a series of unobtrusive observations to take place. These have revealed a number of limiting beliefs first-year students bring to class and need to cope with and proven the significant impact of NLP visualizations in formalized FL teaching environments. In particular, the majority of students understands the importance of knowing English and approaches learning with promising visions but with: a) flickering motivations, b) poor self-esteem, and c) many limiting factors, such as: inaccurate awareness of personal level of competence, too high expectations, inefficacious time frames, and varied types of fears that block and depower their acquisitional force. In the attempt to reduce, transform, or possibly remove the negative consequences deriving from these disruptive learning frames, functional state-changing NLP visualizations have been used. They have greatly favored the transformation from students with low self-esteem and poor motivation into students with confidence and self-motivation and ignite willingness to achieve intended learning goals.