The Spirited Approach— can drinking alcohol improve your foreign language skills?
By Scott Donald.
There are a variety of methods to legally (and illegally) enhance performance: in fact, those two words have probably got you thinking of some fun examples already. Some of these involve getting in the right mental state, others are more concerned with physical aspects, and sometimes the lines between the two are blurry. Cristiano Ronaldo is believed to use cold saunas to encourage the body’s recovery processes. Other athletes, such as British runner Mo Farah, use oxygen tents during training to push their bodies to work harder. Musicians also have all kinds of pre-gig rituals to enhance their performances. Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant likes to iron shirts before he goes out on stage to ‘get him in the mood’, while millennial-superstar Selena Gomez forces down a teaspoon of olive oil before performing, apparently a popular trick for lubricating the throat.
Students too prepare for exams in all different kinds of ways. There are the obvious things like revising, or last-minute cramming (I remember desks in the university library being covered in cans of Red Bull, cups of coffee and packets of Pro Plus to help with this process.) Flashcards or memory games can also be utilised, and many of these now have online versions or apps. For an oral exam, it might be useful to roleplay parts of it beforehand.
Language exams are much the same: revision, memory games, and having conversations in the foreign language before big black exams are all typical things people do to enhance their performance. But what if there’s something else that could give the language exam candidate a little boost when it comes to doing the oral part of the exam… a little kick… an extra (fluid) ounce of help. I am talking of course about aqua vitae…the sauce…alcohol.
Firstly, I should first establish that there is some question about my objectivity in this matter. I first discovered alcohol as a wee boy back in Scotland taking a sip from my Grandad’s McEwan’s lager. Since then, barring the occasional over-indulgence, I’ve found alcohol to be an ideal addition to a whole range of situations: from a Bloody Mary with brunch, to a whisky-filled hip flask when hill walking. Another situation, which perhaps some of you might be able to identify with, is when speaking a foreign language. Suddenly, your stuttering attempts to ask for something in a shop are gone; there is no need to rehearse what you’re about to say over and over again in your head, because after just the right amount of alcohol, you’re delivering Shakespearean soliloquies in a second language, and immediately comprehending everything everyone else is saying to you.
I know I’m not alone in noticing this particular effect of alcohol — we all know that people can become a little more talkative after a few drinks — so could this have an impact on our aforementioned language students? Modern day language teaching is often focused on oral communication after all. And the irony is that language teachers quite often have problems getting students to talk in class in the second language. This brings us to two key questions: could there be an alcoholic solution to this problem? Does drinking alcohol genuinely have an effect on our foreign language skills, or is it all in our inebriated heads?
Amazingly, we actually do have some research which might help us answer these questions. So sit back, pour yourself a glass of your favourite tipple, and let’s have a look at two key studies.
Tongue-Thai’d?
The study that I’m about to describe was actually part of a much larger study published in 1972 on the topic of empathy. The main author, Guiora, established that your capacity for empathy is based on how able you are to partially and temporarily give up your separate identity, i.e. to take yourself out of your own shoes, and try putting on someone else’s. Guiora then stated that to learn a second language is to take on a new identity, I think this is a fascinating idea and one I’ve heard many times before. He then asserts that pronunciation is often the hardest aspect of learning a second language, and that your pronunciation of your first language forms an important part of your identity, or language ego. With me so far? Essentially, following this logic, he was proposing a link between someone’s capacity for empathy and their pronunciation ability in a second language. And to test this link, he needed to tinker with someone’s empathy to see what happened. He concluded,
Of the various means of producing an alteration in ego functioning , the most familiar and socially acceptable is alcohol.
Nicely put, and more or less true all these years later. He then highlighted that most research is focused on the negative effects of alcohol, and in particular, over-consumption. Instead, his experiment was to test whether alcohol in small amounts, such as those consumed by a social drinker, will facilitate the skill of pronunciation. I feel like Guiora and I would have got on well.
The experiment itself is quite entertaining. It starts, like all rigorous experiments with the setting up of control groups and by establishing the testing tools. In this case, they chose to test their hypothesis using the Standard Thai Procedure (STP). Nothing too exciting, it basically just involved pronouncing some words in Thai. Thai was chosen because of the American subjects' unfamiliarity with it, and because, while it is phonetically different from English, its sounds are not overly difficult for English speakers to produce.
Then the description of the experiment starts to get a little more interesting as the authors describe the alcoholic drink.
The subjects were then asked to drink a “cocktail” presented by the experimenter. All such cocktails were served with cocktail napkins, in stemmed glasses, and were garnished with a cherry and a twist of lemon peel.
So far so good. If you’re a cocktail connoisseur like me, I’m sure you are thinking of all manner of drinks that would suit such a garnish. But then things get a little bit weird.
The four alcohol treatments consisted of varying amounts of a punch known for its deceptive potency. It is one half liquor (cognac, light and dark rum) and one half other ingredients, such as citrus juices.
Well, I wracked my brains, asked my drinking friends, checked my cocktail app, scoured the web and I even asked my rum guy what kind of cocktail it was. But I am none the wiser. My rum guy said it was most similar to a sidecar or daiquiri, whereas I thought it might be a variation on a Zombie (famously known for its deceptive potency, as described in a sketch by Scottish Comedian Billy Connolly.) But, honestly, I don’t know, and I haven’t tried to make it yet. So if you have any ideas, or you want to suggest an original name for this cocktail, leave a comment below or in the ALMAR Facebook group.
So did our mystery cocktail and it’s similarly bizarre Virgin counterpart help the scientists prove a positive link between alcohol and pronunciation, or were were the subjects simply tongue Thai’d? In fact, the results of the experiment did indeed indicate that alcohol, in small quantities and under certain circumstances, can increase pronunciation ability in a second language. Interestingly, one of the circumstances was that the alcohol shouldn’t be consumed on a completely empty stomach. The group who tried this did not perform any better in the test, reinforcing the idea that there is a tipsy threshold you don’t want to cross, and that perhaps you should have listened to your mother when she told you to have something to eat before you went out for a night on the town.
Dutch courage
Unlike the previous pun, I can’t take credit for this one. I’ve taken it from the paper’s actual title Dutch courage? Effects of acute alcohol consumption on self-ratings and observer ratings of foreign language skills. Published just last year, the authors, Renner et al., conducted an experiment similar to the one above, but this time with native German speakers who were required to speak, you guessed it, Dutch.
Other than the languages used in the test, there were a few other key differences. Gone is the mystery cocktail — this time the group were given some good old 37.5% Smirnoff Red Label vodka mixed with Bitter lemon. And rather than testing the participants with specific amounts, the authors used the participants gender and weight to calculate the required dose to achieve a blood alcohol level of 0.4% (just below the drink driving limit.) The control group didn’t get any virgin cocktails this time either, just a glass of water. The logic behind this being that related research had indicated that:
In some cases, the effects of alcohol placebo are so potent that they can obscure differences between placebo and real alcohol (Christiansen et al., 2013).
(Thus answering the age old question of what would happen if you kept buying someone non-alcoholic beer without them knowing.) The alcohol, or water, was then consumed after ten minutes, with a fifteen minute waiting period to allow any alcohol to be absorbed into the blood. The participants even got to listen to some nice instrumental music during this time, which I thought was pretty groovy. They were then breathalysed, and their results recorded. The language test itself sounds a bit more fun than Guiora’s, and involved arguing in Dutch about animal testing (students had passed the Dutch B2 exam.)
However, for me the most significant differences were the areas being tested. As well as testing pronunciation,the experiment also tested grammar, vocabulary and how well the subjects made their arguments (which sounds closest to the Cambridge exam descriptor ‘discourse management’.) Furthermore, ‘Dutch courage’ was not just a snappy title for the paper, but something the authors tested, i.e. the idea that the participants' self-confidence from drinking alcohol might affect their performance. For good measure, they also gave the participants an arithmetic test, to see if any over-confidence extended beyond their foreign language skills.
The results were as follows:
- The alcohol drinkers were not more self-confident about how they had performed in the language (or arithmetic) test than the water drinkers.
- However, the Dutch observers assessing the performance in the language test did rate the alcohol drinkers’ language skills as higher than the water drinkers.
So just like the Guiora experiment, this experiment suggests that a low dosage of alcohol does improve the ability to speak in a second language, but suggested this was not down to an increase in self-confidence, or ‘Dutch courage’. What I find astounding though, is that the experiment also indicated that the area that the alcohol drinkers performed best was pronunciation. My own hypothesis would be that the area alcohol might improve would be fluency, and so I expected that the results for the ‘argumentation’ descriptor to be higher, but this was not the case. And, if anything, I would have thought that the infamous ‘slurred speech’ associated with alcohol consumption might have had a negative impact on pronunciation. However, as the authors point out, slurred speech is perhaps a feature more associated with larger quantities of alcohol consumption. Douglas Brown, in his seminal Principles of Language Learning and Teaching (1987) may actually have gone someway to predicting these results when he suggests that the results of Guiora’s experiments were perhaps more to do with the ‘muscular tension’ relaxing effects of alcohol than anything else. So the improvement might be more to do with loose lips, (tongues, palates, alveolar ridges, and all the other things that you use to articulate sounds.) He also highlights the difficulty of separating the mental and physical effects of alcohol, those ‘blurred lines' that I mentioned at the beginning of the article.
Conclusion
How seriously should we take this research: is it useful in any way, or is it just a bit of fun? I decided to take a lighter approach to the topic in this article, as I think there is obvious fun to be had with the idea of a cocktail-laced language classroom. However, there is obviously a darker side to alcohol too, and it comes with some caveats. For example, the students we are talking about experimenting on are clearly adults, as children have neither the physical or mental faculties to cope with alcohol, even in low dosages. This applies to some adults too. There are also cultures in which alcohol is forbidden and this whole topic might be viewed as taboo.
Yet, I’d have to agree with both studies’ assertion that the large weight of research focusing on alcohol is about its negative effects. Even research on how shy people use alcohol to overcome their anxieties have tended to be quite heavy and focused on drinking disorders and severe social phobias. While I understand the reasons for this type of research, it doesn’t mean a blind eye should be turned to any possible benefits of alcohol consumption — quite apart from anything, that would be bad science. Sadly, there is also the case of misleading, or badly reported, scientific studies when it comes to proposed benefits of alcohol. You know the ones: a glass of wine a day is as good as an hour in the gym (one of the studies covered in this great piece by John Oliver). But there are signs of more balanced research, and not just with alcohol. The medicinal benefits of cannabis are now being openly discussed by respected medical institutions. Scientists are also beginning trials on micro-dosing LSD, a practice aimed at boosting creativity which has become popular in specific industries like computing. (Guiora had also tested Valium’s effects on pronunciation, but found it had no benefit. Sorry Valium.) So perhaps if previous social taboos and legal restrictions around other drugs are being eroded, we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss studies like the ones in this article.
Let’s get to the crux: am I going to suggest we crack out the rum and start drinking Pina Coladas in class? No, not quite. Neither of the studies in this article advocate benefits of alcohol for the process of acquiring language. I have no idea if alcohol would help students learn better in my classroom; I suspect that its associated memory loss might not be particularly helpful. But let’s forget the classroom for a minute, what about exam performance? In How Languages are Learned (1993), Lightbrown and Spada also come to this conclusion that the results of Guiora’s experiment may have more to do with performance than language learning. A student doing an oral language exam doesn’t need to learn anything during exam, they simply need to perform, and both papers suggest that alcohol might have a positive effect on pronunciation Furthermore, while there may not be evidence for ‘Dutch courage’, the paper concludes by raising the question of ‘language anxiety’, i.e. an anxiety that relates specifically to language learning, as opposed to general self-confidence. This is something I’m sure all language teachers can identify with. The learners who have all the receptive knowledge but, whether it be because of crippling shyness, ‘language anxiety’, or some unknown factor, are unable to perform well in speaking exams. Wouldn’t you do anything thing to give your student that one extra point which might make the difference between passing or failing?
The observers evaluating the students in the experiments above weren’t language experts, they were just native speakers. I reckon it would be even more interesting to see what kind of results would be generated by a qualified language teacher with a full set of assessment scales in front of them. So, language teachers, are you up for the challenge? Next time you’re doing mock speaking exams with the students, perhaps you could try a little experiment with the spirited approach. It might just be the most entertaining action research you’ve ever conducted.
Disclaimer — the author of this article is not recommending that teachers get their students drunk, and your Director of Studies should always be consulted before conducting any such classroom experiments. Language students should also be discouraged from gambling the money they’ve spent on language exams by drinking alcohol beforehand, but if they do decide to try it, I’d love to hear the results.
Thank you
A special thanks to Fritz Renner, one of the authors of the Dutch Courage paper, for answering my questions and allowing me to access the paper for the purposes of this article.
Bibliography
Christiansen P., Rose A. K., Cole J. C., Field M. A., (2013) ‘A comparison of the anticipated and pharmacological effects of alcohol on cognitive bias, executive function, craving and ad-lib drinking’ from Journal of Psychopharmacology 2013 Jan;27(1):84–92. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22764182
Douglas Brown, H., (1987) Principles of Language Learning and Teaching.
Ellis, R., (1994) The Study of Second Language Acquisition. OUP
Guiora, A. Z., Beit-Hallahmi, B., Brannon,R. C. L., Dull, C. Y., and Scovel, T., (1972) The Effects of Experimentally Induced Changes in Ego States on Pronunciation Ability in a Second Language: An Exploratory Study. Available at: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=A7B082022B45AC18EF58C62293EB2215?doi=10.1.1.927.9067&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Lightbrown, P., and Spada., N., (1993) How Languages are Learned. OUP
Morris, E.P., Stewart, S. H., and Ham, L. S., ‘The relationship between social anxiety disorder and alcohol use disorders: A critical review’ from Clinical Psychology Review 25 (2005) 734–760. Available at: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1010.5139&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Renner, F., Kersbergen, I., Field, M., and Werthmann, J., (2017)
‘Dutch courage? Effects of acute alcohol consumption on self-ratings and observer ratings of foreign language skills’ from Journal of Psychopharmacology 2018 Jan;32(1):116–122. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29043911
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