Why are there so many questions about motivation?

[Cainntear]

And yet... here we go again, because this is the student getting blamed for suffering poor mental health outside of the course.
The student who suffers stress about their poor performance is once again the source of their own problem: "you find this depressing because you're depressive."

Hrm, that certainly was not my intention, so I'm not sure whether you've misunderstood what I wrote or whether I simply communicated poorly. If you are willing to point it out, I'd appreciate knowing what in my message you thought constituted blaming the student for suffering poor mental health.

I think it comes down to the word that I used further down in my message: compartmentalisation. Talking about people with mental health issues so prominently gives a reader an unintended message that the student is the problem, and therefore the teacher is a good person for recognising this and sympathising with the student. I recognise that there are very real problems when dealing with people with specific mental health issues (e.g. refugees from warzones), but here I fear we're just giving another dog to eat the teachers' homework, because by focusing on the exceptional cases when we're really talking about fairly common cases, we're implying that the people in question (i.e. those that talk about problems in motivating themself) are all exceptional cases, rather than a norm.

OK, maybe not a norm per se, but they are indicative of problems in the norm. How many times have you gone into a second hand shop and made an idle survey of language teaching books to see how far they'd been read through based on page folding? The norm is not to complete courses but most of the dropouts disappear silently and very few speak up. Many of those who don't speak up to the teacher speak up to friends and classmates, or to random strangers on the internet.
Dropouts are the norm, and a teacher who dismisses the loud ones as unusual and "just people who like to complain" are missing the oppotunity to listen to the minority who are vocal about their dissatisfactions.

What I was trying to say was that people who are struggling with mental health issues often assume that their problem is a character default, insuffiicently optimized routine, or some other avenue in which they've failed, rather than seeing it as a health issue. Kindly suggesting that someone seek compassion and care (although, as rightly pointed out above, that is often fraught) is not meant to suggest that they're at fault, but rather quite the opposite - it's meant to take the pressure off the person by pointing out that the problem may be something not entirely under their control,

Except it rarely goes that way, and it absolutely takes the pressure off the teacher. You may not see it this way, but I absolutely do: if what I am doing is not working for them, that's on me and it is blaming the student if you absolve yourself of responsibility.

I have looked at struggling students as an opportunity for me to find why the instruction I give is suboptimal. What is it in the strong students' prior knowledge that I need to fill in for the weaker students? Or maybe there's something in all their prior knowledge that I just need to draw deliberate attention to and they'll automatically do it.

I think the heart of the matter is that you are attempting to sympathise and I'm trying to empathise -- I always try to internally model the students' experience so that I feel (a little fraction of) what they're feeling, but sympathy is far more distant and external.

If a lousy course a student is taking (or the solo-learning approach they've adopted) is the main source of the stress and anguish, then their situation can be further improved by changing the educational approach, withdrawing from a subpar course, and so on. However, many students struggle to learn not because their educational experience is ill-designed (though that is common enough) but because their lives contain other stressors or crises or they simply have a mental health condition. Such problems cannot be solved by better instruction or a more well-designed study routine, and it's in those situations especially where I would try to connect students to other resources.

Again, that is either talking about very exceptional cases, or it is passing the blame onto the student, coming down to sympathy vs empathy. You do not feel that you are blaming them because you are acting out of sympathy, but they feel blamed and I understand that through empathy. I've been stressed out by language courses in the past, and I've always had issues outside of the class that I've had to deal with. I have been in the situation where the teacher has shown sympathy but failed to show empathy. I could have been broken by that, but I quickly learned to refuse the implicit blame and just learn to have a low opinion of the teacher instead.

A well-taught lesson works for everyone, because the things that stress out people who are prone to experiencing that sort of stress aren't optimal for anyone -- if there's a heavy cognitive load, it's harder for everyone: even if they don't break under the load, it's slowing down their learning anyway.

As I mentioned above, I don't think the first part of my message contradicted my second paragraph at all (or at least, it was not written to do so). And although I would quibble with the phrasing (people have varying needs and there is no single well-taught lesson that works for everyone), I think what you meant was that, in general, thoughtful, quality intruction and educational support informed by pedagogy, neuroscience, and other relevant frameworks are more effective for everyone, not just for certain students who might already be struggling or be at risk of struggling. Even those who can tough it out in the most abysmal learning environments will learn better if teaching is improved. I agree with all of that.

I don't think there's such a thing as a perfect course to the point that it can be scripted and carried out for every learner. However, I do feel that a lot of "learner differences" are really more about their ability to deal with suboptimal instruction: the optimal instruction is one that doesn't really have gaps. The usual complaint is along the lines of "if you have to do everything explicitly, it takes longer, and it's not fair to slow the strong learners down to help the weak ones," but I don't think that's really the case at all -- filling in gaps is non-trivial, so the strong learners are slowed down by having to do it, and the weak learners are basically cut out by it.
I see a weaker student as a canary in my gold-mine: they're the first to identify a problem, and if I don't react to it, that gas is going to poison all my students' learning.

Indeed, there's a lot of research showing that certain levels of stress and certain emotions impede the cognitive processes necessary for learning. I actually gave a conference presentation on the topic a couple of years ago, specifically on handling trauma-linked topics while teaching EFL to refugee populations. There are still a lot of skeptics in the educational field, but a lot of teachers really are sitting up and paying attention to the developing science and moving away from punitive, confrontational teaching approaches toward models that encourage risk-taking, failure, experimentation, non-punitive feedback, etc. I hope the trend continues.

Yes, I've had various people say stress is good because "I work better under stress" and I tend to repeat something I read years ago: people might work well under pressure but nobody works well under stress -- stress is their being too much pressure and you not coping with it.

The big issue is trying to identify "their problem" -- it's a teacher trying to externalise blame. I used to descrive so-called learning styles as "the dog that ate the teacher's homework, because I kept hearing teachers saying that their teaching was fine and that the students having problems "have a different learning style from my teaching style". Teachers could then ignore what was going wrong in their classes because "nothing works for everyone". The teacher then doesn't need to optimise for anyone, because they can happily identify people who succeed in their classes as having the appropriate personal learning style and then shrug their shoulders and say "well if I teach to their learning style, then I won't be teaching to the others' learning style, so they'll be disadvantaged." Which ignores the fact that good students learn despite their teachers rather than because of them.

[Edited to clarify that I am talking about Neil Fleming's VARK theory of learning styles, specifically]

I'm assuming that most people here know that Fleming's theory of learning styles (visual, auditory, read/write, kinesthetic) has been thoroughly debunked and discredited in educational research. Quite simply, there is zero evidence to show that visual learners, auditory learners, etc. as conceived in said theory exist at all. It's simply not backed up by any credible science, and nobody who knows anything about pedagogy talks about this theory today except as an example of the dangers of nonsense theories gaining popularity and doing a lot of damage.

Of course, it's still true that nothing works for everyone, and there are a lot of differences between learners of various kinds, but any teacher worth anything at all doesn't use that as an excuse to not optimise for anyone. What matters is this: for everyone, something works! As such, good teachers think about varying needs, personalities, and preferences in the classroom and offer lessons with multiple pathways to understanding.

Even 14 years after Psychological Science in the Public Interest published Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence by Pashler et al* I still had colleagues that would talk about learning styles. The problem is that many teachers were taught before Pashler et al (2008) and because their trainers and lecturers told them it, they still believe it. Worse, many teacher trainers were taught before it and they teach their students to believe in learning styles.
[* A paper that had such an influence on me a couple of years afte my CELTA that I can remember the name of the journal and article, although I'll admit I had to look it up to see when it was published, although I have to admit I'd remember the spelling of Pashler wrong ("Pachler"). ]

And there's not really much need to qualify that you're talking about Fleming's VARK, because that's basically what learning styles means. There is a danger that people would read your clarification as saying that they're OK, because they're talking about how the field moved on after Fleming, completely ignoring the fact that everything after Fleming was built on top of Fleming.

I've genuinely had colleagues talking about "visual" and "auditory" learners, and when I pulled out Pashler et al, they defended themselves by saying that the paper was old, and there's been so much more done about learning styles since then... but they couldn't actually point to any specific research.

But yes: people do still talk about learning styles and set material based on the idea, despite it being thoroughly discredited by the academic field.

[cpnlsn88]

I think there's a mismatch of goals and what can be attained and the fact you never really attain it. Evenetually you drop off.

Motivation is an equation. Pain versus enjoyment. If the enjoyment is more than the pain you'll carry on forever. If the pain is more than the enjoyment then you'll only grind your way to the next intermediate goal. Once that is achieved the proposition becomes less and less alluring.

One problem in language learning is one of inappropriate goals. I want native fluency and accent. Good luck but motivation is unlikely to get you there.

I want to read a novel in the TL. Eminently achievable with applicaiton especially if you're reading a genre you enjoy.

Two questions - what do I want to be able to do in the language? What do I need to do?

Another problems is one of means. If you enjoy the means selected motivation is less of an issue. A question is perhaps to find out what you enjoy doing in the language and then do it.

(Of course another question entirely is the appropriateness of the means. If the means chosen aren't reducing the gap between you and your goal then the means are unsuitable and unless you get enjoyment from the activity in itself - I doubt duolingo works in any meaningful way but it's designed to be an addictive activity - the failure of the means will eventually stop the activity).

Few have the motivation or quite frankly time to attain a native fluency. Level B2 is however fairly readily available by the selection of good means.

As others have said there are other things in the world. Other languages, musical instruments, weight training, philosophy, DIY, waterolours, swimming, political actiivism, writing your own novel, poetry.

If you sense you're flogging a dead horse to no purpose then what about another useful activity?

[Cainntear]

I think there's a mismatch of goals and what can be attained and the fact you never really attain it. Evenetually you drop off.
...
One problem in language learning is one of inappropriate goals. I want native fluency and accent. Good luck but motivation is unlikely to get you there.

The reality is that no-one who has never learned a language has any real conception of what it means to learn a language. Hell, so many people don't even understand the word fluency that it has come to mean nothing more than "really good at a language" in colloquial speech.

How can we expect them to make realistic goals if they don't understand what learning language is?

That's why motivation is such a mess, and it's just a useful excuse that teachers can use to absolve themselves of responsibility for their students' failures -- i.e. it's blaming the student. And successful students don't generally challenge it because the flip side of "students failed because of personal failings" is "students succeed because of personal strengths", which plays to their ego and gets them invested in believing that the teacher is right about that.

Motivation is an equation. Pain versus enjoyment. If the enjoyment is more than the pain you'll carry on forever. If the pain is more than the enjoyment then you'll only grind your way to the next intermediate goal. Once that is achieved the proposition becomes less and less alluring.

Is that the equation? Pain versus enjoyment isn't about motivation -- it's about learning. We all learn better when there is no pain. Taking pain into account for motivation seems to assume that pain is a necessary part of learning.

I want to read a novel in the TL. Eminently achievable with applicaiton especially if you're reading a genre you enjoy.

Two questions - what do I want to be able to do in the language? What do I need to do?

These are not questions that most people could even ask, let alone answer, when they start out.

Another problems is one of means. If you enjoy the means selected motivation is less of an issue. A question is perhaps to find out what you enjoy doing in the language and then do it.

Or perhaps the question is for course designers to make their teaching more intrinsically enjoyable...?
I'm not talking about gamification -- that's extrinsic enjoyment, not intrinsic enjoyment. The language should be enjoyable -- nothing should be added that only add to the enjoyment and adds nothing to the learning.

[Severine]

I think it comes down to the word that I used further down in my message: compartmentalisation. Talking about people with mental health issues so prominently gives a reader an unintended message that the student is the problem, and therefore the teacher is a good person for recognising this and sympathising with the student. I recognise that there are very real problems when dealing with people with specific mental health issues (e.g. refugees from warzones), but here I fear we're just giving another dog to eat the teachers' homework, because by focusing on the exceptional cases when we're really talking about fairly common cases, we're implying that the people in question (i.e. those that talk about problems in motivating themself) are all exceptional cases, rather than a norm.

I don't have the time to write the in-depth response I'd like to, but I'll do my best to hit the important points. Overall, my strong impression is that you're jumping to a great many incorrect conclusions about my motivations, beliefs, attitudes, practices, and even my emotions, despite the fact that we don't know each other at all. I also think you have a bone to pick with problems in education, and subpar teachers in general, which is extremely understandable but not a great basis for assumptions.

One thing I will say is that these "exceptional cases" you mention (refugees from conflict zones) represent more than 70% of the population I teach. I also teach low-income adult immigrants who are not refugees, and then I have a few private students in much more stable situations, mostly foreign-born lawyers and academics. I only teach adults. At any rate, please remember that, for some instructors, these "exceptional cases" are not so rare. You also repeatedly assume that identifying someone as needing MH support equates to (1) thinking the student is the problem and (2) no longer trying to teach them or adapt lessons to their needs. I don't know why you're making these assumptions. In fact, it's the opposite: teachers should work hardest to reach and support the students most struggling. And having a MH issue, whether it reaches a clinical level or not, is never anyone's fault and never turns anyone into "a problem." If "a reader" comes to that conclusion, they're straight-up wrong.

OK, maybe not a norm per se, but they are indicative of problems in the norm. How many times have you gone into a second hand shop and made an idle survey of language teaching books to see how far they'd been read through based on page folding? The norm is not to complete courses but most of the dropouts disappear silently and very few speak up. Many of those who don't speak up to the teacher speak up to friends and classmates, or to random strangers on the internet.
Dropouts are the norm, and a teacher who dismisses the loud ones as unusual and "just people who like to complain" are missing the oppotunity to listen to the minority who are vocal about their dissatisfactions.

I have yet to work with a learner who didn't have some form of issue with motivation, self-confidence, anxiety about speaking, fear of failure, shame, pressure, stress, or some combination thereof. I do think it's the norm, not only in language learners but people in general. There is obviously a spectrum, and many learners struggle with such things without reaching a threshold of clinical relevancy. Still, I think that anyone who is teaching human beings has to assume that these are things learners will experience and need to be understood and taken into account in the classroom and beyond. The amount of support needed varies widely from learner to learner, but everyone benefits from a recognition of the role stress and emotions play in learning. Teachers can and should talk about these issues in class, and absolutely must factor these things into planning and pedagogy. If you want to talk more about this, feel free to PM me; I don't want to totally derail the thread, but it's something I care deeply about.

What I was trying to say was that people who are struggling with mental health issues often assume that their problem is a character default, insuffiicently optimized routine, or some other avenue in which they've failed, rather than seeing it as a health issue. Kindly suggesting that someone seek compassion and care (although, as rightly pointed out above, that is often fraught) is not meant to suggest that they're at fault, but rather quite the opposite - it's meant to take the pressure off the person by pointing out that the problem may be something not entirely under their control,

Except it rarely goes that way, and it absolutely takes the pressure off the teacher. You may not see it this way, but I absolutely do: if what I am doing is not working for them, that's on me and it is blaming the student if you absolve yourself of responsibility.

But who's absolving anyone of responsibility? Seeing emotional, stress-related, and MH factors and taking them into consideration is not about absolving oneself of responsibility. It's in fact about doing one's job as a teacher, i.e., better understanding the needs of the student and responding accordingly. If what the teacher is doing isn't working for the student, yes, it is on the teacher to fix it, but finding out why is not about shifting blame, it's about knowing the best way to change what you're doing so that it works for the student. The fix is very different depending on whether the student thinks your lessons move too quickly vs. if the student is having a hard time focusing due to hunger vs. if the student is worried she might be deported and can't think of anything else.

You repeatedly assume that when an emotional/stress/MH factor is identified, that's the last step. It's not. It's part of the process of adapting and improving instruction. It may be a purely pedagogical change needed (filling in gaps, etc.) or it may be something like helping a student work to overcome fear of speaking, or it might mean learning that certain conversation topics are upsetting for students due to past trauma and need to be avoided or scaffolded toward.

If you agree with me that this is what people should be doing, and your main point is "yeah, but many teachers don't do that" then...sure. A lot of teachers are bad. We need to improve teacher training. Debate over? If what you're saying is "talking about MH in the classroom is dangerous because it gives bad teachers an easy out" then my answer is that bad teachers don't need a reason to be bad, and we need to talk about MH in the classroom so that teachers who do care have the tools to handle it well.

I think the heart of the matter is that you are attempting to sympathise and I'm trying to empathise -- I always try to internally model the students' experience so that I feel (a little fraction of) what they're feeling, but sympathy is far more distant and external.

With genuine respect, I have no idea where you are getting this, but it is very off-base. Spend five minutes talking to me in real life and tell me if you still think this.

If a lousy course a student is taking (or the solo-learning approach they've adopted) is the main source of the stress and anguish, then their situation can be further improved by changing the educational approach, withdrawing from a subpar course, and so on. However, many students struggle to learn not because their educational experience is ill-designed (though that is common enough) but because their lives contain other stressors or crises or they simply have a mental health condition. Such problems cannot be solved by better instruction or a more well-designed study routine, and it's in those situations especially where I would try to connect students to other resources.

Again, that is either talking about very exceptional cases, or it is passing the blame onto the student, coming down to sympathy vs empathy. You do not feel that you are blaming them because you are acting out of sympathy, but they feel blamed and I understand that through empathy. I've been stressed out by language courses in the past, and I've always had issues outside of the class that I've had to deal with. I have been in the situation where the teacher has shown sympathy but failed to show empathy. I could have been broken by that, but I quickly learned to refuse the implicit blame and just learn to have a low opinion of the teacher instead.

For one thing, as a teacher of many "exceptional cases," it seems odd to me that you simply deem them not worth discussing. Second, I don't know if you've internalized stigma about mental health, but it is never, ever someone's fault when they are struggling with an illness (or with difficult emotions short of a clinical threshold), and I'm not sure on what basis you're making conclusions about what I or my students might feel in a given situation.

I've had conversations with students who came to me to talk about their troubles with motivation or studying that, when I asked the right questions, turned into them pouring their hearts out about domestic violence, abusive landlords, parenting struggles, job losses, immigration worries, family illness, etc. I've had students confess that they felt they had nowhere to turn and thought it might be better if they were hit by a bus. I've had students tell me the reason they hadn't read any of the book we were reading as a class was because they spent all week in bed crying. Sometimes, you can help the student solve these problems or hook them up with community services that help, and they can stay in class. Sometimes, things are more serious, and they need to take a break. I am not going to tell someone who's trying to figure out where she'll sleep tomorrow night that it's not okay to take a week or two off class to get things sorted out. I don't accept that it's somehow "passing the blame to the student" to recognize that there are times when additional support, including mental health support, in whatever form they want and can access, is needed. That's not blaming the student, that's seeing the student as a complete person whose life extends beyond the classroom. As a teacher, you support them however you can through their ordeal and you assure them that you'll be there to help them catch up whenever they are ready.

[Edited to clarify that I am talking about Neil Fleming's VARK theory of learning styles, specifically]

I'm assuming that most people here know that Fleming's theory of learning styles (visual, auditory, read/write, kinesthetic) has been thoroughly debunked and discredited in educational research. Quite simply, there is zero evidence to show that visual learners, auditory learners, etc. as conceived in said theory exist at all. It's simply not backed up by any credible science, and nobody who knows anything about pedagogy talks about this theory today except as an example of the dangers of nonsense theories gaining popularity and doing a lot of damage.

And there's not really much need to qualify that you're talking about Fleming's VARK, because that's basically what learning styles means. There is a danger that people would read your clarification as saying that they're OK, because they're talking about how the field moved on after Fleming, completely ignoring the fact that everything after Fleming was built on top of Fleming.

I've genuinely had colleagues talking about "visual" and "auditory" learners, and when I pulled out Pashler et al, they defended themselves by saying that the paper was old, and there's been so much more done about learning styles since then... but they couldn't actually point to any specific research.

But yes: people do still talk about learning styles and set material based on the idea, despite it being thoroughly discredited by the academic field.

I clarified I was talking about VARK because I didn't want to be jumped on for saying "learning styles don't exist" - some people aren't aware of the use of "learning styles" as a technical term and would have assumed I was implying that everyone can and should learn in a completely identical manner.

And yes, some people use bad science and are out of date and use faulty, motivated reasoning. Learning styles theory is rubbish and not taken seriously by anyone who knows anything. But I'm not sure how any of that is relevant to the discussion except as an example of the fact that a lot of teachers aren't doing a good job. Which, sure, painfully true. I'll sign at the bottom of that one.

I apologize if any of this sounds overly critical or argumentative, as it is not my intent. I have family visiting and wrote this post more quickly than I should have, but it was all the time I had to spare. I think we're mostly coming from a shared place of caring a great deal about students, and wanting to do right by them and give them the best possible learning experience while recognizing their humanity and the complexity of their needs. I also recognize that none of us know anything much about each other and it's hard to have debates like this with no context of the other person's perspective or beliefs. I think we agree on more than you think we do, but I also think it's fine if we disagree about any number of things. I do thank you for the time you took to respond, as it's clear that you care a great deal, and anyone who cares that much cannot help but be a force for good in one way or another.

[tiia]

I also recognize that none of us know anything much about each other and it's hard to have debates like this with no context of the other person's perspective or beliefs. I think we agree on more than you think we do, but I also think it's fine if we disagree about any number of things.

Following this thread, I was honestly wondering, why the discussion turned into issues in clasoom teaching, while in the beginning I thought that this is a thread more about people who turn up on this forum or other online platforms. I therefore assumed that we were more talking about self-teaching than a classroom setting. Knowing now more about Severines background (and also Cainntear's) makes a few statements more understandable.
I, too, think there's actually quite some agreement on the topic. It may sometimes just be the way we express those issues, that may look like we're on different sides. It's often easier to write about disagreements than just writing "I agree", because "I agree" wouldn't give any new insight into a discussion.

I think our role is to meet people with compassion, provide what good language learning advice we can, and maybe send a kindly worded PM now and then to people who seem to be truly struggling, in order to suggest that crippling anxiety or an extreme inability to focus might be a good topic for a conversation with a doctor rather than call for a new study routine.

I should clarify that I do not suggest we send people away or tell them to stop learning languages until they're feeling better. Getting support or treatment is compatible with staying here and learning - they can (and often should) overlap, especially since, as you rightly pointed out, "better" is a complicated idea. I was using the idea of speaking to a doctor about a MH problem as a stand-in for the general idea that a person sometimes needs to switch from an approach based on rigid disicipline and optimizing their routine toward an approach that focuses on understanding, compassion, and healing.

Seeing that you obviously have a background in refugee teaching, makes this more understandable. To my knowledge teachers of refugees often have quite a special role, as those teachers may be (apart from other refugees maybe?) the person who gets to know the student the best. Their role often may go further than the one of a "normal" language teacher. Considering that the students are in a new country, they may not know about services available for them etc. They may have to deal with a lot of problems, that would be stressful for anyone. There may also be cultural differences that come into play, that may make it more difficult for them to seek professional help etc. So I think, that this group of students may simply need more advice and hinting into different directions. It's natural given the situation they are in.
Still, (as you have already pointed out) that doesn't mean that other students don't need adjustments in teaching/learning methods as well. We both mentioned MH being more of a continuum and not a yes-no-question and issues regarding MH being rather common.
Thinking about in-person classes, taking a break can sometimes help, but on the other hand even taking such a class can help, because it gives structure. A daily/weekly structure is often considered helpful when dealing with depression. However, the best solution can only be found at an individual level.

Going back to the online forum situation that I had in mind (and I think the OP had too), we often don't know much about the person asking, often not even anything about the health system in their country or other background information, that could be useful. And therefore the way we can help will be a bit different. Also in contrast to a teacher, on a forum like this one we usually don't have the option to first built trust over a longer period of time.
I guess the main issue I had with the original advice (the first quote) is that having good intentions doesn't mean that what someone is doing/saying is actually good. Good intentions are not necessarily good, they are intentions. For someone giving advice it can be extremely difficult to distiguish between a good advice and one with only good intentions. But the better you know a person, the easier it is to give personalized advice, that is actually helpful.

Now, when I wrote my previous post, I imagined a situation, where someone would ask here how to actually stick to language learning, giving only few hints what they were actually doing already. Coming then with the advice to go to a doctor to seek for help for their assumed MH issues, would probably feel over the top for that person. I doubt that it would get anyone to actually seek professional help - even if it would be useful for them. Instead they might even feel rejected in the way that may think "they don't want to deal with me." or "they don't understand my problem". This may be, because there was no possibility to built trust first.
I don't think our position is that far from each other, it is just that we were probably looking at this from a different perspective, which is why explaining your background was useful.

Honestly, I do think it is absolutely worth to discuss mental health (whether it is already filling diagnostic criteria or not) or other restricting factors in language learning on this forum. I mean this is a forum for everyone interested in language learning, no matter their background. Many people have some kind of restrictions in what they can do or not and many times switching from "rigid disicipline and optimizing their routine toward an approach that focuses on understanding, compassion, and healing" would actually help.

[Cainntear]

I also recognize that none of us know anything much about each other and it's hard to have debates like this with no context of the other person's perspective or beliefs. I think we agree on more than you think we do, but I also think it's fine if we disagree about any number of things.

Following this thread, I was honestly wondering, why the discussion turned into issues in clasoom teaching, while in the beginning I thought that this is a thread more about people who turn up on this forum or other online platforms. I therefore assumed that we were more talking about self-teaching than a classroom setting. Knowing now more about Severines background (and also Cainntear's) makes a few statements more understandable.

My general philosophy is that the classroom is the only genuinely controlled environment, and the only place to study language acquisition. I therefore always tend to bring things back to the classroom.
As a student I've seen people crying who were given the same materials and instruction as me, and as a teacher I've given the same instruction to multiple students and seen some fail while others succeed.

Going back to the online forum situation that I had in mind (and I think the OP had too), we often don't know much about the person asking, often not even anything about the health system in their country or other background information, that could be useful. And therefore the way we can help will be a bit different. Also in contrast to a teacher, on a forum like this one we usually don't have the option to first built trust over a longer period of time.
I guess the main issue I had with the original advice (the first quote) is that having good intentions doesn't mean that what someone is doing/saying is actually good. Good intentions are not necessarily good, they are intentions. For someone giving advice it can be extremely difficult to distiguish between a good advice and one with only good intentions. But the better you know a person, the easier it is to give personalized advice, that is actually helpful.

This is exactly what I'm thinking. There is a general case, and Severine's students are well outside that. Saying that something is good for her students really doesn't justify others giving it out as general advice.

This is an increasing problem on the internet, I find: when you try to point out that something doesn't hold in general, people object by pointing to a specific group of people for whom it works, when they were not mentioned in the original post. This leads to a situation where you can't actually discuss the limitations of the advice, because it just boils down to two sides shouting "you're wrong!!" at each other and never really finding out how much they agree on and where the specific disagreement is.

It may seem a double standard that I talk specifically about people it doesn't work for and call people out for talking specifically about people it does work for, but it really isn't:
When I talk about specific people it doesn't work for, I am presenting evidence that something doesn't work for everyone; presenting people who it does work for on proves that it works for some, and does nothing to counter my point that it doesn't work for everyone. It only takes one example to disprove a rule.

In this case, as tiia says, we know next to nothing about the people we are talking to or about, so we have literally no way to know whether a specific piece of advice targeted at a specific subset of learners is appropriate to them or not.

[Cainntear]

I also think you have a bone to pick with problems in education, and subpar teachers in general, which is extremely understandable but not a great basis for assumptions.

One thing I will say is that these "exceptional cases" you mention (refugees from conflict zones) represent more than 70% of the population I teach. I also teach low-income adult immigrants who are not refugees, and then I have a few private students in much more stable situations, mostly foreign-born lawyers and academics. I only teach adults. At any rate, please remember that, for some instructors, these "exceptional cases" are not so rare.

I'm only talking about classrooms as a general thing feeding towards the topic at hand. Here we're talking about people who pop up on internet forums and vent without giving much context. We are not talking about giving advice to instructors, but we're talking about those learners.

You also repeatedly assume that identifying someone as needing MH support equates to (1) thinking the student is the problem and (2) no longer trying to teach them or adapt lessons to their needs. I don't know why you're making these assumptions. In fact, it's the opposite: teachers should work hardest to reach and support the students most struggling. And having a MH issue, whether it reaches a clinical level or not, is never anyone's fault and never turns anyone into "a problem." If "a reader" comes to that conclusion, they're straight-up wrong.

What if the reader is the person with the MH problems, though? Because in reality, that's what we're talking about here: people who self-identify as struggling with motivation. If you told someone they were "straight up wrong" because they feel blamed, would you not really be compounding the issue?

Think it through:
A: "Hi B, I'm finding it really difficult to motivate myself and I'm just worried I might not be good enough."
B: "Oh, maybe you have a mental health issue and should speak to a counsellor."
A: "So you're saying I'm mentally ill and that's why I'm not good enough?"
B: "No. You're straight up wrong."

...and this is the main point I often don't really make clear enough: it doesn't matter whether your intention is blaming the learner or not -- in the end, all that really matters is whether the learner feels blamed or not.

But what comes next is very important: do you double down and blame the learner for misinterpreting you, or do you take steps to avoid the misunderstanding being repeated?

Except it rarely goes that way, and it absolutely takes the pressure off the teacher. You may not see it this way, but I absolutely do: if what I am doing is not working for them, that's on me and it is blaming the student if you absolve yourself of responsibility.

But who's absolving anyone of responsibility? Seeing emotional, stress-related, and MH factors and taking them into consideration is not about absolving oneself of responsibility. It's in fact about doing one's job as a teacher, i.e., better understanding the needs of the student and responding accordingly.

Lots of people. You're lucky if you haven't had to work with such colleagues.

If you agree with me that this is what people should be doing, and your main point is "yeah, but many teachers don't do that" then...sure. A lot of teachers are bad. We need to improve teacher training. Debate over? If what you're saying is "talking about MH in the classroom is dangerous because it gives bad teachers an easy out" then my answer is that bad teachers don't need a reason to be bad, and we need to talk about MH in the classroom so that teachers who do care have the tools to handle it well.

Yes, but we need to talk without assuming that we're only talking to the good teachers who know what we know. After all, if they know what we know, why would we need to say what they already know? We're talking to people who don't and that means we've got to explain more, because they can easily pick us up wrong, and then we're only going to perpetuate the problems of well-intentioned people talking about things they don't understand through a massive Dunning-Kruger thing...

For one thing, as a teacher of many "exceptional cases," it seems odd to me that you simply deem them not worth discussing. Second, I don't know if you've internalized stigma about mental health, but it is never, ever someone's fault when they are struggling with an illness (or with difficult emotions short of a clinical threshold), and I'm not sure on what basis you're making conclusions about what I or my students might feel in a given situation.

It's not that they're not worth discussing, it's that they need a lot more context to discuss. As tiia says, we're talking about generic things from random strangers on the internet here, and while the exception cases are worth discussing, they are a distraction from the truth about general cases.

And there's not really much need to qualify that you're talking about Fleming's VARK, because that's basically what learning styles means. There is a danger that people would read your clarification as saying that they're OK, because they're talking about how the field moved on after Fleming, completely ignoring the fact that everything after Fleming was built on top of Fleming.

I've genuinely had colleagues talking about "visual" and "auditory" learners, and when I pulled out Pashler et al, they defended themselves by saying that the paper was old, and there's been so much more done about learning styles since then... but they couldn't actually point to any specific research.

But yes: people do still talk about learning styles and set material based on the idea, despite it being thoroughly discredited by the academic field.

I clarified I was talking about VARK because I didn't want to be jumped on for saying "learning styles don't exist" - some people aren't aware of the use of "learning styles" as a technical term and would have assumed I was implying that everyone can and should learn in a completely identical manner.

And yes, some people use bad science and are out of date and use faulty, motivated reasoning. Learning styles theory is rubbish and not taken seriously by anyone who knows anything. But I'm not sure how any of that is relevant to the discussion except as an example of the fact that a lot of teachers aren't doing a good job. Which, sure, painfully true. I'll sign at the bottom of that one.

At the risk of overstressing the point, I being told a looong time ago that the responsibility for misunderstanding can never be fully blamed on the reader, and the writer bears the largest part of the responsibility. Your writing is written by one person, but can be read by many.
One of the problems with the internet is that most people don't get this: they think it's OK to write in a chatty manner. Unfortunately, a major feature in chats is the question "what do you mean?", and that's fine when it's said directly after the sentence that isn't understood. But responded two hours later with "what do you mean?" doesn't go down great, because when the OP reads the question two hours after you've posted it, they will get a bit shirty because you're then asking them to switch context to something about four hours in the past, and that's not easy.
I believe this is why we've devolved to a point where people will write posts responding to what they think has been said, rather than actually ask for clarification like they would in a face-to-face conversation.