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teaching of English to students in Spain and Latin America eats up a lot of my
time that I would prefer to devote to writing, however it pays the bills and
the students are wonderful. Inevitably my students and I have had many
discussions about the learning of language(s) and the miraculous way in which
all of us as babies and then toddlers learn to make sense of the cacophony of
sounds they’re exposed to and notice patterns within them that have meaning and
significance. Patently during this period of our lives our developing brains are
at their peak of their ability to learn one or more languages. It’s such a
shame that for most of us, including me, it usually is just one. Not least
because it enriches our appreciation of our native tongue and our ability to
express ourselves using it.
Many of my
students are parents of young children and they have been telling me about
their experiences of exposing their children to two or three languages. (I
always praise them wholeheartedly for doing so as I think they’re providing
their children with such a bountiful gift.) Apparently the children are adept
at transitioning seamlessly from one language to another, for example in households
where family members are of different nationalities. What most intrigues me is
that at least in some cases and at certain stages in their learning the
children apparently blend the languages together in ways that actually make
sense. It must be wonderful to hear and illustrates the children’s awesome
facility at this stage in their lives.
For it’s
also a shame that for many of us the teaching of a second language (and usually
at primary school just one second language was on offer) doesn’t begin until
that peak period of maximum language learning ability had more or less
flattened out, in my case practically to zero.
To make
matters worse, as my classmates and I were around eight or nine, we had gleaned
some experience in converting the language we had learned into written form but
– thinking she was making the process simpler for us – our teacher started by
teaching us French in spoken form only. I’ll never know how that worked out for
my contemporaries but what I realise now is that I mentally created a unique
form of written French. I had amassed a huge, highly organised and logically
spelled lexicon in my mind. (Which considering I was making a fist of learning
to spell in English was even more of an achievement!) I had one of the biggest
shocks of my life, around two years after our French lessons began, when the
teacher introduced the written versions of the vocabulary we had been learning.
In fact, I was so shocked that I nearly jumped up and declared, like a kind of
enraged Oliver Twist, that her spellings were wrong! At that same moment the
unique language I had created for myself collapsed into mental dust. I still
feel that is the greatest loss as now I would love to know how I had decided
French should be spelled.
The rest of
my journey in learning French continued to be a bumpy ride. In my first years
at a secondary school not famous for its pastoral care, as I’d had an early
growth spurt before my school mates overshot me and as he knew my dad,
the teacher picked on me as the class scapegoat in order to keep the rest of
the class in line. Not a positive learning experience to say the least.
By contrast
I was astounded when a trainee took over for a while and finally helped me
realise that a sentence could be deconstructed into different distinct
components. Astonishingly, as far as I’m aware, unless I was an even slower
student than I realised, this information had never been revealed to us in our
native language. Indeed, I remember wondering if this same astonishing possibility
applied to English as well! (I was educated in late ‘60s when the fashion
seemed not to be to focus on grammar and get us to read a write and presumably
work out the mechanics for ourselves. Now of course the pendulum has swung the
other way. We seem so hopeless at achieving the correct balance with regard to
education at times!)
Later I deliberately
worked hard at my own ineptitude, having been inspired in a negative way by
another teacher. She marked our work from A to E but gave me an F. I was so
proud of myself. I thought that if you were going to be terrible at something
you might as well go the whole hog and excel in ignorance. So my target was not
to pull myself up by my bootstraps and see if I could scrape a D or an E. That
would just be failing to get a higher mark. No wholesale uselessness was the
goal I focused on and I achieved it repeatedly! Not, again, a very positive
learning experience. The interesting thing is that when we moved home, I ended
up in a school at fourteen where most of the children had been learning German,
so I was put in a small class of others who had also joined the school from elsewhere
to study French. Here I flourished so much my teacher encouraged me, though unsuccessfully,
to take A level!
Back at my
first (the not-famous-for-pastoral-care one) secondary school, I was initially
excited about being put in a class to learn Latin. My dad could read Latin, and
I was always enthralled when we visited cathedrals and churches and he
explained what the messages on the walls where declaring. Unfortunately, I only
remember, with regard to Latin, the first list of verbs we were taught. I guess
the novelty hadn’t been lost by that stage, for all I remember subsequently is
the teacher hurling abuse at us. In this case it wasn’t often me, I was
sheltering at my desk as well as I could from the shouting. In this case it was
mainly a lad called Mark Jones who kept using a ballpoint pen in his exercise
book. The teacher was a traditionalist and preferred (in a loud voice) the ink
pens the rest of us were using. I often wondered why Jonesy kept using the
ballpoint. Maybe he just enjoyed being shouted at. It was certainly more
interesting in someways than the lesson. Jonsey ended up going to Oxford
despite the ballpoint. The teacher got a job in another school thank God.
Well, those
are my, mainly negative, experiences of learning languages. I would be
interested to hear about yours!
Au revoir!*
*Wonder how
I would have spelled that…
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