Other than the fence blowing apart, the water dispersing across the kitchen floor and the flashing antics of the oven, I’ve had a reasonably quiet week. Buried in grammar books, my mind remains settled and content. It has problems it can mull over: little things that keep it occupied. And for me at least, immersed in literature, the dullness of reality doesn’t seem so bad. I fear though that the lack of novelty in my life doesn’t make my writing particularly exciting. And that the lack of input results in a regurgitation of the same small thoughts. Despite normally being able to conjure an emotional calamity wherever I place myself – and thereby excuse myself from clear thinking – my moods remain mundane, and I fear my thoughts boring.
Literature fills a gap, but it can’t replace the excitement of screwing up.
It’s not all doom and gloom. Note the dummy variable. If anything, I tend to be an optimist. And these thoughts (about adverbials and complements, relative adjectives or attributional nouns) do make me professionally more competent. There is no doubt that my understanding of the grammatical differences between Spanish and English is helpful to my students. That was an example of a cleft sentence. No doubt I’m also developing a deeper awareness of the prejudice that obnubilates the distinction between how I speak, what my father considers correct, fustian language, beautiful language, clear language and phrasing that compels action…
Bonus points for guessing which of the above words I learnt this week.
My favourite new word is ‘pratfall’, which is American (but let’s not be prejudiced), and ought to be used by football commentators both in a literal and metaphorical sense. Now I’ve written it on the blog I shall wait for my parents to throw it into some dinnertime conversation. Thanks to the pandemic, they are learning grammar whether they like it or not. Accidental language awareness helps too. I was pretty chuffed when a student mistakenly wrote ‘to probe’ meaning ‘to try’ and I suddenly realised the connection between ‘probe’ and the Spanish ‘probar’.
This post has been hiding in my drafts. I wrote it just before the social unrest flourished into mayhem in October. It was written back when we taught students in real, chair and desk classrooms.
Unearthing a traditional Pachamanca cooked dinner The connection is that I mention cooking somewhere in the text below… Ollantaytambo, Peru January 2020
“Ask her some questions.”
New class, new teacher, the same routine. Silence but for the rustling of backpacks and papers. Two minutes ago they were all looking at me, now the students stare at anything but me.
Then some timid voice dares sound. What sports do I do?
I beam an encouraging smile
It never changes. Every time we do this it’s just another awkward interview.
I gesture at the floor, “Now,” I say, “ I do yoga. I do yoga twice a week.” I gesture behind my shoulder. “When I was a child, I went ice-skating.”
A few more students ask questions, and then one young man asks, “What is ice-skating.”
I write the word on the board and draw an ice skating boot, all laced up. The students find my drawing amusing. I could have just given them a translation, but it wouldn’t have the same effect.
I’m on a mission to learn how to teach well
Teaching, after all, is very different from learning, and although I know something about how I personally learn a language. Teaching one is a constant challenge.
The sad reality is that many of my students won’t ever reach a conversational level of English. Before they get to me, many have spent ten years learning and forgetting the same things over and over again. When I ask them how their weekend was, they still draw a blank.
Although I have limited formal teaching education (for now), I do have a bunch of teachers who keep educating me on teaching theory.
One idea which has invaded my mind is the idea of scaffolding
I hadn’t heard such a word in the language teaching context until a couple of weeks ago when I was reviewing some text for a fellow teacher. He’s all very serious studying for a masters in this stuff.
Scaffolding is giving the student a helping hand that gets them further than where they could get on their own. It’s practical support. It’s what an active teacher is likely to do, frequently on a one-to-one basis, although the rest of the class may well be listening.
To think about what it means to me though, I have decided to take my imagination out of the classroom and into the kitchen.
This weekend, at the English Club where I help out, we’re doing baking with the children
They range from four to eight years old, so have different levels of skill – both in terms of egg-breaking and English speaking
As a tiny child, I used to cook with the Mother or with the Grandmother
There are pictures of me happily baking, stood on a chair in my Grandparents kitchen, and pictures of me sitting on the kitchen floor with the cake bowl on my head as I try to lick out the last of the mixture.
Send a small child into the kitchen with the instruction to bake some buns and leave them to it, and you won’t come back an hour later to the sweet smell of fresh-out-of-the-oven baking.
And yet, with some assistance, a small child can do most of the work
They can measure out the ingredients and mix them together. You might not want them to operate the oven quite yet, but they can load the bun cases with gooey-mixture.
As the adult, your job is to provide a safe environment and guidance so the children can do almost the whole thing by themselves.
The same goes for the classroom
The space we want to be teaching in is just beyond where the student can function by themselves. It has to feel safe. Sometimes we need to just give an occasional prompt, other times we need to say more, like holding the wooden spoon with them to give them enough power to blend the mix. Sometimes the support is visual, as in a drawing of an ice-skating boot, or takes on a physical gesture, such as indicating that there is a change of tense that they should be aware of.
Once the student can do something by themselves, the teacher should stop prompting. You don’t want the students to rely on prompts, you want them to practice creating their own phrases by themselves. When the child can bake for themselves, you can leave the kitchen and just enjoy the cakes once they’re done. No need for fuss.
For me, this is tricky
There is a point where I have to keep my hands still, my mouth shut, or speak lazily, with my accent, at my natural speed and with the vocabulary that I would normally use.
For teachers in general, doing this work is exhausting. It’s active and intense
No wonder many teachers set an exercise and then withdraw. I guess this is where having a language assistant helps. I can go through the class, often pair by pair, listening and correcting and encouraging the students to extend their conversation a little further.
And yet, it’s not enough. Despite my drawings and my enthusiastic pretending to skate across the classroom, the same student may well have forgotten what ice-skating is by next week. If he remembers, it was his question, his curiosity, so there’s hope, the other students in the class are still unlikely to. Ten years of English lessons and they’re still on the basic building blocks of the language.
It continues to bewilder me how some students speak and others don’t. It’s still a mystery.
There are about seven students in the class and they’re chatting away, in Spanish, about something to do with a motorbike that I can’t quite follow. I’ve just arrived. The teacher will be late. The teachers are always late.
This class are learning how to tell me their name, their age
and their telephone number. For some of the students, this is ridiculously
easy, for others, it’s a major challenge. I have a choice – I could sit and
wait for the teacher to arrive or I could speak.
I ask them what they’re talking about
It takes five minutes of back and forth, with almost the
whole class participating as no individual has enough vocabulary, but I learn
that our resident knight in shining armour, sat in the centre of the front row,
helped a guy to safety after he’d fallen off his motorbike and fractured his
leg.
Not bad for a class whose spent the last month learning,
“Where are you from?”
Classes here are small and attendance is poor
The focus is on enabling the students to speak, rather than
read or write. All examinations for English are oral ones. My focus, therefore,
is entirely on conversation practice.
The first goal is to make learning English less of an ordeal
Fear might be a good teacher of instinctual response, but to
speak a foreign language requires a higher part of the brain. You have to want
to own the language. Otherwise, how will you work through the anxiety,
embarrassment and humiliation of constantly getting in a muddle?
I pity the students. If my French classes at school had been
taught with such a focus on speech, I would have hated it. Speaking a foreign
language can be a horrible experience. One of the big appeals of physics is
that it’s quietly learnt. Books, paper, pens. But in Foreign languages, your
main tool is your voice. Everyone else hears your terrible pronunciation and
when you forget a word, everyone else knows.
Yet, from a rational perspective, nobody cares much about you. Most other people in the class are too absorbed in their insecurities to care about yours. But this is a big leap of faith to take.
Therefore I see the first job of the language assistant to
be confidence-boosting
Note this isn’t about self-esteem. I’m not talking about
gold stars and congratulations for every utterance. I’m talking about
presenting a challenge and guiding the students in achieving it.
Like the conversation about the motorbike
When I first told the students to explain what they were
talking about, they deemed it impossible. Understandable when you’re in English
1 repeating ‘My name is…’. With time, they started clarifying the facts. There
was one person involved, a man. He fell. On the road. Leg. Broken, no, little
broken. Fractured. By the time the teacher arrived, we’d got to a whole
anecdote.
The second role of the language assistant is to speak
You might laugh, but the English these students
predominantly hear is their teacher, and most of the teachers speak with a
noticeable Chilean accent. I had one teacher who last year accentuated his
Spanish accent when he spoke English to his class to try and help them
understand. I’m not convinced that this is a good solution. It’s a bit of a
short cut and short cuts don’t always pay off. However, I am sure that it helps
to hear many different accents.
I do speak differently when I’m teaching
My word choice is limited. The flow is slower, and I include
a lot more t’s and h’s. It takes a conscious effort to speak like this and
sometimes when I’m tired, I slur my words, apologise and start again in better
English.
The third task is to correct
This is much harder than is sometimes presumed. When you’re
listening to English as a foreign language as part of a conversation, what you
focus on is the parts that make sense and your brain attempts to fill in the
gaps to create understanding. When you’re listening as a teacher, what you need
to note is the mistakes. Some mistakes are obvious. Others seem invisible.
You get used to hearing the language in foreign accents and
adapt to the poor pronunciation. Some grammatical mistakes don’t disrupt the
meaning of the sentence and are therefore harder to spot. Sometimes there are
so many mistakes, you don’t know how to classify and sort through them.
It’s much harder to hear the mistakes when you are part of the
conversation
Sometimes, therefore, all I do it sit in front of two people who are talking and make notes. This can be disquieting for the students I’m listening to, but does allow me to hear what’s going on. Since we do lots of roleplays, there are plenty of opportunities for me to attend to the oddities of their foreign English.
I’m finding that the teachers are faster at noting and
classifying the errors
Probably because it is how they do their examinations.
They’re practised at it because they’re used to teaching the same course, over
and over. They know what they’re listening for. They’re comparing the mistakes
to the mistakes of other students and the curriculum. Meanwhile, I’m comparing
the mistakes to my idea of standard English.
Sometimes though, I ignore the rules of English
I let my adaptive ears process vs that sound like bs and the
bs that sound like vs. Instead of fussing, I just let the students speak the
stuff that’s on their minds. Sometimes this means conversations about motorbike
accidents. Other times they ask sweet questions, like do I miss my family? Although what they seem to want to know is
nothing more complex than have I tried the local speciality, a hot-dog?
Monday happens as expected. Other than I turn up for my yoga class and nobody is there. The door is locked. I wonder if perhaps I’m the one missing something important, or if I’m the only one who’s noticed that the clocks have changed. I walk away none the wiser.
I walk home, listening to a podcast
It’s part of my plan to be less ignorant of the world. I’m taking in history and philosophy. Continuing my Cuban education by listening to a podcast on the Bay of Pigs. Widening my philosophical knowledge with an In Our Time podcast on Authenticity – in which the opinions of Jean-Paul Sarte and Simone De Beauvoir are discussed and I think, oh I know those names, I have just read about them in a book by a chap with the unlikely name of Mason Curry on the Daily Rituals of creative people. I do love it when my knowledge comes together like that. Snap. Connection made.
Like that wondrous moment when I realised that Catherine of Aragon was the daughter of Isabel and Ferdinand and history took a whole new form in my brain. Snap. Connection made. Love it.
I go to class, but I’m not teaching
Instead, I find today I am in the unexpected role of making up numbers. The students do their exams (oral) in pairs, but this class has an odd number of students. I’m brought in to fill the gap.
Student: Hi.
Me: Hi.
Student: How are you doing?
Me: Fine, thanks. And you? How are you doing?
Student: Fine, thanks. What is your name?
Me: My name is Catherine. And you? What is your name?
Student: My name is Claudio. How old are you?
Me: I am 28 years old. And you? How old are you?
Level one English is hard
Every time I open my mouth to speak, I want to say something different. I want to ask “How’s things going?” Or say I’m “not doing too bad considering this horrid cold”.
Eventually, after exchanging the required number of questions, we get to the end.
Student: It’s late. I have to go. Bye.
Me: Bye. Nice to meet you.
Student: Nice to meet you too.
I feel a swell of relief to successfully get to the end.
After a quick check with the teacher that she will be there for the next class, I leave
The check is worthwhile as I discover that on Friday afternoon classes are cancelled due to something to do with the unions. I am not surprised. Tuesday classes are cancelled due to ‘una fonda’ (a barbeque/party). Nobody it seems wants to teach this week and the students claim to have spent the weekend resting in preparation for next week which is party week. The celebration of Chile’s independence (or not quite… but you get the idea).
I call my sister from a bench in the courtyard of the university
We have a good long chat. She explains the discrepancy between two pictures of the same cheesecake I received over the weekend. The first, from my mother, looked stunning. The second was a puddle. Truthfully, (verdaderamente: such a beautiful word but impossible to say), the cheesecake stood for ten seconds before collapsing. My mother sent me the perfect picture, but my sister’s shot gave a more honest story. At the end of the call, the Midget heads to bed and I go to my next class. Time difference.
The next class goes smoothly
I like the teacher’s desire to enable the students to form phrases of their own, rather than just learn to parrot a set speech. He’s enthusiastic and the student’s laugh at his jokes. They like him, this much is obvious. But they look like goldfish when they have to speak. I continue to ponder how one should teach English or any language. I have no idea how I’m learning Spanish. It’s just happening. But how do I learn to teach language to someone else when it seems to be just happening to me.
After, I drink terrible coffee and eat a hot-dog whilst listening to a story about a snake. This is Chile. The sun has set. I wander home, past more hot-dog stalls decorated with fairy lights. Another day is done.
The centre of Murica. Río Segura, Murica, Spain, May 2019
No message.
There was a signal, so I sent a message announcing my arrival at the bus station in Murcia, in Spanish, a language I knew some words of but had never spoken.
“Yo soy aqui”
I intended to say, “I am here”. Translated it does mean “I am here” but, as any Spanish speaker knows, it should have been “Yo estoy aqui.” As it’s the verb estar (to be) nor the verb ser (to be) in such situations.
In ‘Spanish time’ my host arrived and waved me to her car
She spoke some broken phrases of English. More than I spoke of Spanish but that first day, neither of us could construct a sentence.
If you have since met the Casera, the rolling English you heard was not what I experienced that first day. You heard her speaking after months of living with a native English speaker in her apartment.
Therefore, we couldn’t say much, yet we somehow conversed for the next twenty minutes.
This was a swift education. When it comes to conversation, the most important thing is to have faith.
Very soon, I’m going to meet a Chilean man at a Chilean airport
I will have to open my mouth and speak.
Butterflies swarm in my stomach to think of it. We have two common languages, so it shouldn’t be a problem. From his writing, I assume he speaks beautiful English since his style of composition made me smile with some admiration. I speak Spanish, more or less.
He speaks Chilean Spanish; I speak Yorkshire English. Hiding behind the Andes, Chilean Spanish has developed its unique forms. Yorkshire is well, Yorkshire. I’m told my accent is lovely, but at least for the first week, unintelligible.
I speak non-rhotically, which is a pain when it comes to learning Spanish
Rhotic being a technical term meaning I drop my ‘r’. In Spanish this is a problem as every infinitive verb ends in a vowel followed by an ‘r’ and in many forms of British English (non-rhotic English) such ‘r’ sounds are abandoned.
Take the word ‘car’, which I pronounce ‘cah’.
And then apply this to the Spanish ‘hablar’ (to speak) and get ‘hablah’ which more or less is ‘habla’. I.e. he speaks.
You may wonder, ‘what the hell are you on about Catherine?’
Which is understandable. I wouldn’t have known any of this phonetic vocabulary, if I hadn’t spent quite so much of the last year searching to discover what this annoying letter ‘r’ is.
Despite hours trying, I have never been able to trill an r
But even the single r in Spanish is a harder sound than any r in my English. My pronunciation of ‘Gracias’ is wrong, not because I fumble over whether it’s a c or a th sound in the middle, but because my first syllable is fluffily soft.
From the feedback I have surmised from my students, I imagine my Spanish accent would work if you were casting the little sister of a Disney princess. It’s not the sound I was hoping for.
We take speaking for granted
When I speak in Spanish in front of my parents, I expect them to understand. They should understand me. They are my parents. When my mum stares at me as if I am speaking gobbled-gook, I wonder why. It takes me a cognitive churn to understand that she doesn’t get what I’m saying.
When I speak in half-formed mumbled English, they seem to know what I mean. If I mime, they tend to get it. They know me, they know my voice. So, I find it bewildering how when I’m speaking Spanish are there so many blank looks?
But we also take for granted our knowledge of our language
We instinctively know what feels right. Or, to invert that idea, we know what sounds wrong. We feel that someone is speaking our language as a second tongue before we know how they’re mis-forming the grammar or before we can identify where the pronunciation mimics their native language.
My Spanish students stumble at the difference between the ‘b’ and the ‘v’ sounds. A Finnish friend has a wider spoken vocabulary than me but speaks with an odd ‘v’, which gives her foreignness away.
As children, we absorb this language knowledge without realising we’re doing it
Grammar especially. Later, at school, some English teacher tries to explain what a noun, a verb and an adjective are, by which point we’ve been using them for years.
Then we start to study a foreign language. I did French and German at school. At this point, lots more grammar descriptors come into play, like verbal tenses and moods, and we become very confused.
French, German and English might have much in common, but their structure differs.
Learning German was not a success
Despite having had approximately 110 classes in the subject, I can’t say anything useful whatsoever. When I’m in Germany itself, I recognise some words but not much else. I don’t have any innate feeling about German and so, to me, it’s random sound.
When you don’t have any feeling about what is right or wrong in a language, you’re reliant on rules
You use your first language as a basis for the language you’re learning. Then, rather than learning the new language from scratch, you adapt the rules you know to the new language. My Spanish students ‘cook my mother’ because such grammar makes sense in Spanish.
I would say that my job requires some awareness of this grammatical web.
As an English language assistant, they tell you all you need is to be able to speak English
Which sounded like a wonderful way for me to teach and avoid my lack of formal grammar education. The marketing chaps stress how your role is to conduct conversations and focus on speaking skills.
While it’s true that from a feeling we know when a student says something we wouldn’t, it’s insufficient for answering why.
And the best students ask, “Why?”
At first, I figured I must be able to work it out. I’d think of a few examples and the student would nod. A few hours later I would be in the grocery store or cooking dinner and an exception to my supposed rule would pop up.
At which point, I had to hope I remembered which student in which class had asked the question. Then I’d need to admit I’d made a mistake, and then from somewhere work out a satisfactory explanation or the grammar.
After a few such incidences, I took the better line, “I don’t know. Let me check.”
Teaching English is a constant lesson in humility.
The English grammar experts were all around me
They were the teachers, whose English was sometimes odd in its form, but who had learnt grammar first, conversation second. And hence, they knew the rules inside out.
But this is not my only linguistic challenge as a language assistant.
Most native speakers don’t speak standard English
I don’t. When I’m teaching, I try to speak with clarity and standard grammar, but I refuse to adopt my ‘a’ or my ‘u’ into anything but what it is. My ‘r’, as I’ve said, is a hopeless case. I could not fake an accent, even if I wanted to.
It is only through learning grammar though that I can differentiate between my Yorkshire (my idiolect) and Standard English. This is important. I mustn’t trust my feelings. To say ‘I am sat on the sofa’ feels right but it’s not standard. Furthermore, I have no problem with double negatives or double contractions, although I try not to use them.
When a child uses a double negative, which is a common mistake for native Spanish speakers, I smile and tell them they sound like they’re from Yorkshire. I show them their mistake ask them to use Standard English for school. I couldn’t tell them they’re speaking wrong when it’s the same quirk as we have at home in England.
It’s not infrequent that I screw up
And I’ve given classes where I’ve caught myself speaking with non-standard grammar. At this point, I pause the class and wave my arms about a bit.
“You know how here you say ‘estamos’ as ‘etamo’ because it’s your dialect? When I said ‘I am sat on the sofa’ it was because of my dialect. It’s not standard English. Please do not do this in your exams. We should say, ‘I am sitting on the sofa’ as it’s the gerund here.”
But it’s important to recall what is correct varies depending on who you ask
I met one (Australian) English teacher who thought it was abominable to teach children to use contractions in their writing. I bit back the urge to say, ‘You shou’n’t never do what?’.
If a child put some double contractions into a piece of dialogue, I’d give them bonus marks.
I love beautiful language
Books with intricate sentences which wind stylistically in directions you didn’t suppose possible enchant me. Yet, what’s most impressive about language to me is how we can mangle it and still communicate. For eight months the Casera and I lived together. Neither of us fluent in the other’s language, we used whatever language allowed us to communicate. So what if we broke all the grammar rules and pronounced the impossible imperfectly, we conversed.
A boat depicted on tiles on an ugly graffiti-sprayed wall in Cartagena. Taken with my camera Sunday afternoon.
After resting for at least some of this last weekend, I am
feeling much better.
And having freed up so much time and energy previously spent
feeling sorry for myself, I can now speak Spanish.
I admit, it still involves a lot of waving my arms, but I’m
speaking words without translating first from English. They spew out my mouth,
sometimes nonsensically, often in a higgledy-piggledy mess, but they are
vocalised. This I take to be a major achievement. It takes a certain
willingness to make a fool of yourself to speak a foreign language.
Of course, I reserve my best acting for teaching my English classes.
Today I was trying to explain to the twelve-year-olds how Guy Fawkes fell off
the gallows and broke his neck… All I can say is that I blame my mother who has
been my story telling mentor. I still have much to learn from her, but I’m
putting in the hours of practice.
But back to Spanish. I’m fed up with my miniscule vocabulary and so I’m on a mission to learn the most common words in Spanish with great urgency. I need to learn everything twice because nobody here speaks like a textbook. I don’t blame them in the slightest. However, for a new learner the unique character of the local accent (and sometimes additional dialect words) provides an extra layer of challenge. For example, the textbook chapters on plurals are unnecessary for this region and studying them has been a waste of time. The people here don’t bother with the letter ‘s’.
‘Adios’ becomes ‘Adioh’.
So, whilst I can make myself more or less understood on an
increasingly frequent basis, I still know nothing of what is being said around
me. Occasionally I understand a few words. For example, I understood the other
night that Charles Dickens had become a factor in the conversation, yet, all
the same, I had no idea whether those around me who were passionately discussing
him actually liked him or not.
But I’m learning, and I’m healthy again, and my students
know that attempting to kill a monarch is a very serious crime. So everything’s
good.
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