An Art Workshop in Rural Romania

The teenage girls hug and kiss me before I’m allowed to leave. They’re excitable, trying to outdo each other in their displays of affection. I’ve known them only a few hours, and I can count the words most of them have managed to say to me on one hand.

There’s one girl though, A, she’s eighteen, and a little more reserved. She wants to be a photographer, and she shows me some pictures on her phone, including a beautiful portrait taken by her older brother. He’s her role model.

This girl comes from a village in rural Romania. Although it’s in the school curriculum, children in rural areas rarely get to do art in school. If they want to do art, they must provide their own material, and these girls cannot afford paints. Indeed, when this series of art workshops began, the children stole the half-used tubes of acrylic paint and battered brushes. It took time for them to understand that the paints were theirs, but needed to be kept together to be used.

We painted together all morning, creating an elaborate entrance for the festivities that mark the start of the school year.

The building we’re houses in is crumbling in places. It was once a small part of a large compound which was owned by a rich man (the main building is architecturally beautiful, albeit wrecked now). The rich man gambled the property away. Communism happened. The window frames were stolen away for fire wood, and the stone to build homes. There are decorative flowers made of sliced toilet rolls on the walls of the studio.

We pause for a break, and A invites me to accompany her to the ‘magasin’, the village shop. She explains the compound, points out the building that was once a hospital and takes care to guide me across the road. All this she does in broken English. She asks if I have a boyfriend, husband, baby. She has a boyfriend, he’s being a bit of a jerk.

We reach the shop and she buys me a bottle of water. I don’t need a bottle of water, and I feel bad for this girl who has comparatively so little buying me a drink. I can’t however say no, as I quickly realise that the entire purpose of the walk is to make sure I have something because I am a guest and this is Romania where people go out of their way to help.

Before I leave, one of the adults who speaks only a few words of England grabs me for a photo, and then makes my friend translate for her something dear to her heart. Romanians, she says, are not gypsies. She echoes a sentiment that many Romanians have stressed to me. The semi-nomadic Romani (the gypsies) and the Romanians are two distinct people. They’re physically different and culturally different, and when you’re understanding Romania you have to understand this difference.

Lessons from a not-so-little mermaid (why being a teenager sucks)

The Little Mermaid and I walk to the library to collect some pre-ordered books on the history of fashion. It’s bright sunshine, and I’m happy in my skirt and strap top, but she’s wishing that she’d worn something other than jeans. One of us has been lounging out in the garden and knows what the weather is doing today.

We pass the tennis court, where younger children are batting balls across the net, and flying paper planes. We talk, or rather she tells and I prompt and somehow despite working around the age gap and that weird sense of being family so knowing each other (and in odd ways being rather similar) whilst knowing nothing of each other we manage to get along.

She’s surviving the summer holiday; I’m having an education.

It strikes me that I assume all teenagers are teenagers like I remember from school. In my mind, they’re bigger. Furthermore, I assume schools are pretty much all the same – they’re not. The Little Mermaid has a locker and is encouraged to take a photograph of her homework assignments with her smartphone. I try and explain to her a Nokia 3310. She’s amazed at the idea of a phone without colour. It appears I’ve become one of those old people who grew up without modern technology.

I try and explain that we could do more than text. We had MSN messenger (the easiest way to put a virus on the computer). Surprisingly, she’s heard of MSN. It makes an amusing line in a very old French textbook. I learn a new word – télécharger (to download) – is how French textbook characters acquire music. The Little Mermaid is worried about the character’s ethics.

She’s also worried about me walking out in front of a car. She’s got that whole ‘stop, look, listen, live’ thing memorised whereas I’m still trying to shake of the influence of Cairo. That said, when she moves, she strides with purpose. I’m the one having to speed up to keep up.

Yesterday we visited an art gallery and saw some Wedgewood pots, some pre-Raphaelite paintings and some Japanese prints. She liked the painting of a goat and another in which a young woman was begging a soldier not to go to war. I liked one where an almond tree turns into a woman vexed with the inattention of her beloved. The young man looks quite taken aback by the ordeal.

I learn that being a teenager is hard work. Wearing the right clothes matters. As does having the right (read bountifully liked) social media. The most important thing is not to be trying too hard to be someone else. You must be authentically you AND on trend. There’s peer pressure, but also pressure from an abundance of very young celebrities. These are people achieving stuff right now. Or at least, having their picture taken lots.

My mind thinks of Einstein’s achievements at my age, and I say nothing.

Why I prioritise learning to listen

Stepping out of normal life, to be somewhere remote and just listen. It can be kind of special.

The Grandmother asked why would I want to go to Romania, a country I know nothing of, and do nothing for a week but converse with people who want to learn my language.

It’s hard to explain because it doesn’t tick the typical list of priorities that people have for their lives. I get a qualification, yes, but that’s kind of just a bonus. It’s not going to lead to a career, I love teaching English occasionally, but my ambition isn’t to be an English teacher.

It’s not just me though. In Poland, the woman I shared a room with had flown there from Canada. Not a girl in her twenties, a woman with a house and grown children. She wasn’t paid, she didn’t get an exchange of a qualification. She just wanted to spend her time listening to these people who were in the process of trying to change their lives.

Which is what I enjoy about it.

Some of the participants in Poland were people whose work had paid for their place and encouraged them to partake but a significant proportion had paid for themselves. Public speaking is terrifying to most people anyway, and speaking a foreign language which you know you’re not fluent in to a group of strangers takes some incredible nerve. At the end of the week every participant gives a presentation in English. You don’t turn up for a week of English immersion just because your boss thought it was a good idea. You can’t learn a language if you aren’t willing to commit to it. It takes guts.

There are many reasons people want to learn English, that as a native English speaker we take for granted. International business demands it. Travel is easier with it. Sales wants it. Machine manuals and health and safety documentation are written in it. There was a determination from those fed up of struggling through meetings in English, or having to have information translated.These were people who wanted to make change happen. If you speak English, you can have more influence.

One woman I met worked in a Polish only role in the lower levels of a big international company. When the chief executive gave speeches and talked about the company in English, she wanted to understand. She wanted to know what was going on. She cared.

Another oversaw implementing the health and safety requirements from a non-Polish parent company, and wanted to improve her English because she needed to convey Polish law and Polish health and safety requirements to the parent company in a manner which they could understand. Somehow she was going to make them listen.

And what about a grandmother learning to speak her grandchildren’s first language.

Or an office-worker who wanted to travel.

Or, one of my favourites, a woman training to be a coach. As the best textbooks on coaching are predominantly in English decided that she was going to learn to read them.

It’s an odd combination. You spend all day, everyday listening and talking. People open up.

Complete strangers sit and talk authentically and freely about anything on their mind: crumbling relationships, aspirations for their businesses, family, depression, death, neighbours, improvisational theatre, teenage drinking, moving to a foreign country, or the ordeal of having their son’s girlfriend to visit for the first time.

You learn more about a persons hopes and dreams in one week than you learn about many people you see regularly over years.

Poland: Teaching non-native speakers business English

I went for a run this morning in the hotel grounds

We’re situated in the north-east of Poland, not so far from the border with Lithuania, by a beautiful lake. In the shade of the trees the air held a chill, but still the sun shone brightly, and soon I was sweating and glad I’d left my jacket back in my room.

We had breakfast. A buffet of cold meat, salad and bread. I had coffee and muesli, which oddly had chunks of chocolate in it. I’m not normally a chocolate at breakfast kind of girl, but neither am I a ham sandwich person.

Then I met up with my mentee

She’s working on a presentation which she’s going to be giving tomorrow on the salty snacks industry. I coached her for the hour. She’s nervous of course, but she knows what she’s talking about and she’s going to do just fine.

Then I found myself a mug of hot water with a few slices of lemon. I need to take care of my voice. And went outside with a lawyer who needed my assistance practicing negotiation. A lawyer who has taught lawyers, and who employs lawyers and who needed my help. We sat on a bench in the sunshine to discuss the situation. We covered potential problems of high unemployment, the challenges of persuading young people to stick around in a town with few job opportunities, and developed the arguments that he would need to negotiate with a farmer’s alliance for gain support for the building of a new supermarket which the farmer’s alliance were dead against.

At one, I took a break

A few of us hired bikes and went for a ride, picking up essentials from the village shop, like chocolate.

Then time for lunch: beetroot soup which, like cucumber soup, is apparently a very traditional meal, followed by roast chicken and buckwheat groats. With an accompanying conversation about jellyfish.

And now, with my tummy full, I have an hour or two of time to get on with my own work. Soon though, I must return to the conference room and begin a session on telephone conversation. With my wonderful accent this will be an excellent listening test for the people I’m coaching.

Teaching, coaching, mentoring, listening

This is how I’m spending my week in the sunshine and I am learning so much.

How to boost your vocabulary (without getting in a tangle)

conditioner as context
Sometimes the tangles look huge and overwhelming, but with a little help, things can soon get back to neat and smooth.

“You look like you’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards.”

My mum used to despair at how tangled my hair would get when I was little. Both me and my little sister have great volumes of hair. So much that it even amazed the hairdresser. It’s long, mostly straight, but comes at you from every angle. After an hour or two of playing in the garden it did look like we’d been dragged through a hedge backwards.

It used to get into the most dreadful knots.

I remember my mum lecturing my dad on the importance of using conditioner

After giving us our baths one evening, and sending the first of us downstairs to have our freshly washed hair combed, my dad thought he had done a good job. That was until my mum tried combing our hair.  My dad had not used any conditioner and so the dry, rough hairs matted together. However, hard my mum tugged, the comb wouldn’t go through.

We returned to the bathroom, and with a dollop of gloopy conditioner she smoothed the hairs, making them less likely to catch on one another. Finally, she could untangle our hair.

Conditioner was not optional in our family. It was essential for pain-free combing.

But how can we apply these principles for pain-free language learning?

Context is the extra gloop you need so new vocabulary lays smoothly in your mind

Unless we have context, all that vocabulary becomes knotted. You’ll have words you know you know but can’t remember, and words you know but are meaningless because you have no idea of what they mean.

As we get more proficient learning, we tend to start thinking that we’re cleverer than we once were. We repeat a word a few times in our heads and imagine that we’re just going to remember it. We rarely do. Instead, the words that stick are those that we feel something about, the ones we’ve used, the ones we have associated with other ideas.

Which is why learning with context matters

However, context is not simply a matter of learning all the words to do with the beach in Tuesday afternoon’s class and words to do with a hospital all in Friday morning’s class. And it’s often impractical to go to the beach or the hospital for a language lesson.

Instead, sometimes you need to play pretend

If the vocabulary is about going to the beach, then perhaps pack your bag and get ready for a beach trip, noting the vocabulary you’re coming across as you engage with the items. These items can become a show and tell game. Everyone has a story about a time they visited a hospital. How many of the words you’re learning can you fit into your story?

Perhaps a brief account of that time you went to the beach, when your son was stung by a jellyfish, had an allergic reaction and ended up in the accident and emergency department. Use props.

Does it feel a little childish?

Probably. Sitting behind a desk and writing words on a piece of paper is often easier than acting a story. There’s less chance you’ll look foolish. I don’t say it lightly. I’d take silent reading over charades any day. However, if you watch children playfully learning to speak a language, it’s hard not to be jealous of how they adapt.

Moving around in role-play (games of mummy, daddy and baby dolly for example), drawing pictures and singing songs might seem childish, but children do these things because it’s how they learn.

We learn in three distinct ways

Kinaesthetic learning is about doing. This means lying down on the floor and pretending to sunbathe. Having a make-believe conversation with a friend in which you argue about the price of an ice-cream, with one person playing the role of vendor, and the other playing the role of sunburnt tourist.

Visual learning is about pictures. Photos are great because they refer to specific memories. But making a collage from magazines (or a travel brochure), drawing pictures, doodling and watching videos all helps.

Auditory learning is about hearing. What television adverts can you find telling you to visit so and so country. Or look up adverts for package holidays or airlines. But even small things help, like putting on a recording of the sea, gentle sloshing waves, or squawking seagulls and children crying.

There are many online tests to work out your predominant learning strategy, but you will learn through all three methods, and it’s worth using them all if you can.

All these small context prompts act like conditioner

They organise the vocabulary in your mind, allowing you to move through the words to find what you’re looking for. It stops you getting stuck on the wrong word, instead you can think of others and keep up the momentum. Like the comb sliding through the hair. Finally, you land on, if not the perfect word, something you can use.

With a little bit of context to help organise your brain, your mind won’t feel like it’s been dragged through a hedge backwards.

Summary

  1. Textbook learning can tie us in knots. We end up knowing a lot of words, but not necessarily what they mean. Or we can’t reach them, quickly, from our memories.
  2. Building a context helps us integrate the words into our minds.
  3. The building blocks for context building are the visual, kinaesthetic and audio cues that we learn from.

Sometimes it’s worth getting creative about how you find your context

When I first learnt Italian numbers, it was after a glass of wine (or two) during a game of monopoly. The Italian young men whom I was playing with had no qualms about stealing from each other. They would lie openly about who owed whom what amount. And, when convenient, pretending not to understand English.

Determined that the Italians wouldn’t swindle me. I learnt to count my lira, make demands and gesture in wild Italian. It was playful, fun and hard work. Sentences were beyond me, but even a few weeks later, I could order whatever weight of salami Milano I wanted from the butcher. I had all my numbers.

Have fun with your language learning.


A helpful hint about copyright. These resources can be used under a CC BY-NC-ND International Licence.

You can share the whole text of the article as it is, without changes. You can’t pick and choose this paragraph or that paragraph, this doodle or that doodle, you may only use the article and document as a whole. Furthermore, you can’t make commercial gain out of it. You’re more than welcome to print off and share this article within your business, such as for team discussions or with a friend.

When sharing any of the content listed on this page, you must include the following text:

©2017 Happenence Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Article written by Catherine Oughtibridge.

Curious as to where this article came from? For more tips on learning English head over to happenence.co.uk where you can enjoy other articles and free resources.

Contact Happenence Ltd. if you have further licensing questions.


How to use a teacher’s trick to improve your fluency (Even if you fear speaking)

cold corrections
How do you feel when someone puts you on the spot with a question?

Have you ever found that the words and phrases you’ve worked hard to learn disappear when you need them?

A question. You hear it. Perhaps you understand some of it, but haven’t got a full translation. There’s no sound coming from your lips. Your brain stretches to find the right words, but finds nothing. Time passes. Your cheeks begin to redden.

You feel like a novice.

It isn’t fair, you’ve worked hard

All that time sat behind your desk. The audiobooks you listen to in the car. The TV programmes you watch even though most of the time you’re not entirely sure what’s happening. You’ve done the studying, practiced the grammar, learnt your set phrases and yet, faced with a native speaker, you have nothing to say.

Well, it’s not just you

Speaking often comes up as a top cause of anxiety – even with people speaking in their own language. The biggest reason for this is that people believe that others are going to see them shaking, nervous and incoherent and think, what a fool.

Furthermore, when you’re speaking in a language you’re learning, you’re guaranteed to make mistakes, and unless your culture is greatly different from the British attitude that making mistakes is embarrassing, then you’re going to be uncomfortable with that reality.

You don’t need to apologise

Native English speakers tend to be insecure about speaking foreign languages. The truth is we rarely need to do it. In business, English is often the language of choice, and for the unsure tourist, many restaurants, hotels and tour guides cater specifically for the English-speaking market. Us native speakers have it easy.

The moment you apologise for speaking imperfect English, you’re bound to hear a hurried reassurance. Your English is probably much better than the native speaker’s ability to speak any language other than their own.

When I tell people their English is good, what I often mean is that it’s better than my French.

In classrooms, there’s often more emphasis on grammar than speaking

And if your English reading and writing is better than your speaking, you start to feel a gap. Not surprisingly, this makes you feel more frustrated every time you speak. What’s more, you’re acutely aware of grammatical mistakes because this has been what you’ve focused on.

Now grammar’s important. Things like articles, prepositions and tenses are necessary for sounding fluent. However, if you don’t say anything, you won’t get any message across.

In teaching, there’s a technique of using hot or cold corrections

A hot correction is made the instant the mistake is heard. You’d be stopped by the teacher and have to correct your speech there and then. This style of making corrections is useful for rehearsing a set speech, or making progress in grammatical correctness.

A cold correction happens later. The emphasis is put on letting the student speak, and continue speaking. Making corrections like this is the best way to encourage fluency.

How can you internalise this technique?

First, decide for yourself that you’re going to use cold corrections. Make sure you recognise that your goal is flowing speech, not perfect speech. Give yourself permission to make mistakes.

When you’re speaking, don’t seek out correction. If someone seems overly concerned with correcting you every time you forget an article or mispronounce a word, politely ask them to remember your biggest mistakes and tell you once you’ve finished speaking. If necessary, explain that you’re trying to focus on flow. Or that their corrections make it difficult for you to think.

Perhaps it sounds counter-intuitive to avoid corrections

But by putting taking the pressure off speaking perfectly, you’re getting more words said. By speaking quickly, even if what you end up saying doesn’t make sense, you’re saying words which must be better than silent blushing. It’s also going to sound and feel more natural.

As an experiment, listen to what goes on in your brain when you’re having a conversation in your own language. You aren’t second guessing yourself are you? And the words that you speak, I bet they’re not said with perfect grammar. Mine certainly aren’t.

To summarise:

  1. Speaking is terrifying for many people. Even people speaking in their own language. When we’re speaking we tend to worry about making mistakes and looking silly.
  2. When teaching spoken English there are two types of correction that can be make: hot and cold corrections. Teaching your internal critic to use cold corrections will improve your fluency.
  3. By taking the pressure off to be perfect, you can say more. Even if what comes out isn’t grammatically correct, or quite understood, it’s progress on saying nothing at all.

But just so you know, it’s not just you. I’ve had conversations in French where I’ve been lost after one question (a question like ‘do you like France’) and said nothing at all. Yet on other occasions I’ve managed to explain travelling to Egypt to a room full of French people without correctly conjugating a single verb.

Both scenarios left me feeling flustered. But the second left me more confident too.


A helpful hint about copyright. These resources can be used under a CC BY-NC-ND International Licence.

You can share the whole text of the article as it is, without changes. You can’t pick and choose this paragraph or that paragraph, this doodle or that doodle, you may only use the article and document as a whole. Furthermore, you can’t make commercial gain out of it. You’re more than welcome to print off and share this article within your business, such as for team discussions or with a friend.

When sharing any of the content listed on this page, you must include the following text:

©2017 Happenence Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Article written by Catherine Oughtibridge.

Curious as to where this article came from? For more tips on learning English head over to happenence.co.uk where you can enjoy other articles and free resources.

Contact Happenence Ltd. if you have further licensing questions.