How did the past influence you?

When I was in Bishkek, I saw this classroom display and it brought back many memories....

"I can read and speak Russian." 

With pictures of Vladimir Mayakovsky, Aleksandr Blok and Sergey Esenin.

We language teachers are all influenced by our previous experience of being students in a foreign language class. We consciously or unconsciously bring elements of that experience to our classrooms. 

When I look back at my experiences as a language learner I can identify where particular teachers or methods influenced the teacher and trainer I have become now. I’d like to reminisce a bit because I ask teachers to reflect on what they bring to the classroom so it’s only fair that I am willing to do the same.

My first experience learning a foreign language was…..

French - Silent Way

I remember taking French lessons when I was 11 or 12 in America. The teacher used Cuisenaire rods and only spoke French. I was a complete beginner. The other kids had been taking lessons for a while and they understood what they were expected to do. I was lost and scared from the first lesson. That was not a positive experience. Looking back on it, she was asking me to do simple things like “Take a blue rod” and “Which rod is longer, the green rod or the orange rod.” “Put the blue rod on top of the orange rod.” But every time she spoke to me I froze.

From this I learned that the affective filter is very, very powerful. If I put someone in the spotlight, and see the ‘Help, I’m drowning look’, I try to end it as fast as possible. That happened in Almaty when I asked a teacher to stand up (in Dave’s class) and help me organise the group work. But the teacher had such weak English that she didn’t understand. My mistake for calling on her…. But we muddled through with help from the other participants. The affective filter pops up when we analyse the micro level (this activity, that learner) but also….

...when we choose a method or approach for a series of lessons. I know that I should be ready to explain what I am doing to the learners and not just throw them in at the deep end. They might not understand the methods I am using. Why do I want them to hear and say the sentences before I write them on the board? Why don’t I teach opposites (tall, short, cheap, expensive) in the same lesson? etc I usually start in a very traditional way so the students feel comfortable and gradually lead them to different or unusual methods like my box of wooden Cuisenaire rods. I love rods now that I understand why they are so powerful! 

If you're new to using them, teachingenglish.org has a good introduction and here is an article describing a grammar lesson. Busyteacher.org has a list of 15 ways to use them.  

Personally I think it is important that the teacher should develop some rapport with learners in their mother tongue if the he/she speaks or understands it. Especially with little kids. They benefit from knowing that when they speak L1, the teacher can understand them. I speak English 98% of the time in class, but I won’t sacrifice rapport for the sake of creating a 100% English language environment. This means that if students need to tell me something in Turkish, I listen and show that I understand them. I don’t necessarily answer in Turkish though! I have seen teachers pretend not to understand the children when they speak Turkish. I just think that produces a lot of potential classroom management problems.   

I don’t remember that French teacher’s name but I send a big ‘thank you’ for teaching me the importance of affective factors in foreign language learning.

French – with a traditional, strict class teacher

When I was 13 we spent a year in Geneva, where I attended a Swiss school. We had the magnificent Madame Steck all day except for German lessons with another teacher. Madame Steck was supposed to teach us enough French across one year that we could be integrated into the Geneva education system the following year. She had complete control over the class. No one talked out of turn. She did dictation, made us copy grammar rules off the board and …gosh…I remember having to memorize French poems and recite them each week. That was scary but I can still remember parts of them.

From her I learned that to be an effective teacher you don’t need to be smiley and super-friendly. You can be the ‘master of your classroom space’ and an expert in what you do. You have legitimate power as a state-certified teacher. And kids, even immigrant kids from poor countries whose parents are not very literate (as was the case for some of the other children in the class) can learn well in an orderly environment where there are clear rules set by an authoritative teacher.

If the combination of 'teacher' and  'power' seems new or shocking, check out this comprehensive website. 

I learned not to be afraid of being the boss in my own class. Thank you, Madame Steck!

Russian - Audio-lingual Method

At the end of high school I had the chance to take Russian lessons at the local state university. The teacher followed the course book/teachers book pretty exactly as far as I can understand now with hindsight. At the beginning of every unit, we had to listen to her and repeat dialogues until we had memorised them. She built the dialogues up line by line using only Russian and hand gestures, mime and little pictures on the board so we could understand.  We didn’t see the written forms (keep those books closed!) until we could say them perfectly. Then she switched to English, we opened our books and she explained the grammar rules.

Afterwards we had to go back to the dialogues and make changes to practise the grammar. These were ‘substitution drills’ as I learned in CTEFLA (the previous version of CELTA). We didn’t read much and I can’t remember writing anything.

The advantage to learning basic Russian by listening, repeating and substituting words was that using correct grammatical forms became automatic. From this language teacher and method I took into my practice the idea that the method should match the complexities of the target language. Russian has 6 cases, singular and plural forms plus masculine, feminine and neuter nouns - and adjectives agree with nouns so there are a lot of endings to learn! The audio-lingual method really helped with that. (It might not have been useful to continue learning in this way but as I didn’t take the second year I am not sure if the same method was used.)

The biggest disadvantages were that I could only say sentences that we had memorised ("I don't have any brown eggs") and I didn't know how to continue learning on my own without a teacher. 

I can’t say I have ever had to teach a wholly audio-lingual English course book but I can build up dialogues on the board, line by line and work with the oral form before showing the written form. This made sense when we were taught it on the CTEFLA many years ago since I had experienced something similar in the Russian lessons. I don’t see many teachers doing that these days so perhaps this has become ‘old-fashioned’;). But it’s a useful technique with beginners, who often make pronunciation mistakes when they see the written form straight away. Sound-spelling correlations are one area of difficulty for learners whose languages are read more or less phonetically, like Turkish students.

Thanks to that Russian teacher, when I teach English I think about the structure and difficulties the learners have coming from the mother tongue and borrow from different methods that will help them, i.e. principled eclecticism. I also learned not to make learners dependent on me. 

German – a grammar book and immersion

My father always says that the first foreign language is the hardest, the second is a bit easier and after that you can just teach yourself in a couple of weeks or months. After learning good French, a tiny bit of colloquial German and pretty solid elementary Russian, I decided to learn to speak German.

So at age 18 I set off to spend my summer holidays with my Swiss German relatives outside Berne to learn German. I bought a ‘Learn German in 3 Months’ book and worked my way through it in my free time while listening carefully to my relatives talking. They tried to speak High German to me but of course used a lot of their particular Swiss German dialect amongst themselves.

This was my first time as an adult learner immersed in the community where the target language was being spoken. By the end of 6 weeks I could explain myself fairly clearly in German and understand a lot of what was being said. (I also picked up the odd Swiss German phrase like Merci vilmal - Thanks a lot.) From this experience I learned the value of listening carefully to infer what people must be saying, the value of rehearsal and the need to create language-learning opportunities. And that what they teach in the grammar book isn't actually what people say. 

I learned to repeat words I didn’t understand when people were talking at meal times. My aunt would explain what as being said to me again. I learned to listen carefully for standard question/response patterns that were repeated at different times and fillers people used to buy thinking time. I tried to use them myself. 

A couple of weeks into my stay, I started planning. While I was in my room I decided what I wanted to talk about, imagined the conversation in my head and looked up the words and grammar I thought I would need. Later I tried to use the language at the lunch or dinner table conversations. It didn’t always work and sometimes I was too tongue-tied to follow through. There is a big difference between practising with yourself and practising with another person! But it taught me the value of rehearsal and preparation time long before I read that these two factors are important when designing speaking activities.

Repeating the same tasks meant I got a lot of chances to hear or say certain language. My aunt taught me how to bake the Sunday loaf of bread. She showed me and explained in German. Every week she gave me feedback on how well it turned out – not kneaded enough (45 minutes minimum!), too little salt, too much salt etc.  By the end of the holiday I had great ‘baking bread in German’ vocabulary plus a new skill. I love baking bread to this day. Thank you, Aunt Elspeth!

I learned that immersion and self-study is hard work and there are days when you seem to be going backwards. And it needs great persistence, which is the positive aspect of being stubborn. I’m a Capricorn and have enough ‘stubborn’ for several normal people.  

Arabic - Grammar Translation

At 17 I decided I really wanted to learn Arabic. At university we had a couple of mad professor teachers, one of whom threw chalk at you if you made a silly mistake. He would get it to explode on your desk so the dust went all over your face and clothes. After the initial three-week ‘add-drop’ period anyone who wasn’t a serious student had dropped out. (That professor then metamorphosed into an absolute darling.)

The program was solid grammar translation and actually pretty boring. We translated fun sentences like ‘The boy entered the house’ ‘The girl entered the house’ and you can imagine the mess we made when we got the words confused…. We learned to talk about 2 yellow submarines vs 3 green submarines vs 1 white submarine, etc. 

Anyway, after memorising all the language patterns and translating various pre-Islamic poems I still couldn’t say ‘Hello, how are you?’  

We were assured that being able to recite classical poetry would really help us in Egypt. Actually it did ward off a few over-eager men, who left me an my travelling companion alone on a train when we recited the opening lines of the one in the link above. They either thought were mad or we were serious students of Arabic literature. Your guess is as good as mine. A hard-bound Arabic dictionary tried up in a shirt also proved a useful weapon. So classical grammar translation is probably good for something.

But the turning point was IH Cairo. 

Arabic – the Communicative Approach

Armed with our dictionaries we set off to our first day at the intensive Arabic course at IH Cairo. The teacher, who was from England, spoke only Arabic. The first activity we had to do was listen to the opening part of a dialogue and work out what the context was. It was a customer and waiter. We listened a few times, each time for a different purpose. We worked out that the man asked what there was, ordered soup, then wanted tea. Finally he paid for his lunch. Later that week we read a newspaper article about Pepsi and Coca Cola consumption in the world. We scanned and circled all the numbers. We worked out what they must refer to. The teacher gradually led us into the text. We realised that we didn’t need to understand everything to get a lot out of an authentic text.

Some of those lessons really stuck in my memory. 

By the end of a month we were reading fairly academic texts and I could understand the Egyptian soap operas in Ramadan well enough to follow the plot.

Wow.

Three years of grammar translation vs four weeks of communicative method. The communicative method won hands down. 

When I had a chance to become an English teacher I jumped at it. I had realised there were many ways to teach language according to the students' different personalities and expectations, their backgrounds and their future needs. 

So thank you! To that Arabic teacher in Cairo, whose name I have also forgotten, but who started me on this life-time journey…..   

And I hope I have made you think back over your experiences in learning foreign languages. Whether you are a teacher, a trainer or a program administrator, you will benefit a lot from spending some time reflecting. I look forward to reading your comments as well. 

Kristina