\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Online
\nteaching of English to students in Spain and Latin America eats up a lot of my
\ntime that I would prefer to devote to writing, however it pays the bills and
\nthe students are wonderful. Inevitably my students and I have had many
\ndiscussions about the learning of language(s) and the miraculous way in which
\nall of us as babies and then toddlers learn to make sense of the cacophony of
\nsounds they\u2019re exposed to and notice patterns within them that have meaning and
\nsignificance. Patently during this period of our lives our developing brains are
\nat their peak of their ability to learn one or more languages. It\u2019s such a
\nshame that for most of us, including me, it usually is just one. Not least
\nbecause it enriches our appreciation of our native tongue and our ability to
\nexpress ourselves using it.<\/span><\/p>\nMany of my
\nstudents are parents of young children and they have been telling me about
\ntheir experiences of exposing their children to two or three languages. (I
\nalways praise them wholeheartedly for doing so as I think they\u2019re providing
\ntheir children with such a bountiful gift.) Apparently the children are adept
\nat transitioning seamlessly from one language to another, for example in households
\nwhere family members are of different nationalities. What most intrigues me is
\nthat at least in some cases and at certain stages in their learning the
\nchildren apparently blend the languages together in ways that actually make
\nsense. It must be wonderful to hear and illustrates the children\u2019s awesome
\nfacility at this stage in their lives.<\/span><\/p>\nFor it\u2019s
\nalso a shame that for many of us the teaching of a second language (and usually
\nat primary school just one second language was on offer) doesn\u2019t begin until
\nthat peak period of maximum language learning ability had more or less
\nflattened out, in my case practically to zero. <\/span><\/p>\nTo make
\nmatters worse, as my classmates and I were around eight or nine, we had gleaned
\nsome experience in converting the language we had learned into written form but
\n\u2013 thinking she was making the process simpler for us \u2013 our teacher started by
\nteaching us French in spoken form only. I\u2019ll never know how that worked out for
\nmy contemporaries but what I realise now is that I mentally created a unique
\nform of written French. I had amassed a huge, highly organised and logically
\nspelled lexicon in my mind. (Which considering I was making a fist of learning
\nto spell in English was even more of an achievement!) I had one of the biggest
\nshocks of my life, around two years after our French lessons began, when the
\nteacher introduced the written versions of the vocabulary we had been learning.
\nIn fact, I was so shocked that I nearly jumped up and declared, like a kind of
\nenraged Oliver Twist, that her spellings were wrong! At that same moment the
\nunique language I had created for myself collapsed into mental dust. I still
\nfeel that is the greatest loss as now I would love to know how I had decided
\nFrench should be spelled. <\/span><\/p>\nThe rest of
\nmy journey in learning French continued to be a bumpy ride. In my first years
\nat a secondary school not famous for its pastoral care, as I\u2019d had an early
\ngrowth spurt before my school mates overshot me and<\/i> as he knew my dad,
\nthe teacher picked on me as the class scapegoat in order to keep the rest of
\nthe class in line. Not a positive learning experience to say the least.<\/span><\/p>\nBy contrast
\nI was astounded when a trainee took over for a while and finally helped me
\nrealise that a sentence could be deconstructed into different distinct
\ncomponents. Astonishingly, as far as I\u2019m aware, unless I was an even slower
\nstudent than I realised, this information had never been revealed to us in our
\nnative language. Indeed, I remember wondering if this same astonishing possibility
\napplied to English as well! (I was educated in late \u201860s when the fashion
\nseemed not to be to focus on grammar and get us to read a write and presumably
\nwork out the mechanics for ourselves. Now of course the pendulum has swung the
\nother way. We seem so hopeless at achieving the correct balance with regard to
\neducation at times!)<\/span><\/p>\nLater I deliberately
\nworked hard at my own ineptitude, having been inspired in a negative way by
\nanother teacher. She marked our work from A to E but gave me an F. I was so
\nproud of myself. I thought that if you were going to be terrible at something
\nyou might as well go the whole hog and excel in ignorance. So my target was not
\nto pull myself up by my bootstraps and see if I could scrape a D or an E. That
\nwould just be failing to get a higher mark. No wholesale uselessness was the
\ngoal I focused on and I achieved it repeatedly! Not, again, a very positive
\nlearning experience. The interesting thing is that when we moved home, I ended
\nup in a school at fourteen where most of the children had been learning German,
\nso I was put in a small class of others who had also joined the school from elsewhere
\nto study French. Here I flourished so much my teacher encouraged me, though unsuccessfully,
\nto take A level!<\/span><\/p>\nBack at my
\nfirst (the not-famous-for-pastoral-care one) secondary school, I was initially
\nexcited about being put in a class to learn Latin. My dad could read Latin, and
\nI was always enthralled when we visited cathedrals and churches and he
\nexplained what the messages on the walls where declaring. Unfortunately, I only
\nremember, with regard to Latin, the first list of verbs we were taught. I guess
\nthe novelty hadn\u2019t been lost by that stage, for all I remember subsequently is
\nthe teacher hurling abuse at us. In this case it wasn\u2019t often me, I was
\nsheltering at my desk as well as I could from the shouting. In this case it was
\nmainly a lad called Mark Jones who kept using a ballpoint pen in his exercise
\nbook. The teacher was a traditionalist and preferred (in a loud voice) the ink
\npens the rest of us were using. I often wondered why Jonesy kept using the
\nballpoint. Maybe he just enjoyed being shouted at. It was certainly more
\ninteresting in someways than the lesson. Jonsey ended up going to Oxford
\ndespite the ballpoint. The teacher got a job in another school thank God.<\/span><\/p>\nWell, those
\nare my, mainly negative, experiences of learning languages. I would be
\ninterested to hear about yours! <\/span><\/p>\nAu revoir!*<\/span><\/p>\n*Wonder how
\nI would have spelled that\u2026 <\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u00a0 Online 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[101],"tags":[8068,1554,8067,4956],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-9966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-languages","tag-learning","tag-loving","tag-steve"],"yoast_head":"\n
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