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Friday 25 January 2019

Recommended Reads: An Italian Family, by Franca Magnani

Every now and again, a dip in the bookshop's bargain bin can be like hitting the jackpot. I'm always on the lookout for books that capture the multilingual experience from a human point of view, and Franca Magnani's memoir, An Italian Family, which expresses the amusing and confusing realities of a multilingual upbringing, hits all the registers.

Magnani's witty, intelligent and warm writing style takes the reader back to a very fraught time in European history when adapting swiftly to new situations and environments was absolutely key to survival.

What do you mean, you've never heard of Franca Magnani?! Umm... join the club. Neither had I before I rescued said book from the cruel fate of ending up in the maws of the recycling plant. Turns out, Franca Magnani was a journalist, foreign correspondent and author who spoke Italian, French, German and English to a superb degree.

Multilingualism was foisted upon her in 1928, at the tender age of three, when she left her grandfather's house in an Umbrian village to go and live in Marseille with three perfect strangers: her mother, her father and her older sister. Franca's parents, as politically active anti-fascists, had been forced to flee into exile a few years earlier. They left Italy separately and were unable to carry a baby across the mountains on foot while evading border patrols.

After spending just enough time in the French school system to sound like her French playmates, Franca and her family were uprooted again, this time being granted political asylum in Switzerland. They ended up in Zürich, presenting a triple linguistic challenge: getting to grips with Swiss German, the Zürich dialect and, later on, standard High German. The latter differs significantly from the dialect of German spoken in Zürich and more subtly from Swiss German.


Franca's father, Fernando Schiavetti, an Italian intellectual and committed anti-fascist, was also a linguistic purist determined that his daughters would not babble away in "migrantish." Not only was he hell-bent on his family conversing in "proper" Italian, but their command of the languages spoken in their host countries had to be just as impeccable.

The family's evening meal was subject to frequent interruptions when the daughters were ordered to prise either the Zingarelli, the Larousse, or the Langenscheidt off the shelf to make sure that words were being used correctly. The outbreak of WW2 put an end to these dictionary-accompanied family chats across the dinner table. Instead, they all listened to French, British, Italian, Swiss and German radio stations to see how the same events were covered from different points of view.

And although five different languages were spoken by the girls, mixing different languages in the same sentence was a capital offence in the Schiavetti household, punishable by a wallop on the back of the head (never a slap across the face, that was considered demeaning).

Hitting children on the head may have fallen out of fashion, and so has the view that code switching (mixing languages) demonstrates a lack of linguistic proficiency, but Daddy Schiavetti's dedication to the multilingual cause has to be applauded.


Here's another Recommended Read:
What Language Do I Dream In? by Elena Lappin


...and here's why excruciatingly bad books can still be great for language learning:
Why Terrible Books Can Be Terrible Useful 

Tuesday 22 January 2019

Don't speak to the students in that language!

For those of us who love languages, multilingualism is a great source of joy. That joy, though, is punctuated on occasion with moments set to test us, usually when we least expect it. The CELTA course I did last year produced one such memorable moment.

I was chatting to the students as they were arriving for their English class. I remembered that one of them, a friendly woman in her mid-fifties, had previously mentioned that she was also learning French and Spanish.

Intrigued by this, I prompted her to chat with me in Spanish. She clearly enjoyed being able to practice with me for a minute or two. Then it was time for me to teach my lesson, during which I was being assessed, with feedback given at the end of the day.

Imagine my surprise - if not to say consternation(!) - at being reprimanded in my written feedback for having exchanged a few bits of Spanish with a student before the official start of class. I realise that we (the trainee teachers) were meant to stick to English, and I had been doing my best (not always successfully, I must admit) to avoid using German with the students to maximise their language practice opportunities, but this reproach just struck me as downright petty. It had been about two people connecting, very briefly, over a common interest - an act conducive to building rapport, which tends to impact positively later on in class. There were no victims here. What, then, was this comment exactly if not a gratuitous put-down? Why sledgehammer rules onto a context where they run contrary to the spirit in which they had been drawn up?

Being told what language to speak, when and with whom, by an uninvolved bystander, is just plain patronising. I'm pretty certain that everyone who speaks more than one language has experienced an incident similar to this one. I was 19 the first time this happened to me. I was working as an au-pair in the Midlands (UK) and had made friends with a fellow German au-pair living just a few houses further down the same street. The family she was working for forbade us to speak German with each other because it would "confuse the toddler."




Saturday 19 January 2019

You only learn speaking by speaking. There, I've said it.

Since airing a gripe about the CELTA course a few days ago, it's probably time to say something positive about it. Well, it has overhauled my thinking on a few points. And one of these is the importance of language production or "output."

The course made me realise that, as a learner, I'd always been very "input" focused. I'm a very reluctant speaker, you see, and I tend to place a lot of emphasis on reading and listening to the radio for hours on end in order to internalise the structures.

When attending classes in the past as a learner, I couldn't really see the point of engaging in speaking practice with other learners. What's the point, I used to tell myself, of listening to other people making the same mistakes that I was making, thereby reinforcing my own errors? Surely, to get good at speaking it's best to converse with competent speakers who can correct me...?

The CELTA course made a point of breaking down the language learning process into various components. It would draw a distinction, for example, between language "input" and "output."

Just to be clear: There has never been any doubt in my mind that speaking practice is important. Over the years, I've met so many people who told me, "I understand [insert language], but I can't speak it." The point is, comprehension alone is not enough. Consuming copious hours of input will only take you so far, but if you ever want to consider yourself a speaker of your chosen target language, you need to actually make those words come out of your mouth, no matter how haltingly at first.

Sonia, who was my Spanish teacher in London, once revealed to me that, after arriving in the UK, she used to sit herself in front of a mirror every night before going to bed and talk to herself until, eventually, she got to a place where she felt vaguely comfortable speaking English.

I'm sure I must have guffawed at this when she told me, but it clearly worked for her, and after finishing CELTA, I've come round to considering her "mirror chats" an effective method of fluency practice. However, I doubt that many would have the discipline to stick to it, and I've become convinced that a classroom setting is actually a very good place to make speaking practice happen.

In fact, I'd go as far as conceding that the core benefit of attending a language class at all is to get the opportunity to speak. Thirty years ago, it was still quite a challenge to find good quality input sources, and a class may have been one of the few occasions for the student to hear the language being spoken. In the online world, this is no longer the case. Magazines, blogs, articles, subtitled TV series, films, verb & vocab quizzes, YouTubers teaching you anything and everything from basic grammar down to colloquial expressions in bite-sized chunks - it's all right there, 24/7. And while it is true that you can quite easily find people for conversation practice online, from my own experience of having gone down that route, I'd say that, at least initially while you're still struggling to maintain a conversation, the classroom is a much better place for taking your first steps in this direction.

In an ideal world I personally still prefer working 1-2-1 with a native (or highly competent) speaker, but this isn't always feasible. In reality, it doesn't really matter whether your conversation partner stumbles over their words just as much as you do - the main objective is that you get those words out, no matter how. You first need to get used to producing the language - the quality of your output can be improved later on.

The upshot is, if I ever do get round to teaching, my focus would be on giving my students as much speaking practice as possible.




Sunday 13 January 2019

What was the worst thing about CELTA?

High time for an update methinks. For those of you who remember, a year ago I applied to get onto a CELTA (Cambridge English Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) course. I'd been wanting to get a language teaching qualification for years, and finally the time seemed right.

Well, I won't lie, it was hell. Interesting, worthwhile even(!), but hell nonetheless. The workload, as I'd been warned about, was insane, and I found it impossible to maintain my usual level of output in terms of the work that actually pays my bills. This wasn't a major problem for my established clients, they seem to appreciate my contributions and were prepared to be patient, but I was forced to pull out on a project handed to me by a new client. I still feel bad about that, but something had to give.

OK, back to the actual course. What was so horrible about it? Let me tell you...

We had to teach one lesson per week, either to a beginners' (A2) or to an advanced (B2) group. The students, all of them adults, were lovely people of different nationalities, motivated, likeable, no problem with them at all. We were required to write up detailed lesson plans before each session. This was horrendously time consuming, but I actually learnt a lot from that.

The core problem for me was that, when it came down to the classroom teaching, we had to then stick to that lesson plan, and that lesson plan was scripted out to the minute, with us being assessed by our teachers throughout. I felt like an ill-programmed robot, like some kind of automaton, constantly clock-watching, forgetting my lines and unable to properly respond to the students' input.

The sessions left me feeling drained and deeply frustrated. My enthusiasm for the language, my ability to relate to the students' struggles built on years of experience as a language learner myself, my willingness to let them steer the lesson to the points that roused their interest and engaged them - in short, everything I thought that I, as an individual forged by decades of language acquisition and exposure, had to offer - was absolutely stifled by this setup.

I do, of course, understand, from the assessors' point of view, why the protocol was designed like this, and I also realise that real-life teaching is a whole different ballgame. Still, the whole experience left me somewhat traumatised, and six months after finishing the course I can't help but feel crestfallen when I think back to it.

Having said that, I learnt a lot from this, and it's changed my perspective on a couple of things for the better, I think. I shall expand on that in the next post.