About a month ago, as I was finishing up my week with my last class full of students, I began to reflect. They were *somewhat* quiet, working on writing letters to their pen-pals far across the ocean, in a place they didn't know, a place with gratte-ciels and tempêtes and chaleur and - many of my students have never even been to Paris, two and a half hours away by train - CINQ MILLIONS CINQ CENT MILLE PERSONNES, waouh!!*
A place called Atlanta.
It struck me how studiously they were working: describing themselves, their families, their town, their hobbies and the places they like to hang out, the sports they play... Every once in a while, one would call out, "Lauren", or "Madame", asking multiple grammatically-approximative variations on, for example, "How do you say 'brussels sprouts' in English?", or "What's the word for 'collège'?".
I realized, as I watched them, that they were using the vocabulary they'd been learning all year. Yes, they made grammar mistakes. But here they were, actively engaged, many for the first time in their lives, in communication with a real person, in English.
I reflected back, then, to my first days in class with them. To their eager questions, again in that approximative English, about absolutely everything they could think of. They wanted to know my interests, they wanted to know who I was, they wanted to know where I came from... they even wanted to know if I liked David Guetta, if I ate pork. They smirked when I told them I do yoga. Their eyes got wide when I showed them pictures of Atlanta.
Now, my time with them is over. But as I think about these moments I spent teaching them, I find meaning in everything I've done up until now. Not just teaching them, but learning their language. Understanding where they come from.
It's a great big world. One that I've been discovering ever since I was their age, ever since the first time I opened a French book at age 11. One that I continue to discover each time I set foot outside my doorstep.
And this, these students writing letters to each other, glimpsing each others' worlds and spaces, this is why we must study language. This is the whole reason we do it. To understand each other better. To stretch ourselves a bit. To envision life differently. As we get older, this translates into seeing new ways life could be different. We have a better grasp of why our spaces are designed the way they are, why our governments work the way they do, why our worlds are similar and not-so-similar, why our traditions vary. As adults, we can use this knowledge - indeed, we must use this knowledge - to improve our own worlds, to offer a broader perspective on a variety of situations, to understand the implications of speaking a certain way, to see the person behind the nation. And then, language studies lead us to go beyond the surface, to see why variations in wording are important, to start to question translation, to understand that the written or spoken word must never be taken at face value: must always be flipped inside out, considered in its multiple dimensions.
That "going beyond the surface", I would argue, never happens - indeed, can never happen - without fluency in a second language, and certainly multiple language proficiency must bring even more clarity.
It all begins in these classrooms, with these students. It all begins the first time they put pen to paper and envision that mystery person across the ocean... so different, but yet so very similar, to them.
*translation : FIVE MILLION FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND PEOPLE, wow!!
A place called Atlanta.
It struck me how studiously they were working: describing themselves, their families, their town, their hobbies and the places they like to hang out, the sports they play... Every once in a while, one would call out, "Lauren", or "Madame", asking multiple grammatically-approximative variations on, for example, "How do you say 'brussels sprouts' in English?", or "What's the word for 'collège'?".
I realized, as I watched them, that they were using the vocabulary they'd been learning all year. Yes, they made grammar mistakes. But here they were, actively engaged, many for the first time in their lives, in communication with a real person, in English.
I reflected back, then, to my first days in class with them. To their eager questions, again in that approximative English, about absolutely everything they could think of. They wanted to know my interests, they wanted to know who I was, they wanted to know where I came from... they even wanted to know if I liked David Guetta, if I ate pork. They smirked when I told them I do yoga. Their eyes got wide when I showed them pictures of Atlanta.
Now, my time with them is over. But as I think about these moments I spent teaching them, I find meaning in everything I've done up until now. Not just teaching them, but learning their language. Understanding where they come from.
It's a great big world. One that I've been discovering ever since I was their age, ever since the first time I opened a French book at age 11. One that I continue to discover each time I set foot outside my doorstep.
And this, these students writing letters to each other, glimpsing each others' worlds and spaces, this is why we must study language. This is the whole reason we do it. To understand each other better. To stretch ourselves a bit. To envision life differently. As we get older, this translates into seeing new ways life could be different. We have a better grasp of why our spaces are designed the way they are, why our governments work the way they do, why our worlds are similar and not-so-similar, why our traditions vary. As adults, we can use this knowledge - indeed, we must use this knowledge - to improve our own worlds, to offer a broader perspective on a variety of situations, to understand the implications of speaking a certain way, to see the person behind the nation. And then, language studies lead us to go beyond the surface, to see why variations in wording are important, to start to question translation, to understand that the written or spoken word must never be taken at face value: must always be flipped inside out, considered in its multiple dimensions.
That "going beyond the surface", I would argue, never happens - indeed, can never happen - without fluency in a second language, and certainly multiple language proficiency must bring even more clarity.
It all begins in these classrooms, with these students. It all begins the first time they put pen to paper and envision that mystery person across the ocean... so different, but yet so very similar, to them.
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| One of my classrooms in Flers, "fisheye view" :) |
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