Many of you are teachers, used to providing instruction to help students learn English as a new or additional language. But can you recall how it feels to be in their shoes and to be experiencing the classroom not as a teacher, but as a learner of a brand new language?
Here in Cambridge, our language and pedagogy research team wanted to explore this very notion. They held a language learning session for our ELT publishing colleagues, with the aim of recreating the language classroom experience, focusing on teaching them a new language as complete beginners. The details of the event were kept under-wraps until everyone was in the room. Here, they were all told that the language they would be learning for the afternoon was the North Germanic language, Faroese!
The lesson was given by a highly experienced teacher and trainer to small groups of ‘students’. For each class, there was a 15 minute “pre-flection”, where the students discussed what they would expect from a beginners’ lesson, 60 minutes of the lesson itself, where students were instructed on beginner’s Faroese, and a 45 minute post-reflection on the teaching techniques, learner strategies and the materials or tasks used. The entire lesson was taught in Faroese, with the pre- and post- reflections taking place in English.
We caught up with two ELT colleagues, Karen Barns – Teaching and Learning Manager, and Ruby Davies – Editor, who shared their reflections on how they found the experience of learning a new language from scratch.
How did you feel at the beginning of the lesson?
Karen: Having lived in four places overseas and never learned more than being able to order a taxi or a cup of coffee, I am a self-confessed shoddy language learner. So I was more than a bit nervous about this lesson, and when I first sat down I couldn’t think why I signed myself up for what was bound to be torture.
Ruby: I’m a bit of an Old English enthusiast, so I was very excited to see the language we’d be studying was Faroese. It’s quite different, though, so I was very much in at the deep end!
How did you find the lesson as it progressed? What parts did you enjoy?
Ruby: I enjoyed the fact that we learnt phrases and chunks and that we came away from the lesson equipped with practical language to greet someone, ask how they were, and order a limited range of food and drink. The communicative part of the lesson played out well, meaning we encountered the language multiple times in short exchanges with fellow learners. The focus on pronunciation – with back-chaining, individual and group drills, and the use of transcription in the International Phonetic Alphabet – was valuable too, and I definitely have more of a feel for how slippery pronunciation can be – easily forgotten or mis-remembered, too easily turned into something more closely resembling one’s mother tongue.
Karen: I have to say the lesson was a really enjoyable and insightful experience for me, in ways I hadn’t expected. Firstly, having 16 years of teaching experience under my belt I was surprised to find myself a bit hazy about a few things… like how many words you can teach a beginner in a first session (more than I remembered!) and also just how useful and versatile simple old fashioned props like flashcards are. Having said that, I got to a point about 45 minutes into the lesson where I felt like I wanted to go and lie down in a darkened room – my head felt like it was about to explode with new information. In an act of rebellion my mind began wandering to other things. I felt a moment of panic when we were asked to do something without being able to look at our notes – I realised that this is an instruction I would have given myself as a teacher when I felt the learners had reached the point where they needed to do this, but actually on reflection this is counter-productive as my stress levels wiped my mind blank.
What insights did you take away?
Karen: Doing things without notes is something I wouldn’t suggest as a teacher – I would leave learners to reach that point in their own time. Although I kept up during this lesson, and I really enjoyed the communicative and fun approach, I was also really aware that even in this first beginner lesson I could feel others pulling away from me – their recall was better, their pronunciation better … I think a few lessons down the road they would be streaming ahead. And if my history is anything to go by I’d give up, telling myself that sign language and smiling are primitive but perfectly adequate means of communication. If I were a teacher again, I think I would certainly take the time at the start of a beginner course to understand better how the learners feel about learning a language– it is amazing the impact that confidence can have, and how soon lack of it can be a stone round a learner’s neck.
Ruby: I realised first and foremost the importance of repetition – just how many times I needed to hear, see, say and write the new forms before they began to stick. We must have encountered each item of target language over fifty times both productively and receptively, but despite this I still struggled to wrap my head around the strange new sounds. I also better appreciate the importance of spaced repetition in locking down new language – returning to the phrases a few hours, then a few days, later has meant that I remember much more of it.
If you’ve enjoyed this article, you might like to read about controlled and guided writing tests for beginners.