Now me as an adult student of French

Now me as an adult student of French

I have writing about my students, about what I do to teach, giving some thought to how my adults learn. With this post I'll give this a different twist for a moment:

On how many occasions have I wanted to speak more languages! On how many occasions have I regretted not studying French and German when my mum was pushing me to! Yet, it's never too late! I envy those who speak three or four foreign languages and I have set out to learn French for once and for all!

Background:I am in my mid 30s and I took up French classes last September. I'd done French for one academic year when I was 15 at secondary school, with a really bad teacher. Nobody speaks highly of her, so it's not just my experience. Then, took a three-month course at uni as part of the Introduction to French and French literature, of which the language bit was an overall idea of how French works as a language and its phonemes as a means to distiguish sounds. Pronunciation is the hardest area of French learning for me, the switch between open a , e the neutral vowel, the nasal a, oe sounds etc is really hard! All of us who teach and learn and speak the gallic language know how important it is to get the sound right if you don't want to be ridiculised and laughed by Parisians.
After that in about 10 years ago I took a summer refresher course for a month. So i've never learned more than what would be level 1, if this at all.

Last summer, I armed myself with old exercise books and online grammars and exercises and reviewed as much as my time allowed me to in order to be placed at level 2 of the school I was going to register for the course. I must say that I like languages, I teach English as a foreign language after all, and I've tried every single opportunity life has put before me to practise French, which has now had its rewards. I am a risk taker and thanks to my travelling to French speaking countries and possibly aptitude i secured i place in the level I thought corresponded to my knowledge or degree of command. I was not going to start all over again after all, i feel i've done level one two or three times in my life before, none of them being a proper level 1, just complete and false beginner!After the level test: written and oral, the oral examiner would have assigned me level 3, which I was not prepared for, hardly having a good command of the two most basic tenses but I felt very flattered. The fact that I had studied French over 10 years ago, practised it only when booking hotel rooms and ordering at restaurants and having limited conversations with people when travelling the country, astonished the examiner. The command i seemed to have for that limited input and output apparently was fairly good. I think it's more the risk-taking nature of mine in this case.

I can see the theory behind the endlessly repeated idea that if you do homework and review regularly you make quicker progress.
I learn by associating words or grammar items to English or to Catalan. We can't help using our mental patterns to learn new things, we compare to what we know, to what we are used to, to what we experience and to our standards and ideas, and I am stretching and extending the idea to not only language learning here. (the idea that it is very xxx or not very xxx is measured to our own idea of xxxx)
I am pro-active, and participate as much as my common sense allows for if/when interested in the subject we are dealing with. Common sense? I'd be interacting with the teacher and other classmates a lot more if I could but the nature of the situation prevents me from doing so. Not only because I am very much aware that one learns to speak by speaking (and listening too, no need to say) but because I, as a teacher as well, simpathise with the teacher when she wants one of us to step forward and say something and I may be more fluency-oriented than accuracy! (I wonder what she's going to react to this if she ever gets to read this bit! :-). It's not a matter of the less shy students dominating the "mis en commun" or plenary debates as it has been the cases on a couple of occasions! You learn to speak by speaking. You overcome the fear by fully being aware that you will make mistakes, that you will get stuck for a word or a tense or a sound mispronounced at times and that it's part of the learning process, not a weakness and it's ok if others laugh with you at a mistake you make. It's fine. That's my approach and that's the attitude I promote among my students.
It's 25-30 of us in a class and I don't want to manipulate the plenary speaking times. That is the risk-taking. I think in my L1, hard not to. I am even more aware of that.

I wonder how or to what extent does me being a teacher helps me in my learning of French.

not finished, more shortly

new technology

I want to try podcasting with my students as a way to record their progress but the idea of buying all the necessary equipment and then not using it cos it's complex or not engaging is just too strong still.

Great videos to watch for teachers and students

These are two of the great Ted talks on www.ted.com.
The first is Sir Ken Robinson, not only an excellent speaker but his "Schools kill creativity" talk is awesome. After I watched this video I saw a short bit of a Hannah Montana episode by chance where she was studying for an anatomy exam, singing and dancing. When doing the exam, she kind of needed to sing and dance to remember the names and stuff and she failed because of that. I couldn't help but thinking of Sir Robinson's video.
No room for creativity. Creativity is often punished or frowned upon, which means descreasing the inventiveness of younger children as they grow older.



The second video is from Patricia Ryan, who states that unless you speak English your potentially very good ideas will not reach out to as many people as they'd deserve reaching out.