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Do you speak the TL you learned at school | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5334 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 1 of 53 15 August 2012 at 8:41am | IP Logged | ||
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We have been discussing how much benefit we get from the language training we get at school. From what I
see, a lot of you do not feel that it benefited you all that much, and some of you speak the language you learned in school, some of you don't. Given that we represent some of the most avid language learners, that is actually quite sad. I was a language teacher at a high school for two years, and I was so enthusiastic! I played Spanish songs, we had cultural days where I brought Spanish food, I begged the other teachers to let me have the kids for a whole day, so that we could get in a mega session of Spanish ( my colleagues thought I was out of my mind, but were delighted to get those hours off) I brought in native speakers for my English class and I took them to the cinema and showed them Hitchcock films in class. I brought two of my pupils on a class tour to Spain, and invited them to meet my Spanish family. It may sound standard now, but I can assure you that this was not standard 25 years ago. I wanted my pupils to love the languages as much as I did, and to get really good. And yet my results were just marginally better than those of the other language teachers. Yes, my English class got great grades, but they might have anyway, due to the media exposure, and in my Spanish class they had the full range from those who got straight A's to those who could barely introduce themselves. But even those with the best grades could only speak rather basic Spanish after three years. A2 to B1 perhaps. My own experience as a student was mixed. Yes, I learned English quite well, but I think I can attribute only half of that to the actual teaching. I also learned French quite well, but that was all due to my year in France. After one year of French at school I knew perhaps 100 words, and all pronounced badly. In spite of the fact that I feel that I speak German rather badly, that is still my best success story from school. I did German for two years at school, after which I spoke some kind of German. Ten years later I did a two week's course at Berlitz in Munich, and then I have done a few classes at Berlitz here, and I have read a bit on my own, and spoken with some friends when they were visiting us or we them. Of course, German is not too difficult for Norwegians, but I am still satisfied that I had enough background from those two years in school to be able to communicate. So what is your experiences? Did you actually speak the language after having learned it at school? How many years did it take, which languages did you do, were they "easy" or hard, did you do things differently in the different languages you learned, and which changes would you do to to language teaching to make it more effective? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| magictom123 Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5593 days ago 272 posts - 365 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French | Message 2 of 53 15 August 2012 at 9:04am | IP Logged | ||
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It appears to me that the teaching of foreign languages in the UK (where I'm from) is
abysmal. After 5 years of French at school I could barely say my name, ask for an Orangina...and that is literally it. For a while afterwards I thought my experience was the exception because my school had a bad reputation and the french classes in particular were awful. A culture had developed around those lessons for every class and year in the school where it had become the norm for probably 90% of every class to do at the very least nothing but sit and chat, and at worst, well...I regularly saw 12 year old's fighting with the teacher, swearing at him etc. This was nothing compared to the older children who (yes, this really happened) threw tables out of those large windows classrooms often have that have a central axis. All this while other children threatened the teacher, threw things at him whilst he was looking at them and finally, once - set his chair on fire through the use of a cigarette lighter. OK, you went to a stinker of a school I hear you say. Well, yes, but when I left and went on to Sixth Form (college level, 16-18 for anyone unfamiliar with the UK system) the school was a million times better. However, my friends, who by the end of our time there had had 7 years of good solid instruction in German were only marginally better. One of them to this day still maintains he directly and literally translated English into German and got good marks. When I pointed out that in German the second verb goes at the end of a sentence (something I had learnt from an hour or two of Michel Thomas' course), he was stumped. 7 years of German and he didn't know something that's taught in a matter of hours elsewhere. So, in short...No, I never spoke my target language in school. Despite 5 years of lessons, I was never even taught it Edited by magictom123 on 15 August 2012 at 9:07am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5982 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 3 of 53 15 August 2012 at 9:19am | IP Logged | ||
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For now the answer is no but it's my own fault for letting it slide. After 7 years of French at High School I reached a rough B1 level. I should have achieved more but there were some issues. I had good teachers for the first five years. Although expectations are low for students aged 16 (I guess there are too many subjects and not enough time to do any of them properly), my teachers ensured I had a reasonable grasp of the basic grammar etc and provided a framework to be built on later.
For the next two years of high school I studied at a different institution where unfortunately the teachers were not as good. We had two teachers, one who preferred gossiping about her colleagues to actually teaching, the other who was quite good on a good day but on a bad day would just waste time arguing with the students (in English, of course). Due to dwindling numbers our class ended up being combined with the class a year ahead of us, which is the single biggest disaster and one of the reasons I felt so left behind and hopeless. I had no motivation to look at the language on my own, in part because I really did not know what I was supposed to be doing anyway. It's a shame because if I'd continued with a teacher of the same calibre I had for the first five years (and no awful mixed ability class nonsense), I think the outcome would have been much better. I made bad decisions about where to study for the last two years of high school. Having said that, the German teaching at my first school was dire. But at least after spending two years turning me off German for nearly twenty years, the teacher in question got sacked. Engagement with the culture and media is a really important point, and some teachers definitely made some attempts to encourage it along the way. But for close minded teenagers in a fairly "rough" school I think the sense of otherness for even French culture was a step too far. It's quite sad to think how limited the world view of a high school student can be. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| maydayayday Pentaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5219 days ago 564 posts - 839 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, SpanishB2, FrenchB2 Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Polish, Persian, Vietnamese Studies: Urdu | Message 4 of 53 15 August 2012 at 9:31am | IP Logged | ||
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Third UK post here - which says something for the UK educational system (or the time of day of course)
@Solfrid Cristin - you taught too ? Yay for ex-teachers. I do speak the language I was taught at school (French). I had informal French from an enthusiastic primary teacher - I believe her husband was French. I had the usual five years of lessons but .... there had to be a but didn't there.... I had a series of summer exchange visits with a lovely Breton family. My exchange partner had a sister just a couple of years older so I tried to impress. I took two further years in the sixth form as a 'supplementary' subject to my Sciences & Maths. I used French at work for a few years and when I went to teach Science the kids thought it odd that the 'science bloke' could also talk to the pretty French tutor in her own language and take her to the pub after school on a Friday. I suspect some of the other teachers wish they had paid more attention to languages at school. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5334 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 5 of 53 15 August 2012 at 9:35am | IP Logged | ||
No motivator is better than that :-) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| eggcluck Senior Member China Joined 4701 days ago 168 posts - 278 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 6 of 53 15 August 2012 at 10:05am | IP Logged | ||
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My UK language education was terrible and went some thing like this:-
For 1 year we had Italian for 1 hour a week, needless to say I got no where. I remember how to say hello, and the words for nose and red ^^, lol. This was followed by 3 years of french again for 1 hour a week. Again I leanred so little, I wanted to do well but had no idea of how to study a language. The teacher was not particluary helpfull and in every class he just seemed to be going through the motions, there was no exposure to any French media or culture, nor did the school run an exchange program (local goverment was busy diverting funds to the schools where the more wealthy kids went ^^). After 3 years the School decided I was incabable of leraning a language and along with a host of others took me off the subject, and made me do statistics instead. I remember how to say my name, ca va, and that is pretty much it. Edited by eggcluck on 15 August 2012 at 10:11am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4868 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 7 of 53 15 August 2012 at 10:46am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm speaking English, but naturally I'm not speaking Latin and Ancient Greek - and I've completely forgotten them by now.
You sound like a great language teacher, Solfrid Cristin! I wish I had had such a dedicated English teacher right from the beginning. My Latin and Ancient Greek teachers all were great and very passionate about their languages - I guess only people who really love those languages would ever teach them. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 8 of 53 15 August 2012 at 11:07am | IP Logged | ||
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I had classes in Danish, English, German, French and even Latin, and I learnt them well enough to use them all today (though Latin was only taught as a passive language). However today I also speak Spanish and Italian which I didn't learn in school, but began studying at home from textbooks, so my teachers can't take all the credit.
My studies at home in Spanish and Italian definitely benefited from the grammar I learned in school, but the influence also went the other way - I profited from having to invent methods for home study. All in all I wouldn't say my language in school was a disaster, even though I was more interested in mathematics and biology at that time. Thinking about it... I left school in 1972 and moved to Århus to study at the university there, so it is almost like I could see myself sitting on a shelf in some historical museum, surrounded by artefacts from a bygone age like fountain pens and books and stuffed birds. Or even worse: during my first school years we used simple dip pens of steel, and we sat two and two at immovable benches with a table and looked at an oldfashioned blackboard with a piece of 'chalk' instead of a keyboard. But at least the whip had been outlawed by 1960 where some google-eyed kid known to myself as 'me' entered Sct. Nicolai school in the medieval town Kolding, a venerable institution almost in the shadow of the local castle and within easy reach of my home where my family had lived at least since around 1820 (and probably long before that). So being a true relic from a distant past I don't have to try to look like something that was invented yesterday. Edited by Iversen on 15 August 2012 at 3:53pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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