PEGAGOGIC PENSIERI

A student I taught this afternoon is preparing for a university level oral exam in which she has to describe a picture. “What sort of picture?” I asked. “I don’t know” she replied. The exam is on Monday, there has been no practice of this sort of task and she has no idea what to expect. Now I have been teaching children and adults for long enough to know that you can give some groups of students important information over and over again and they will swear that you have never broached the subject, but this is not the case here. Next I discovered that she had no idea how to go about describing any scene and would have found it difficult even in Italian. This is not uncommon in students: how are they to know if you, as the teacher, don’t tell them? How can you concentrate on content [and not even that has been done here] and completely ignore technique? For goodness sake, give the poor dears some guidelines! The student’s mind – it was a fascinating process for me to watch – just zoomed in on the objects in the first photo we looked at and she was not lacking in vocabulary. But she had no knowledge of how to order her thoughts or how to make her description interesting. “Just a minute, slow down” I counselled. “Now tell me where we are – it doesn’t matter if you don’t know exactly – just town / countryside / Britain / Italy”. Then, “OK, when is it happening? What season do you think it is? Why? What time of day? Why?” If there are people: “Now, who is there? What are they doing? What are they wearing?” or if there are no people, “What can you see?” Again – whoa! “Take the picture section by section”: and of course, she had no stock of phrases like “in the foreground / in the background / on the left-hand side” etc. This is not the first time I have come across a student who is just told, “The exam’s next week – this is what you have to do [in the vaguest terms ] -get on with it.” It is easy to criticise a teacher I have not met – I realise that – but I’ve seen so much of this now that I think there must be a general lack of guidance here in how to approach the required tasks. To be fair, I have observed this in the UK too.

On a similar theme, I do not know how any teacher can expect students to debate in an oral exam or write discursive essays without giving them a list of the expressions they will need to do so, regardless of topic. The lists I have devised for Italian and English teaching are divided into sections such as: agreeing / disagreeing / conceding / concluding. [French has more commercial material available on this.]

My advice to students is always, “Do anything [legal] that you can to give yourself an edge”. And , with higher level exams, that usually means observing and studying the culture of the target language and doing a lot of reading. I remember begging an A level French group I was teaching to go and see the films, Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources, which had just been released in Britain at the time. [These were 18-year-olds, remember: you shouldn’t have to always organise a school trip to a film that is showing in a cinema down the road from where they live.] Only one young man from that group heeded my advice. And when the aural exam came upon us what was the main part of it about? - An interview with Pagnol, the author of the books on which the films were based. Apart from the fact that, if they’d gone to see the films, the other students would have experienced a psychological boost – “Hey! I know about this!” – and believe me, that can help on exam day – one question used the French word sources. Only the young man who had seen the films realised that in this context it meant “springs”; the others misinterpreted it. I rest my case.

When it comes to reading in the foreign language, I tell students to resist the urge to look words up when tackling a book: otherwise it slows the whole process down, they get fed up and the book ends up back on the shelf. “Persevere and get the gist”, I tell them. And they are often surprised at how quickly their fluency improves. In the days when a literature paper was obligatory in A level modern language exams, I would tell them to read the book in English translation first. After all, they were going to do that anyway, so you might as well be honest about it and make the thing an asset. “At least if you do that”, I would point out “you have read the book as it was meant to be read – in its entirety, without worrying about meaning and without stopping to analyse”. Then we would go to the original version and get down to the nitty-gritty. Another way that students can help themselves when learning a foreign language is to read a news story – one of international interest – in their own langauge. Then, when they at least know the basics of what has happened, they can go and find a version of the story in the target language[ so easy with the internet!]

With regard to listening, I tell students to have the radio on as much as possible in the foreign language: they don’t have to understand all, or even most, of what is said but if you have it on while you are doing the ironing or something you are, subconsciously, absorbing some of the rhythm of that language. Czech, for instance, is a monotone language and if you are a learner you need to listen to it to get to grips with that: in English, on the other hand, tonic stress and sentence stress patterns are vital: [Consider how tonic stress can alter meaning in English, eg., perfect - adjective / perfect - verb and the way we use our voices for emphasis where French and Italian use extra words, eg., I think that / Moi, je crois que…] One of the reasons why someone like me puts cushions over her ears when the Queen or Blair makes a speech in French is that, although it will be grammatically correct, they use exactly the same intonation as they do in English.

Talking of grammar, one thing I never do is say, “It is ALWAYS like this” when giving a grammatical rule. You might be able to get away with this with children but advanced and mature students are more likely to come across stylistic variations and this can be quite stressful for them. They [understandably] blame you, too: “But you said….!”

In preparing students for English IELTS [a horrible exam which I would not like to have to sit myself] I analysed the type of questions asked, particularly in the listening test, probably the most difficult component. There was nearly always an address given, very quickly, which students would have to write down. Now, just as a lot of Italian street names are those of historical dates – every Italian town will have a via XXV aprile, for instance – so British street names are themed: names of famous people, names of battles, names of flowers, etc. I ‘d advise students that it might be worth their while to buy themselves a ticket for the City Circle bus, take the round trip through the city and notice the street names. Those particular street names may not have come up, though sometimes they did, but the activity gave students confidence – and confidence, provided it is not misplaced, can be an edge in an exam situation.

Now it’s gone 9 pm and the schoolmarm has rambled on in a way that she would never encourage her students to do, so I’ll end by saying this: I am not the perfect teacher and I don’t know anyone who is. My “tricks of the trade” have taken a lifetime in education to acquire and I have given some crap lessons in my time! I have off days, like everyone else, and sometimes the most meticulously planned lesson just goes wrong. But I have learnt this: you often do not know what effect you have had on your students. You can be in despair because a lesson didn’t seem to work and years later you find out a student remembers it as one of your best; the converse, of course, is also true. You can’t always predict the exam questions but you can give students as much confidence as it is possible for them to have by discussing approach and technique with them. Do not send them “naked into the examinations hall”.