Steve's Blog Posts, A New Age for Language Students, Teachers and Schools (1)

A New Age for Language Students, Teachers and Schools (1)

Steve: Hi, Lindsay.

I'll let you have a glass of water because you're going to be doing a lot of talking. I'm very happy to be able to talk to Lindsay Dow of Lindsay Does Languages and maybe you can start by explaining what it is that you do. Lindsay: Okay.

Thank you very much, Steve. Hello, I'm Lindsay, as Steve said. What I do is quite a mixture of things. I teach languages, I teach English, French and Spanish, but I also learn them myself. That's my main passion, the learning side of things. Right now, I'm learning Korean and trying to keep up a little bit of Japanese, as well. I recently finished Esperanto, which is quite interesting because I started it a lot later than those languages, yet I feel so much more advanced already, which goes to show the whole ‘no language is created equal' theory. Also, in each of those languages I blog, I make videos about language. It's pretty much everything in my life, language, language, language. Steve: Okay, we'll leave a link in the description box here to the video so people can come and visit you.

Now, question.

First of all, let me say that having learned a bunch of languages that languages are not equal in term of their level of difficulty, as you say. It all depends on the language we start from, but I'm finding Korean a challenge. Even though I speak Chinese and I speak Japanese, Korean is difficult. We can get into that later on, perhaps, in the discussion -- what makes a language difficult. No question that after Russian and Czech then Ukrainian becomes easier for French speakers, Spanish speakers. So they're not all equally difficult, no question, but my question is this. I think we have a tendency to think of English-speaking countries, that includes, of course, the UK, Canada and so forth, as countries where people are less interested in learning other languages either because they're less intelligent, which is probably not the case, most people are equally intelligent, on average, or because they just don't feel the need.

And, typically, people from smaller countries, smaller languages feel a greater need to learn. If you go to Japan, Russia or Spain, mind you, the Germans are pretty good. So the question is this. How keen are people in the UK on learning languages, is a big part of your job trying to motivate them or are there a lot of motivated people who just need your help? Lindsay: That's a very good question.

Before I did Lindsay Does Languages, I worked in a secondary school. I was a Learning Support Assistant primarily in the Language Department and I would take out small groups to teach them. If they wouldn't pick up as much in the class, I'd teach them at a slower rate myself and it was always a challenge within the main language classroom in secondary school. Bear in mind, a lot of the time this was the first exposure people had had to languages.

When I was working in schools it wasn't compulsory. I think it was in 2014 they actually made it compulsory to learn a language in primary school and a very interesting thing is that it's actually very open. They say any language living or dead. They have to learn a language, a different language to English within primary school, which is really interesting because it then creates this difference that you have when people then go to secondary school and they start, generally, with French or Spanish, occasionally German, maybe something else. It was the same problem when I was that age, as well.

I had had French back in primary school as a kind of extracurricular thing, but then going to secondary you start from the beginning. You're coming from all these different schools and no one knows where you're at and so the teachers then have this quite difficult job, granted, of trying to bring everyone to the same point. What happens there is you're 11 years old and your teachers are talking to you as if you're four. You know, dog, cat, green, blue, all of that stuff and it's taught in a very primary manner, very simplistic. You go into maths lessons and you're learning trigonometry for the first time and then in French you're still learning I like football. I think a big reason sort of on the official education side of things is that it's not very inspiring, perhaps.

That's by no means most teachers. There are some fantastic language teachers out there. But then, also, as you say, coming from an English-speaking country where the need is seen as less. Steve: A couple of reactions.

If you're in Sweden, most kids by the time they reach secondary school already speak English because they've been watching English-language television programs, English-language movies, listening to English pop music and so forth. Another thing, too, I often question the relative importance of the classroom versus other factors. I'll give you another example.

My grandchildren are in French immersion. French immersion in Canada is a situation where English-speaking kids in a place like Vancouver where there are no French speakers to speak of do all their schooling in French. The late immersion kids who start in grade 7 or grade 8, they catch up right away. So they're in a classroom studying history, chemistry, whatever it might be, maybe getting a little extra help, but they're doing it in French. They're in there with a group of kids who started doing this from grade 1 and they catch up right away. It's interesting. It gets back to your point.

Maybe in high school in Britain instead of teaching them this is a dog, if they actually gave them something that was more challenging to do and more interesting they might advance more quickly. Lindsay: Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more.

I completely agree with that. Like I mentioned briefly, now it's compulsory in primary school and it's very open. They'll say you learn a language. Primarily, it's going to be French, it's going to be Spanish. There's one company, I think they're called Springboard to Languages, they teach Esperanto and their whole kind of ethos is, well, in primary school kids learn the recorder.

Not to create a nation of recorder players, but to create kids who understand the basics of music. They teach Esperanto with that mindset of this isn't so that everyone speaks Esperanto, it's so that people are exposed from a young age to other languages. I think that is what's needed and that, hopefully, is now beginning to change in the last couple of years with that introduction. Steve: Now, question.

I'm in favor of giving kids choice. I'm against the idea that in Canada, say in Vancouver, everyone has to learn French. Even though French is an official language, the reality is they will probably not have much use for French and if they were more motivated to learn Chinese or Spanish why wouldn't they be able to learn that language. The counter argument from the schools always is we don't have qualified, accredited teachers in that language. My answer always is there are so many resources available it doesn't matter, if you have a motivated language coach who knows how to help kids access all this stuff. So what do they do in Britain, how would they deal with this fact?

The kid says, okay, I want to learn Japanese and the school says we don't have a Japanese teacher, then what? Lindsay: That's pretty much what happens, so then the kids won't get schooled in Japanese.

For example, my partner is a primary school teacher and they have French at their school. They have a French teacher who comes in I think one day a week and teaches each class one by one their French lesson for the week and that's the way it goes. It may be that a teacher that already works at a school studied Latin, for example, when they were at school 30-40 years ago and they're like, oh, I've got some Latin, then they might teach Latin if the school can't find an external teacher to come in and do it. So there are occasions where it would vary like that, but it's very rare I think that the child would get the choice. Again, like you say, because of that lack of teachers. Steve: But you said they were allowed to choose whatever they wanted.

Lindsay: Oh, no, the school is allowed to choose.

Steve: Oh, the school is allowed to choose.

Again, it always annoys me that everything that happens in language learning is dictated by the teacher. Let's say you had a skill, within the teaching profession you had people who knew where to find resources on the internet, let's say Japanese. There are going to be children in the UK who are interested in anime, who are interested in some aspect of Japanese culture. Even at the age of 10 those people exist. Let's say that the initial course was to start to show them some of the things they can do in different languages, which might be Swahili, Japanese, Russian, whatever, and then the kid says I'm interested in Japanese.

Then the teacher chooses to say, well, here are some resources you can use that you can listen to, that you can do stuff with. Maybe you have to pool the human resources within the teaching community.

So a teacher at school A is a coordinator, coach, motivator, but she's able to access some other more specific resources, Japanese language resources that are available in Yorkshire or somewhere. I come across this here. Again, if we don't have a teacher in our school who can teach Japanese you can't have Japanese, which in today's day and age strikes me as very backward looking. Lindsay: I think that's a fantastic point and I love that idea of having someone who gives the child the resources because everything now is so much easier.

Like you say, with the internet and everything it's so easy, as well, for a child. A child picks up an iPad and they know exactly what to do with it, so if you've got a Japanese app installed on the iPad the child is going to know exactly what to do and they're going to learn Japanese. Yeah, it is so easy.

It should be the case that the child can say I want to learn this language. I'm intrigue by that. I love this aspect of that culture or I love that food. Just something small that they've picked up on, even from a young age, that they can then drawn on and learn a language from. I would like to think that that is something that will change. You asked at the beginning is it a case of the students in the UK already there or am I kind of having to motivate and I've always felt very passionate about that idea of inspiring language learning with what I do and I hope that comes across. I hope that I do inspire people. Steve: Well, you know, there's always this sort of dilemma.

On the one hand, sort of the learner-centered approach says that the learner, not just kids, should have the freedom to choose what to learn, how to learn, but the reality is most people don't want that degree of freedom. Most people like to be directed. I always find as a learner that the teacher is like, here, you have to read this story and then you have to answer my questions on this story, so we're dancing to the tune that's dictated by the teacher. There has to be some kind of balance between freedom and people being motivated by what interests them.

The fact is the teacher is like a shepherd. You have the lagers, so they need be herded along with the others. So some kind of more of a role of a motivator, coordinator, providing some guidance and direction, but where possible allowing people to do what they want to do rather than forcing them, which gets me to the subject of Esperanto. Some people say if you learn Latin, then you can learn the other romance languages.

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A New Age for Language Students, Teachers and Schools (1)

Steve: Hi, Lindsay.

I’ll let you have a glass of water because you’re going to be doing a lot of talking. I’m very happy to be able to talk to Lindsay Dow of Lindsay Does Languages and maybe you can start by explaining what it is that you do. Lindsay: Okay.

Thank you very much, Steve. Hello, I’m Lindsay, as Steve said. What I do is quite a mixture of things. I teach languages, I teach English, French and Spanish, but I also learn them myself. That’s my main passion, the learning side of things. Right now, I’m learning Korean and trying to keep up a little bit of Japanese, as well. I recently finished Esperanto, which is quite interesting because I started it a lot later than those languages, yet I feel so much more advanced already, which goes to show the whole ‘no language is created equal' theory. Also, in each of those languages I blog, I make videos about language. It’s pretty much everything in my life, language, language, language. Steve: Okay, we’ll leave a link in the description box here to the video so people can come and visit you.

Now, question.

First of all, let me say that having learned a bunch of languages that languages are not equal in term of their level of difficulty, as you say. It all depends on the language we start from, but I’m finding Korean a challenge. Even though I speak Chinese and I speak Japanese, Korean is difficult. We can get into that later on, perhaps, in the discussion -- what makes a language difficult. No question that after Russian and Czech then Ukrainian becomes easier for French speakers, Spanish speakers. So they’re not all equally difficult, no question, but my question is this. I think we have a tendency to think of English-speaking countries, that includes, of course, the UK, Canada and so forth, as countries where people are less interested in learning other languages either because they’re less intelligent, which is probably not the case, most people are equally intelligent, on average, or because they just don’t feel the need.

Before I did Lindsay Does Languages, I worked in a secondary school. I was a Learning Support Assistant primarily in the Language Department and I would take out small groups to teach them. If they wouldn’t pick up as much in the class, I’d teach them at a slower rate myself and it was always a challenge within the main language classroom in secondary school. Bear in mind, a lot of the time this was the first exposure people had had to languages.

When I was working in schools it wasn’t compulsory. I think it was in 2014 they actually made it compulsory to learn a language in primary school and a very interesting thing is that it’s actually very open. They say any language living or dead. They have to learn a language, a different language to English within primary school, which is really interesting because it then creates this difference that you have when people then go to secondary school and they start, generally, with French or Spanish, occasionally German, maybe something else. It was the same problem when I was that age, as well.

I had had French back in primary school as a kind of extracurricular thing, but then going to secondary you start from the beginning. You’re coming from all these different schools and no one knows where you’re at and so the teachers then have this quite difficult job, granted, of trying to bring everyone to the same point. What happens there is you’re 11 years old and your teachers are talking to you as if you’re four. You know, dog, cat, green, blue, all of that stuff and it’s taught in a very primary manner, very simplistic. You go into maths lessons and you’re learning trigonometry for the first time and then in French you’re still learning I like football. I think a big reason sort of on the official education side of things is that it’s not very inspiring, perhaps.

That’s by no means most teachers. There are some fantastic language teachers out there. But then, also, as you say, coming from an English-speaking country where the need is seen as less. Steve: A couple of reactions.

If you’re in Sweden, most kids by the time they reach secondary school already speak English because they’ve been watching English-language television programs, English-language movies, listening to English pop music and so forth. Another thing, too, I often question the relative importance of the classroom versus other factors. I’ll give you another example.

My grandchildren are in French immersion. French immersion in Canada is a situation where English-speaking kids in a place like Vancouver where there are no French speakers to speak of do all their schooling in French. The late immersion kids who start in grade 7 or grade 8, they catch up right away. So they’re in a classroom studying history, chemistry, whatever it might be, maybe getting a little extra help, but they’re doing it in French. They’re in there with a group of kids who started doing this from grade 1 and they catch up right away. It’s interesting. It gets back to your point.

I completely agree with that. Like I mentioned briefly, now it’s compulsory in primary school and it’s very open. They’ll say you learn a language. Primarily, it’s going to be French, it’s going to be Spanish. There’s one company, I think they’re called Springboard to Languages, they teach Esperanto and their whole kind of ethos is, well, in primary school kids learn the recorder.

Not to create a nation of recorder players, but to create kids who understand the basics of music. They teach Esperanto with that mindset of this isn’t so that everyone speaks Esperanto, it’s so that people are exposed from a young age to other languages. I think that is what’s needed and that, hopefully, is now beginning to change in the last couple of years with that introduction. Steve: Now, question.

I’m in favor of giving kids choice. I’m against the idea that in Canada, say in Vancouver, everyone has to learn French. Even though French is an official language, the reality is they will probably not have much use for French and if they were more motivated to learn Chinese or Spanish why wouldn’t they be able to learn that language. The counter argument from the schools always is we don’t have qualified, accredited teachers in that language. My answer always is there are so many resources available it doesn’t matter, if you have a motivated language coach who knows how to help kids access all this stuff. So what do they do in Britain, how would they deal with this fact?

The kid says, okay, I want to learn Japanese and the school says we don’t have a Japanese teacher, then what? Lindsay: That’s pretty much what happens, so then the kids won’t get schooled in Japanese.

For example, my partner is a primary school teacher and they have French at their school. They have a French teacher who comes in I think one day a week and teaches each class one by one their French lesson for the week and that’s the way it goes. It may be that a teacher that already works at a school studied Latin, for example, when they were at school 30-40 years ago and they’re like, oh, I’ve got some Latin, then they might teach Latin if the school can’t find an external teacher to come in and do it. So there are occasions where it would vary like that, but it’s very rare I think that the child would get the choice. Again, like you say, because of that lack of teachers. Steve: But you said they were allowed to choose whatever they wanted.

Lindsay: Oh, no, the school is allowed to choose.

Steve: Oh, the school is allowed to choose.

Again, it always annoys me that everything that happens in language learning is dictated by the teacher. Let’s say you had a skill, within the teaching profession you had people who knew where to find resources on the internet, let’s say Japanese. There are going to be children in the UK who are interested in anime, who are interested in some aspect of Japanese culture. Even at the age of 10 those people exist. Let’s say that the initial course was to start to show them some of the things they can do in different languages, which might be Swahili, Japanese, Russian, whatever, and then the kid says I’m interested in Japanese.

So a teacher at school A is a coordinator, coach, motivator, but she’s able to access some other more specific resources, Japanese language resources that are available in Yorkshire or somewhere. I come across this here. Again, if we don’t have a teacher in our school who can teach Japanese you can’t have Japanese, which in today’s day and age strikes me as very backward looking. Lindsay: I think that’s a fantastic point and I love that idea of having someone who gives the child the resources because everything now is so much easier.

Like you say, with the internet and everything it’s so easy, as well, for a child. A child picks up an iPad and they know exactly what to do with it, so if you’ve got a Japanese app installed on the iPad the child is going to know exactly what to do and they’re going to learn Japanese. Yeah, it is so easy.

It should be the case that the child can say I want to learn this language. I’m intrigue by that. I love this aspect of that culture or I love that food. Just something small that they’ve picked up on, even from a young age, that they can then drawn on and learn a language from. I would like to think that that is something that will change. You asked at the beginning is it a case of the students in the UK already there or am I kind of having to motivate and I’ve always felt very passionate about that idea of inspiring language learning with what I do and I hope that comes across. I hope that I do inspire people. Steve: Well, you know, there’s always this sort of dilemma.

On the one hand, sort of the learner-centered approach says that the learner, not just kids, should have the freedom to choose what to learn, how to learn, but the reality is most people don’t want that degree of freedom. Most people like to be directed. I always find as a learner that the teacher is like, here, you have to read this story and then you have to answer my questions on this story, so we’re dancing to the tune that’s dictated by the teacher. There has to be some kind of balance between freedom and people being motivated by what interests them.