Teachers Act Up!

My son gave me a picture of an owl he’d colored in preschool with the word “Merhaba” written above it.  A scholar from Turkey has been visiting his classroom while on a one year fellowship in early childhood education.

“Merhaba means hello!” I say, hoping he’ll be impressed.

“I already know that!”

Oren, not yet five, is confident about non-English languages.  When his best friend’s  mother spoke Chinese during soccer practice, Oren asked her if she also knew Spanish.

“No, I don’t.” She shrugged.

“Why not? I speak Spanish!”

“I guess you’ll have to teach me.”

“And you can teach me Chinese!”

I can still remember the excitement and awe I felt when I brought my first non-English word home from school to my mother.

“Do you know how the Sioux Indians say hello?” I handed her this grade school question much like I had handed her a yarn covered jar pencil holder and a caterpiller magnet.  Getting older meant I could give her gifts of the mind.

“Hau,” Mother said triumphantly, forming a stop sign with her raised hand.  Although she spoiled my chance to wow her with my new knowledge, I was proud of her Lakota fluency.  When she later greeted some of my grandmother’s neighbors in Spanish, I was overwhelmed with pride.

I learned “merhaba” ten years ago from my friend Serif who had also had a one year visiting scholar position at my university.

“Incredible! Incredible!” He said when I returned a book to him at his small campus apartment.  I can see him now: one hand raised above his head, the other grabbing a slice of white bread or cup of tea.

After eating a meal in the dining hall, “incredible!”  After watching the annual town bike races, “incredible!”

“How was your day?” I asked when I’d run into him at the bus-stop.

“Incredible! Incredible!”

He did not strike me as unusually upbeat or awestruck, so after several months of new friendship I asked, “How do you say incredible in Turkish?”

“Inanilmaz! Inanilmaz!”  The same inflection, the same gestures to the heavens, the same stress pattern and number of syllables.   From then on when he shouted “Incredible!” I parroted the word back to him in Turkish.

I packed this one word with me when I visited his family in Turkey the following year.   I was giving a paper in Spain and it seemed easy enough back then (single and childless) to continue my journey East to see Serif at home, roasting kestane kebap (chestnuts) with his mother on an electric stove, watching his daughter pass out tiny glasses of copper-colored tea.  I couldn’t make out much of what he said to his family but I had no trouble hearing this common interjection. Inanilmaz! wasn’t very useful when they sent me on an errand to buy a loaf of bread (ekmek), but it brought a smile to new Turkish friends’ faces.

Oren wasn’t as impressed.

“Inanilmaz, means incredible!” I said, as if I had given him fifty cents for the toy crane machine in the mall.  He’d already clawed something better.

“What I’m learning is mor.  Mor means moth.”

“Moth?”

The next day his regular classroom teacher explained, “They’re learning colors and there was a purple butterfly.  Mor means purple in Turkish, that’s where he probably got that from.”

Turkish has an unimpressive rank among the world’s most commonly spoken languages (between 20 and 30). There are few Turkish speakers in our town; no Turkish restaurants, no Turkish cartoons, and I can’t think of a single Turkish actor.  However, in our university town, we can regularly find a handful of Turkish academics and this year one has decided to teach in the campus pre-school class. While learning more commonly spoken and/or highly valued world languages (e.g. Spanish, French, Chinese, Arabic) may feel more vital for Oren’s future in the “linguistic marketplace,” the reality is that in the United States few children learn the importance of any language relative to English. Colin Baker  (2011) writes that fewer than 1 in 20 U.S. Children become bilingual through foreign language education (p. 116 in Foundations of Bilingual Education). While people around the world manage to acquire fluent English as a second language, monolingual Americans relax in the clouds, much like Jack in the Beanstalk’s giant, mindless of his golden egg-laying goose.

Oren has just started making connections between spoken and written English, asking to title pictures and to “make books,” cutting images of animals out of the New Yorker, taping them to the inside of a folded piece of colored paper and dictating sentences for each “page.” Why not add another skill in early childhood, to learn to say the “same thing” differently in non-English languages, and to use context cues to make sense of differently patterned sounds and syllables.

When I left his classroom, another child and his mother were counting the school steps in Spanish.

“…siete, ocho, nueve, diez!”

“¡Muy bien! ¿Y dónde aprendiste español?”

“Oh we don’t speak any Spanish,” the mother apologized.  “We only know to count from one to ten.”

While my question seemed to have blown an adult fuse, I perceived a flicker of understanding from her son.  He knew the exclamation of praise and the upward inflection of a question.  While he might have remained silent or mistakenly answered “Purple!” or “Moth!” I could sense he captured the rhythm of adult-child turn-taking.

How many other American children might become at ease with other languages through early exposure?

The demand for early childhood English instruction is huge the world over.  How to read English fairytales, how a boy can learn to catch the giant’s goose while he sleeps.

Proud of the little Spanish and less Turkish he’s learned, I know what Oren would say.

“I already know that!”

Let me introduce myself: I have been in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia since 2001.   For over ten years I have been fortunate to work with numerous Georgia teachers from your districts and this year is no exception.  I am currently advising an incredibly bright educator from one of your districts who is in her first semester of the Educational Specialist (Ed.S.) degree  program in TESOL & World Language Education. She brought  distressing news yesterday. Her district will not acknowledge this degree  and she will likely drop out of the program. If my UGA courses were only filled with Georgia teachers, then I might soon be out of a job.

Though she is not an ESOL teacher, her elementary classroom is filled with over 60% of students for whom English is their second or additional language.  She came to our department and program to deepen her understanding of language arts and literacy instruction with English language learners.  She is to be commended for pursuing a degree that will require extensive reading, applied projects, research practice, personal time, and ultimately, curriculum modification.  Her degree program, if she is allowed to complete it, will ultimately help her  improve instruction, increase job satisfaction, and promote her own retention and professionalization in the field, allowing her to become a literacy leader in her classroom, school, and district–contexts that are increasingly multilingual and multicultural.

However, I have just learned that she may have to drop out of her degree program. Due to changes in your districts’ policies, she and her colleagues will no longer receive any compensation for advanced degrees (beyond a B.A. with certification), no matter how much it may help her to improve practice and enhance student achievement outcomes.  In a climate that does not reward the rigor and expense of her study, she feels she has no choice but to quit.  She is extremely disappointed.  I can imagine other young Georgia teachers who might desire to  enhance their understanding of practice and improve instruction, feeling trapped in a climate that uses test scores as the basis for advanced pay but discourages any further study to understand how tests and curriculum work, especially with the huge number of newcomers to our Georgia school districts.

Your teacher and I wondered: is this about finances–the district need to halt salary increases? Is this about politics? The district afraid of teachers who become advanced critical thinkers and ask questions about the testing climate that we find ourselves in and explore complimentary additions or alternatives? Is this about scandal–wanting to stem the tide of teachers pursuing “advanced degrees” from untrustworthy institutions (online or otherwise)? Is this about distrust and disappointment–believing that degrees even from recognized institutions such as UGA–have little effect on practice?

As a Professor who has worked intimately with so many Georgia pre- and in-service teachers (helping many of them to achieve their initial certification for your employ) and who hopes to continue various partnerships with your linguistically and culturally rich school systems,  I would like a better understanding.  What is the reason School Superintendents use to justify a policy that will ultimately discourage educators from pursuing advanced knowledge?

In speaking to one district’s administrative secretary by phone this morning, I heard an unusual name (I’ll call her “Brigitta” to maintain her anonymity)–so I asked: Are you German? Indeed, she is! She was an immigrant child when her family moved to our state from Europe.  However, her English is so proficient and Georgian, that I would not have known this unique history had her name not been an indication.  All Georgia students bring with them unique lingustic and cultural histories–English dialects and world languages, past and future tenses filled with diversity.  Present-day ESOL students add an opportunity for all Georgia students to increasingly recognize and build upon the languages and cultures around and within us and become advanced in world literacies–joining global markets with people who will often look, speak, and act differently from ourselves.  I believe Georgia teachers who are in our TESOL & World Language program take back a wealth of strategies to their classrooms,  strategies to  help ESOL students acquire English literacy as well as strategies for ALL students to acquire multicultural skill sets in regular education as well as foreign language classrooms, skill sets that are invaluable in today’s and tomorrow’s economy.

I am afraid these new county policies will have adverse effects–forcing teachers to choose between remaining stagnant in your districts or pursuing advanced degrees and seeking other districts/states for employment or other professions that will honor them.

What are the discussions on your end? Help me to understand your dissatisfaction or distrust.  I don’t think this is just because you want to empty my classrooms.  This will not be the case.  We have growing international enrollments from students from around the world who know the value of additional languages, language teaching pedagogies, and multiculturalism.  If your constituencies do wish colleges of education to retool and reform to your needs, what do you perceive those to be? Are you interested in knowing more about we have learned through our studies and collaborations world-wide?

We are very interested in a dialogue between Education Professors and Education Stakeholders–Superintendents, district and school administrators, teachers, staff, parents and children.  Let us imagine the future together, identifying the complex and varied literacy skills our students need to be able to successfully join international university classrooms and workplaces in our state.

Sincerely yours,

Dr. Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor

Vocabulary lists!

Grammar exercises!

Phonetic translations!

A 60 minute audio CD!

Do these sound like fun to you? What about a laundry list of classroom related vocabulary transliterated into English orthography—from report card (el informe/ ehl een-FOHR-meh) to playground (el patio de recreo/ ehl PAH-tyoh deh rreh-KREH-oh)? What about verb conjugation charts? A 3000 word bilingual glossary?

My eyes glaze over as I review the available books on the market directed toward teachers wanting to learn beginner Spanish.  I am momentarily drawn back to Summer 2003 when I wanted to experience beginner world language learning again and I enrolled in a Hebrew Ulpan for 6 weeks in Israel. Colin Baker (2011) writes, “The word Ulpan is derived from an Aramaic root meaning ‘custom, training, instruction, law.’  This movement started in 1948 after the State of Israel was established and emergency measures were needed to teach Hebrew -quickly- to large numbers of immigrants.  Until 1948 Hebrew had been largely a liturgical rather than spoken language –intense cultural activity and language learning helped to shape the nation.

I remember turning the pages of my well worn pocket Hebrew-English dictionary searching for the vocabulary word to complete five sentences about a picture of an elderly man seated on a park bench with a dog. I remember the sweat and fear at night before facing my Israeli teacher in the morning and my classmates who seemed to soar ahead of me either because of their backgrounds from Hebrew school lessons in the States or because they were recent immigrants to Israel and needed to know how to buy a refrigerator in Hebrew and not Amharic or Russian.  I remember feeling frozen on the first day of class when I was asked to describe myself—and I didn’t have the words for soccer, poetry, teacher, or scrabble player.  But I did have my cousin’s Hebrew version of Dr. Seuss’s “My Book About Me.” In the comfort of my aunt’s home in suburban Tel Aviv prior to my arrival at the language institute, I learned to say “I am a girl,” “My hair is brown and curly” and “I have 16 teeth downstairs.”  I had gone to the market with my aunt several times prior to attending language classes and I had also learned to say tomato, green pepper, corn, and chocolate (she was making “Israeli salad” and I wanted the chocolate). So I spewed these vocabulary words as if I were on Dick Clark’s $10,000 Pyramid game and the category clue was “Misha’s first and only words in Hebrew.”

While I can remember the exasperated feeling of studying a foreign language late into the night to complete my practice exercises, I also remember moments when the vocabulary lists came to life.  I had just learned the Hebrew word for terrorist (this was in the vocabulary list with buying a refrigerator).  Only a few weeks after my arrival I picked up a copy of Haaretz, a Hebrew language newspaper, and there was the word “terrorist” several times between the front page and the want ads listing all kinds of kitchen appliances. It seemed strange as a beginning language learner to have “terrorist” appear alongside lists which included household items and parts of the body.  However, when I googled for more information about Nehariya, an Israeli city where I would soon visit with extended relatives, the first automatic pairing that appeared was “Nehariya – Attack.”  It became abundantly clear that if one wanted to learn Hebrew in contemporary Israeli society and keep all one’s body parts, that “terrorist” was just such a word one wanted to learn sooner rather than later.

Reading over these beginner Spanish books reminds me of this experience with language learning in Israel, but what I can’t remember now are any of the Hebrew words I learned from my own study of word lists.  “I’d like some Chocolate,” “What’s your name?” “You have a nice refrigerator”—I must have said each of these phrases a dozen times during my six weeks of study, visits to relatives’ houses, and tourism.  Did I fail as a student of language learning? Did I waste thousands of shekels on my courses, the plane ticket and chocolate bars if the result is back to square one? This was nine distant summers ago and since then I’ve had very few opportunities to use communicative Hebrew.  In fact, my bilingual Israeli uncle predicted this would come to pass.

“Why would you want to study Hebrew?”

“I’m a linguist and a language educator—I love learning and teaching languages and I haven’t learned another language fluently other than Spanish in a long time.”

“But no one speaks Hebrew. Why don’t you study Russian? Or Chinese?”

“You speak Hebrew.”

“But I also speak English. You’re going to study Hebrew but you’re not going to speak it to anybody.  It’s a waste of time.”

Hmph, I remember thinking.  I’ll decide what is a waste of my time! I also wanted to study Hebrew so I could feel more connected to my family’s language.  But as a person of Jewish descent with Yiddish and German as languages of “inheritance” and Hebrew a relatively new, adopted language of home, my “family language” is quite unclear.  Having nation-state as well as institutional (religious) status, Hebrew may seem like the most “valid and authorized” language of the Jewish people. But here was a member of my own family telling me he’d already learned English so why study something so unncessary, something I would never practically use?

When my six weeks of study had ended, I visited for a week with non-English speaking relatives in the Northern part of the state on my own when my need for Hebrew loomed large and impossible.  I remember the awkward silences when I had already exhausted my lists of produce and descriptions of my brown hair and brown eyes.  The show “Friends” was playing but it was dubbed in Hebrew and I couldn’t laugh along with my peer-aged cousins.  I was a dead linguistic weight at parties.  We used smiles, gestures, and at times avoided one another all together.  Then mid-week a Spanish word slipped out when I was reaching for one in Hebrew.  My elder cousin’s husband, Yom Tov, asked, “¿Usted habla español?” Yes! I said YES! Sí! I rattled off all the words I had been storing in the winter of my silent language acquisition period.  Yom Tov was of sephardic descent and grew up in former Yugoslavia speaking Ladino, the spoken and written language of Jews of Spanish origin. Despite the fact that the Ladino language is a variety from 14^th and 15^th century Spain and Portugal when the Jews were expelled, we could still understand one another. Yom Tov and his wife Ruthy took me to the local police station to purchase fresh eggs, we took a boat tour of their coastal city, we travelled to museums and dance festivals.  I began to think my investment in Hebrew resulted in a new understanding of Spanish diversity and a personal connection to the Spanish language I had not anticipated.

This is not to regret the six weeks I spent studying Hebrew vocabulary lists and the awkward nights I spent trying to write using cursive Hebrew consonants and dots for vowels.  Serious language learning of any kind is a form of character building, I reasoned, so that embedded within struggles to acquire discrete parts of language are lessons in culture, humility, second language acquisition processes, and communication with a capital “C.” Linguistic Anthropologist, Dell Hymes,  discussed the difference between competence and performance in a language—that despite the absence of grammatical or cogntive feasibility or social appropriateness, living people get things done through second, third, and fourth languages regardless.  Becoming a beginning language learner in any non-English language places the U.S. learner in the shoes of an essential human boundary crossing experience—one that continues to be lived daily by those who are immigrants in this country and whose children often appear in our classrooms.

Most teachers to whom these beginner Spanish books are directed can’t afford to leave their families and classrooms to take 6 weeks off to study Spanish in Mexico and I would bet that few teachers are going to actually use McGraw-Hill’s Spanish for Educators text or even online language progams such as Rosetta Stone with enough regularity to become fluent or absorb the “more than 3,000 key Spanish words and phrases” they claim to teach.  However, unlike my experience learning (and quickly losing) beginner Hebrew, Spanish language use has a daily, living purpose in many teachers lives.  There are Walmarts all around us (not to mention the much more interesting and vital small Mexican tiendas and weekly “pulgas”, Spanish for “fleas” short for “flea markets”) where Spanish vocabulary can be touched and tasted—selling pan dulce (Mexican sweet bread), Caribeño Goya products, even Saints candles or veladoras.  There are Spanish language newspapers, television and radio stations, markets and celebrations all around us where we can learn language in context and build bilingual relationships over a lifetime greater than intensive, but isolated, language study abroad.  But my Israeli uncle’s voice nudges me, asks again:

“But why would anyone learn Spanish when all the Spanish speakers are learning to speak English? You’re going to end up speaking in English.  It’s a waste of everyone’s time.”

Certainly, there is an element of truth.  While many in the U.S. believe that Spanish speaking immigrants “never learn English,” this is a misinformed misperception.  Sociologist and demographer, Calvin Veltman (1990) has created a generational model of language shift documenting that by the third generation, all Latinos speak English regularly and less than 20% continue to speak Spanish, with fewer than 4% preferring to speak Spanish rather than English (p. 122).

The value and power of English has prevented generations of Americans from needing to spend time learning other languages or valuing and preserving their own families’ non-English linguistic resources.  If we seek motivation by need alone, then we will never move beyond our widespread monolingualism, denying English speakers the opportunity to deepen our understanding of how language and communication work in other cultural systems as well as furthering understanding of our own English language and cultural system.  We must move from need to want, we must want to become language learners as adults so that we model for children the real possibilities of a life time of world wide language learning.

“Mommy, Mommy!” My son shouts and runs into the kitchen where I am grading papers.  He is watching Toy Story 3 in the other room.  “Buzz light year is speaking Spanish!  They pushed his button!”

Would that we could all push a button and start spewing out vocabulary in another language.  In bed that night Oren asks me if I can say various words in Spanish.  “Wall,” he says.

“Pared,” I answer.

“Dinosaur.”

“Dinosaurio.”

He looks up at the glow in the dark stickers around his room.  “Star!”

“¡Estrella!”

“You know everything Spanish!” he says, impressed by our short translation exercise.  What parent doesn’t want to hear they know it all?  I don’t tell him how many words I don’t yet know in Spanish but I do try to model for him that I want to learn more and that learning in context and interaction is the best way to acquire communication skills in another language.  For me learning Spanish and bits and pieces of Hebrew, Turkish, French, and other languages is because I have been lucky enough to experience the joy that comes with questioning cultural and linguistic assumptions.

Learning a second or third or fourth language helps to develop this questioning into a lifelong intercultural skill—questioning assumptions for what a casserole looks like, or when and how to give a compliment, invite someone to dinner, even how to ask and answer a question. In an increasingly diverse cultural and lingustic society, we must develop such intercultural skills in order to communicate with those who are different and there is no better way to develop this skill than through exercises in learning another language—regardless of the fluency level attained.

Do I recommend these beginner Spanish books for teachers? Maybe.  Having a book filled with everyday language and Spanish for professional purposes can indeed be helpful as a reference or resource for practice and support. More often than not, an online bilingual dictionary can be just as helpful if not more so.  Without meaningful contexts for regular practice and genuine desire, vocabulary lists are static and useless.

What kind of book can be written to cultivate such desire to “waste time” studying langugaes other than English?  What resources are those that are the most useful for learning Spanish or another language in a timely and joyful manner? I intend to write my way through to the answers!

Hymes, D. H. (1971) Competence and performance in linguistic theory.  In  R. Huxley and E. Ingram (eds) Language Acquisition: Models and Methods. New York: Academic Press.

Veltman, C. (1990). The status of the Spanish language in the United States at the beginning of the 21^st century.  International Migration Review, 24 (1), 108-123. Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2546674