Je m'appelle. Why do we teach it? As Greg Horton shows in his conference talks, if you ask someone their name, they just tell you their name. Without a verb or a sentence. Or if they are introducing themselves, they say, "I am..." And then there's the ridiculous situation as you go round the class, calling upon the pupil by name to answer the question, "Derek. Comment tu t'appelles?" We've all done it.
I suppose the answer is that it is a cultural expectation that English people know how to say, "je m'appelle" as part of their general culture. And so they can understand memes about actress Gemma Pell. Otherwise would I happily skip it and start straight off with more recombinable chunks?
Or maybe there's some underlying grammar that is what we are really teaching. And by grammar, I don't mean -er verbs in the present tense. Or reflexive verbs. Or the radical changing verb appeler.
By grammar here, I think I mean pupils' basic understanding of how the term is constructed. I don't let pupils get away with thinking je m'appelle means "My name is". That makes no sense. Perhaps "I'm called" would be closer but then it leads to the mistaken spelling "Je'm appelle". So I do make sure pupils know it's "I call myself". It's one of those examples we tell pupils about - "You are learning how different languages say things differently and you'll learn to look at your own language in a different light." And this is a great example. Followed soon afterwards by "What age do you have?" Already pupils are realising that a language isn't a code with French words substituted for English words. A language will say things a different way. And that is exciting and interesting. And has implications for how they have always spoken, thought and seen the world in their own language.
When we start Spanish in Year 9, I do start with "me llamo" as part of a conversation to crack all the sound-spelling combinations. It has an important role in embedding the ll sound. Pupils learn me llamo and in the question form they also see te llamas. In the accelerated learning that happens with Year 9, it is only a couple of weeks until the paradigm of the present tense comes in, and llamo, llamas is a pre-learned automatically retrievable version of this that can help with fluency in using other verbs. And then later when they meet the concept of El desayuno se sirve a las siete - Breakfast serves itself at seven o'clock, then the idea of is called/calls itself works as a model for the way Spanish avoids the passive by using reflexive or impersonal forms.
In Year 7 French, er verb endings are further away, so I am not claiming that they learn Je m'appelle as anything other than a phrase to be memorised and spoken.
So what is it really for? It is part of pupils acquiring a starting nugget of French around which more can crystalise. To try the feel and the sound of the language. To try out the sounds they learn in French phonics more and more fluently. To hear the same phrase with different elements substituted. Here the simplest substitution of different people's names. To interact in an easy and confident way exchanging the most basic information. And maybe right at the start of the year, they don't all know each other's names. Or who has twelve years already or which is the date of their birthday. Or what pets they have and... how their pets call themselves.
It's not about a theory of language-learning. It's about real people in a classroom, getting started with learning a language.
So communication, interaction, sounds, tongues active with the new language, low stakes, memorisation. Starting to change the perception of self from monolingual to a confident language-learner.
In the same way as Year 7 love picking up "Am stram gram." It's meaningless, but it starts their snowball of French ready to pick up more and more.
No comments:
Post a Comment