I have been meaning for a while to write a post on the idea of Linguistics in schools and its relation to language teaching. Or more precisely, to explore how encountering a new language brings our pupils up against important concepts in understanding what language is, and how it works.
For many of our pupils, language and words are transparent, almost invisible tools. They use language without thinking about it, for the purposes of interaction and communication. The idea that language can be studied is new to them.
I have had pupils on trips to France say things like, "French people are so clever and so stupid. So clever because they can speak French. But so stupid because, well, why don't they just say it in English?" Or, "I know why you always get off the bus and go and talk to the people first. It's so you can tell them to all speak French because we're here now." For many of them, English is all they have ever known. And just as a fish doesn't realise it's in water until it's taken out, our pupils aren't aware of their own language until they start to learn another.
Here's a selected few of the typical encounters and lightbulb moments in Year 7 French. Some of these are inevitable milestones, some are interesting asides, and some are my own personal favourites...
Je m'appelle... Straightaway, it's the important realisation that French is a language, not a code. It's not just English transposed. So instead of saying "I am called...", you say, "I call myself..." In terms of remembering the exact grammar of reflexive verbs and radical changing verbs, it's too soon to exploit the verb s'appeler any further. But this is a big first realisation - that different languages say things in a different way.
J'ai un chien. This is continued when we get on to nouns. It's a huge and unnerving realisation that your pet isn't, in fact, a dog. "Dog" is an arbitrary name given to the animal in one language. But it's nothing to do with the essence of the beast. We have to correct the Primary SATs mantra that, "A noun is a person, place or thing" to "A noun is the word given to a person, place or thing." And we can point out that "nom" in French means name as well as noun. This is important when we come to gender, and the idea that "a noun has gender" means the word has gender, not the thing.
"Dog" is a nice example too, because we can comment on how chien is related to the word "canine" and German Hund is the same as "hound", but nobody knows where the word "dog" comes from. So not only are we introducing the idea that words are related, evolve, have origins, but also that there are people whose job it is to find this out. Or in the case of "dog", to fail to find this out. There is work still to be done, if the idea tempts them!
Then there's "guinea pig" (in French, Indian pig) which brings up the idea of needing new words for new things and not being totally sure what to call them or where they are from. Which we will meet again with potato and tomato and chocolate and avocado...
When we learn j'ai un chien qui s'appelle..., the pupils are focused on the nouns for pets. But I have to talk to them about the fact that for the next 5 years, pets are not exactly going to feature heavily. But the other words in that sentence are going to be important. J'ai is interesting because we look at how it's a contraction of je + ai. This seems directly analogous to I've = I have, and we may use this parallel to help teach it. But one of the differences is that I have and I've are both correct. Whereas in French, je ai is incorrect. This can be a route into talking about how the spoken language is the "real" language. It is determined by what people actually say, through a process of evolution and survival of the most efficient. Whereas the written form is secondary and has arbitrary invented rules.
This conversation may seem unnecessary, but it is inevitable sooner or later given the decayed nature of spoken French compared with the futile attempts of the guardians of the written form to maintain or even recreate archaic forms. If it doesn't come up now, it will come up when we meet words like forêt. The French long ago (but post 1066?) stopped pronouncing the s in forest. And then also started to omit it in the written form. Until someone complained. And they decided as a compromise to invent the circumflex accent...
So far, we have learned to say what our dog's name is. But we've learned about the nature of language, the divorce between names and the essence of things, the evolution and relationships between languages, the notion of arbitrary language and of self-declared authority as arbiter, and that all of this can be studied.
J'ai une petite souris blanche. Learning un chien and une souris, as we have seen, was an important step in learning that grammatical gender is not always the same as biological gender. In fact, it's the noun that has gender, not the thing. But what is gender for? The first thing to point out is that when pupils are "confused" by this, what they really mean is, "I'm not familiar with this concept because my language doesn't have it." So there are 2 things to do. One is to show what its role is in other languages. The other is to show why English can manage without. Because we already established that languages go through a natural process of evolution and efficiency. So features will always have a purpose.
We show how gender acts as glue to hold words in a sentence together. We can do this visually, but essentially, the feminine word souris is stuck to the words une and petite and blanche so that the sentence doesn't fall apart. If the words are the building blocks of the sentence, having some kind of glue is a natural thing to want to have. So why doesn't English have this glue? Because have English in we word very order rigid. And if we don't stick to that very rigid word order, the sentence doesn't work. It's as if in English we pile up our words very carefully so they don't all fall down. But we have to be very careful because glue have our doesn't language any. What's the example? A new red shiny fast French train? A fast shiny French new red train?
The house of Fraser. Possessives in French. You have to say la maison de ma tante. This is a great chance to introduce the idea that English = Latin + German(ic). So we can mention 1066 again. But also the idea that often English has 2 ways of saying something. So you can say cleverer or more clever. The first is the Germanic way. The second is the French way. You can say go in or enter. And Frasers Haus is literally the German for Fraser's House. Whereas in French, you have to say... House of Fraser.
In the previous examples, learning a language meant coming up against important ideas from linguistics. In this one, hopefully the knowledge of linguistics helps them remember to get the French right. But the idea that English comes from somewhere, is unsettling. What seemed natural, pure, the default, the original language of Hollywood, Shakespeare and the Bible, turns out to be a melting pot of language spaghetti. Or linguine.
If you want, you can take a diversion into how the letter s in English has taken on so many roles acquired from different languages. Possessives. Plurals. Third person verb endings. Contractions. No wonder it sometimes needs an apostrophe to help out and show how many Frasers the house belongs to. Quite an eye-opener after a diet of SPAG bollocknaise in Year 6. Sorry. Pasta jokes again!
Pain au chocolat. This one is a pain. And I don't mean the word "pain". Or the word "chocolat", although it's always good to throw in a little about Nahuatl. But I mainly save that for when they start Spanish. No. It's the au.
What do we do about a word meaning at the or to the in the expression glace à la fraise or pain au chocolat? It's time to come back to the nature of language. French has not evolved to be mapped onto English. (Which as we saw at the very beginning of the post, can be the default understanding of someone who hasn't yet studied a language.) Words in French do not correspond directly to words in English. (Even though the two languages are closely related.) French corresponds (I could qualify this but we've had enough brackets already) to the World. And English also corresponds to the World. So if there is such a thing as a potato, then French may well have a word for it. And English may well have a word for it. The link isn't language-to-language. It's language-to-thing-to-other-language. But what about less concrete words. Words that don't correspond to a real thing in the outside world? Words whose role is to connect other words in a sentence? This is where a visual depiction on the board with some arrows helps. But basically, if a word is entirely internal to the language, then it is not directly connected to things outside the language. So it can do what it likes. If French people want to say, "bread at the chocolate" and that sounds weird to us, then that's because it's a different language.
Which brings us back to where we started. Learning a different language inevitably means learning what things are different, what things are coincidentally the same, what things are linked or have evolved. It brings us up against the nature of language as something arbitrary and natural, but also with conventions and rules. We start to meet some examples of how languages can be structured in different ways, including things we weren't aware of in our own language. We come up against these ideas in very real ways, on a daily basis - I have only given 5 of the most basic here. And with this, comes the idea that language is something that people study: Linguistics.
I do have to say, I'm not a huge fan of suggesting that we need linguistics or literature or politics or history or culture or Culture or essays, in order for language learning to be considered valid. All of them are bound up in it and can be interesting. But it is a peculiarly British thing to consider that they are necessary for language learning to be valued. The worst manifestation of this is what happens post-16, where we have no mainstream language-learning pathway. Our obsession with intellectual heft has left us with only A Level, which is delightful for the happy few, but hardly a mainstream pursuit.
