Bored & boring?

If you’ve studied a language before, you’ll inevitably have been asked to describe a holiday you went on in order to practise a few instantiations of the past tense. You’ll have been guided towards generating a highly formulaic little monologue in which you inevitably repeat the same restricted set of sentence patterns:

In Welsh, you might first run off a few sentences which take the first person preterite form of the verb GWNEUD (to make) and combine it with some mutated verbs:

Gwnes i fynd i Gernyw, Gwnes i deithio ar y trên o Lundain, gwnes i aros mewn pabell. [I went to Cornwall, I travelled on the train from London, I stayed in a tent)

Then chuck in a few lines with the past tense of the verb to be:

Roedd yn hwyl, roedd y tywydd yn braf. (It was fun, the weather was nice)

Here’s an excerpt from a model answer copied from BBC Bitesize’s GCSE French resources:

Alors, l’année dernière, j’ai passé mes vacances avec ma famille en Espagne au bord de la mer, ce que j’adore parce que c’est toujours génial. J’ai passé mes vacances à Marbella, un vieux port de pêche près de Malaga. On a pris l’avion et ensuite un car, et on a logé dans un hôtel à 500 mètres de la plage. Je l’ai trouvé assez confortable même s’il n’était pas très moderne. Heureusement, il y avait une piscine énorme ! C’était super !

Good load of passé composé here and of course the obligatory ‘…parce que c’est génial’- no French exam contribution is complete without this.

When you’re just starting out with a new language as a beginner, this will be the extent of what you can do of course. And it necessarily has to be formulaic (and a little boring) because you’re practising new sentence patterns and using new vocabulary.

But as you progress with your language, is it really the case that the contexts in which you’re invited to practise the language change? I reckon most probably not. If I flick through an intermediate level course book for example, here are some of the topics used for conversation practice in Welsh:

-        Cymdogion (neighbours)

-        Teledu (television)

-        Yn y feddygfa (at the doctor’s surgery)

-        Dysgu Cymraeg (Learning Welsh)

-        Dyddiau Ysgol (School days)

-        Dysgu Cymraeg (Learning Welsh… again… )

-        Hobïau (Hobbies)

It’s not just the topics that induce formulaic speech in lessons, the phatic communication with which we begin most conversations also forces us to say boring, predictable things. Here’s how I always start my Swedish lessons:

Teacher:  Hej, Jack! Hur står det till? (Hi, how’s it going?)

Me: Hej! Ja, det är bra. Hur är det med dig? (Hi! Yeah, I’m alright. How’re things with you?)

Teacher: Bara bra (just fine)

Then I talk about one of the following: 1) the weather 2) being bored during the neverending lockdown 3) how I haven’t had much time to study that grammar I was meant to do in preparation for the current session.

But it’s important to move swiftly away from these formulaic interactions and boring, predictable communicative contexts. When you have basic conversational abilities established, you can then start to use the language in your own way to express your own thoughts and things in your own life. I think the way courses are designed and just the expectations of the interactional dynamics between tutor and student crowd out any actual real communication. Two things are missing: meanings that matter and emotional resonance.

Meanings that matter

This was the title of a lecture I attended whilst training to be a secondary school teacher. This session was given by MFL teacher Sian Brookes at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and it’s session that I’ve thought about a lot since. The central message of this session was that teenagers are more likely to engage with language learning if they are communicating thoughts about something that is within their immediate experience and that matters to them.

This doesn’t just mean conversation practice about Below Deck or Married at First Sight Australia or mentioning TikTok or playing what you think is popular music.  It means engaging the imagination to some degree. Instead of describing a real holiday, Sian Brookes suggested getting kids to describe a holiday from hell by showing pictures of a disgusting, dilapidated hotel resort. “I got into bed and was attacked by cockroaches”… far more interesting than “I swam in the pool, it was génial”. Using provoking, creepy or confusing microfilms was another idea and then having students describe the scenes but also give their personal opinions and reactions to them.

This session ended with this quote from the educational philosopher Kieran Egan:

“It is certainly not new to point out that children’s thinking is most deeply and energetically engaged when their imaginations and emotions are active”.

It’s certainly not new, but it is something secondary school language teachers need reminding of. Replace the word ‘children’ with ‘adults’ and you probably have something quite revolutionary in the context of adult language teaching.

Emotional resonance

In addition to things being interesting, the second missing dimension from adult language learning classes is emotional resonance. What about the topic of neighbours, then? Well, unless your neighbour is an eccentric bohemian socialite who throws wild, debauched parties which you can only remember through intermittent absinth-induced blackouts, then talking about your neighbours isn’t going to have any emotional response.

Well, not quite… everyone will be emotionally invested to different degrees in different things. Your neighbour might be quite unremarkable, but they might also be your friend with whom you enjoy spending time. This, then, is a topic of emotional resonance for you.  Emotional resonance doesn’t mean “exciting”, it means things that we care about on a personal level. When we’re talking about topics in which we are emotionally invested we will use more organic, personal language because we’ll be forced to move away from the sentence patterns in our textbooks and course notes. What we want to say is something that happened to us, not to the character in a dialogue.

This is what’s missing in conversation practice sessions. Intermediate level learners and above, I think, get stuck in a cycle of talking about things that mean literally nothing to them on a personal level. And this means that when you’re speaking your second or third language you’re sort of acting. You’re playing the part of a language learner, talking about set topics in a set way from a particular course book.

I’ve been running informal online conversation practice sessions for a while now and by far the best ones in terms of progress the learner makes are the ones in which they are talking about their own life.

The session that’s made the most impression on my was with an intermediate level learner who described a very emotional situation they had experienced in an airport. This learner was waiting at a large international airport hub and about to get on the first leg of a long-haul flight. They’d saved up for a good-while to afford this adventure. They described all the things they’d booked and hoped to do on this trip of a lifetime. But then they described the tannoy announcement calling passengers to the gate.

They described becoming suddenly completely overwhelmed and unable to move from their seat. They told my how they stood there as the departure lounge emptied gradually of people. They wondered whether the staff had made one of those “this is an announcement for passengers Smith & Delgado...” calls about them. They said they couldn’t remember. The gate closed. The plane pushed back from the stand and stood waiting on the tarmac. Then it rolled slowly out of view. My learner said they then went to the information desk and asked how they could leave the airport.

We stopped along the way to translate words and phrases that the learner needed to talk about this experience:

Do’n dim yn gallu symud (I couldn’t move)

Roedd ofn arna i (I was afraid)

Gwnes i sefyll yn stond ac edrych o gwmpas (I just stood there and looked around me)

Symudodd yr awyren o’r neilltu (the airplane moved out of view)

You can’t and probably won’t want to talk about something like this in a group context. But if you have a 1:1 tutor it can be easier to talk about topics with emotional resonance. It doesn’t have to turn into a therapy session- the goal is communicating in a second language. But this goal is definitely more easily realised when you’re talking about your own experience and about a topic in which you are or were emotionally invested.

Language learning apps and most classroom learning situations place a lot of emphasis on learning vocabulary and sentence patterns. The initial emphasis on this is justified; you do need to accrue enough basic and transactional competency to interact in the target language.

But very quickly we become bored and we also start to sound boring as we only use the target language within the prescribed contexts of the textbook or the conventions of the classroom itself. When you learn another language the goal should be to express yourself through the medium of another language, not to perform rote-learned interactions in a limited set of situation-based scenarios.

You can read some suggestions for conversation practice yn Gymraeg here.