My Language Background

How did I come to the decision to raise my child speaking French? Lots of things in my life influenced my choice to do that. I'll start with my education and career.

In college I double-majored in Linguistics and French. I knew by the time I was a junior in high school that I wanted to go into Linguistics. I remember making a conscious effort on my own initiation to think about the elements in my studies that most intrigued me. Hard to settle on Linguistics when there wasn't any course of study accessible to me in high school that even remotely resembled it! (I think high schools should offer a basic Linguistics elective; it would likely be a lot more interesting and effective than the traditional "grammar" classes offered...And I personally think all/most college students should take an introductory Linguistics class at some point in their college career, but I digress....). But I thought about it and realized that while I loved the French I was learning in my AP French class (notice I didn't say i loved the class...:)), I realized what I loved most was language in general. More evidence of this was that I liked and excelled at writing and literature analysis in my English class and paused extra long at anything that had to do with foreign cultures and languages that I came across in my AP European history book. So I perused one of my brother's course catalogs from UC Berkeley, looking at major and individual course descriptions...and stumbled upon Linguistics. I had never heard of it, but it seemed to fit, and I ended up being one of the few who went to college knowing what I wanted to study...I just didn't know exactly what I wanted to do with it. I became interested in American sign language research, language universals, and languages with rare features, thinking that I would pursue the research angle or go off and live somewhere where I could analyze and transcribe some strange language. But ultimately, these were just vague images I had of myself floating around in the back of my mind, and I was finally forced to realize they didn't really fit what I wanted in my life or who I was at my core. It was hard to give up at first; I had always done well in my studies and was highly praised for my efforts every step along the way, although I always disliked being in school. And I had quite a strong passion for language, the way it sounded, the way it worked, the way it influenced and was influenced by culture. Wasn't I the type to go on to get my PhD? I decided that if I were meant to stay in academia in that particular way, my entire school process wouldn't have been so painful and felt so forced. So, I abruptly changed my focus to teaching English as a second language. I finished my Master's in Applied Linguistics in one year so that I could get away as quickly as I could from what I perceived as the oppression of school and finally get on to real life where an actual job would be waiting me.

I have been involved in some form or another of adult ESL education for more than 10 years. I've taught ESL to University students, banquet servers, golf course maintenance personnel, and restaurant workers. I've taught a range of students from well-educated (my forte) to barely literate in their own languages (something I've yet to master). The students I had at Golden Gate University were working on obtaining their master's, so the work with them was generally high level, although I had some lower level classes and managed to throw some games and "fun stuff" into pretty much any class I taught. At some point along the way I became a grammar maven, although maybe not in the way you might think (i.e. NOT the ruler-wielding, bespectacled, older woman insisting it is a travesty that no one uses "whom" properly.) My students at Golden Gate University, often the ones from Asia, really wanted to dissect the grammatical structures they were learning and thought that was the key to becoming more grammatically accurate: "Why would someone choose to say "I've baked a cake for you" instead of "I baked a cake for you."?) I indulged these questions and dug into them deeply with the students trying to explain them using the grammatical terms I knew many of my students were already very comfortable with after years of studying English and as many examples and comparisons as I could come up with.

At some point, I realized that a career without some form of writing in it is not really me. Neither is a career spent almost entirely in front of large groups of people. I enjoyed writing materials for my ESL classes, although I did not enjoy doing this at 6:00 pm after all my other work was done and I was emotionally and physically exhausted. So I decided to pursue some elements of ESL that allowed me to be more "behind the scenes" and involved with content production rather than content presentation. After some initial trouble finding paid jobs doing this, I managed to find contract work producing ESL materials, never as much as I would like, but enough to get soe satisfaction from it. I enjoyed it immensely. I co-authored several ESL texts, some with online or video components. I found that writing materials requires a unique blend of creativity, knowledge of one's content area (i.e. effective methods for teaching a foreign language, but also other content areas that can be researched and written about), ease with explicative prose, and a significant degree of word smithing, along with a decent sense of humor, that suits me quite nicely. A sample assignment: "The original textbook author designed this chapter around the theme of travel. We feel it is a bit too lackluster and needs some updating. Can you keep the general theme but pull out some more entertaining, and yet still thought-provoking, angle? As part of the chapter we will also need a vocabulary exercise that teaches 10 or so of the words you have identified as challenging and/or level-appropriate. We will also need a grammar exercise that "tests" competence in present perfect tense while recycling vocabulary and grammatical structures presented in previous chapters. Try to center these exercises around the chapter theme, using a combination of previously developed characters and novel characters/situations, making sure to contextualize them and present them as a whole rather than as individual questions. They should be neither too hard nor too easy for the target level, too silly, nor too boring, too heavy, nor too light. And could you do it in 200 words or less so that it fits on the page?" Ah, yes; I can do that! And I did:)

I've also done some ESL tutoring, which along the way seems to have morphed into other jobs: academic coaching, academic writing instruction, business writing instruction, and (semi)professional editing of academic papers and business letter/proposals, public speaking coaching, among others. And to be honest, at times, my job as a tutor has looked more like a therapist's or grief counselor's, or just a caring friend's. Although there were aspects of tutoring I did not like (the business aspects, namely, and the ways I could sometimes be controlled by clients), it was a good outlet and learning experience for me. It actually enabled me to see more clearly how and why students would make the mistakes they did in writing and grammar because I was working one-on-one with them and could hear them think aloud as we wrote. I had initially assumed I would be looking at papers that were already completed, going over them with the student before submission. But, that was actually quite naaive to assume, since busy people often do not have the time to both write and meet with a tutor, and students wrestling with poor English do not have the super-human motivation that would require. So, we wrote the papers together, with me suggesting organizational and content ideas where I could (the subjects were not always my forte so my input was limited sometimes), offering words and phrases, and pointing out inaccurate grammar. I had been taught to be "hands-off" and only correct and suggest where necessary, but again this was not something that fit into the "real world." People need to be corrected sometimes in order to learn, and in the case of producing a well-thought out, well-organized, and reasonably well -written paper with few grammatical errors within a time constraint to receive a grade that could potentially have some lasting impact, this was an absolute necessity. I did try to schedule book lessons to attack common grammatical/stylistic errors, and when we were able to get a few of them under our belt during a particularly busy season, the results were far-reaching, since we could later refer to them when writing together.

Overall, I found that working one-on-one to help a student write papers enabled me to do something with my writing ability that I had not been able to do while teaching ESL, even ESL writing, in the classroom. I was really teaching someone to write better (although admittedly, some of the learning was an echo of my own style), and I could see it working. It has definitely given me something to do with my talent for academic paper-writing. I mean, this is a skill I honed over hundreds of papers over the years since I started kindergarten, and although effective writing itself is a very useful skill to possess in life, school papers are peculiar beasts with their own dysfunctional characteristics; I truly believe that the skill of churning out an "A" paper, a complex mastery of the art of"BS" and the perfectly crafted cliche introduction, topic sentence and conclusion with its carefully "balanced" tone, is one that has limited life applications. Honestly, don't they all begin to sound alike after a while, no matter what the topic? Don't you at some point feel you've learned just about all you are going to learn and writing that paper isn't going to accomplish anything other than your own misery? Ah, but I digress yet again...

I can see how all of these elements in my general education and career have led me to make the decision to teach Cilla French. I think they continue to shape that decision and influence how I carry it out, something I'll be writing about more later. They give me a good base from which I will be drawing often as I plan for language instruction for my child. True, I have not taught children before, only adults, but I've learned a fair amount about how people learn, and specifically how they learn language, what works reasonably well, the limitations of formal instruction and the limitations of immersion with little or no instruction. As I get older, I see that I am also discovering new perspectives and approaches to education that rival ways of thinking I've had for years. More on that later.

In the next post, I'll talk about my background in French, how that is influencing me to raise my daughter with the language, and what challenges I have because of my specific background. (No doubt it differs significantly from yours, but I bet we'll find a lot we can share with each other.)