Teaching English in Denmark - Some Observations from Comenius Assistantship
Anna Ćwidak, Poland
Anna Ćwidak is a student of Early Education with English at the University of Gdansk, Poland. In the school year 2007/08 she was a beneficiary of Socrates Comenius Programme. She spent the autumn semester as a Comenius Assistant at Danish primary school.
E-mail: aniacwidak@hotmail.com
Menu
Introduction
Beginning
Danish school
Teaching English
My assistantship
Conclusion
‘It’s usually not so easy for newcomers to get used to new places, people and situations. I must say I’m the lucky one who has got a chance to meet bosom people here in Ellidshoj and that makes everything easier and more familiar to me from the very beginning.
How is Ellidshoj School different from schools in Poland? First of all the building is really pleasant. It seems to have more windows than walls and that makes it bright and roomy. I’ve never before seen so many computers at any school. Of course in Poland we have I.T. in computer rooms and few computers usually stay in the library, but it’s not the same. And believe me or not, but in Polish schools children don’t have cooking lessons. That’s a pity, because there seems to be nothing better than a cooking lesson. ;-) Apart from that Polish students have more or less the same subjects. Of course they learn Polish instead Danish. They don’t have autumn holidays, but in summer they have a break from 20 June to 1 September. Can you imagine? It’s more than two months of holidays!’
[Diary from the 1st week of the assistantship]*
What is the Comenius Assistantship? It is neither an ordinary teaching practice nor a real job, neither a cultural exchange nor a language teachers training. As a part of Comenius within Lifelong Learning Programme it is one of the European Commission’s initiatives aimed at students and young teachers who haven’t started their job at school yet. It enable them to spend between 3 and 12 months in other European country assisting at school, practicing their skills, teaching about the language and culture of their homeland and learning about the school system in the host country. To learn more about Comenius Assistantship take a look at: http://ec.europa.eu/education/programmes/llp/guide/fiches/comenius4_en.html
As far as I know every assistantship is different. About 100 of students and young teachers are beneficiaries of the programme every year in Poland. We were sent to various places all over the Europe. Sometimes completely unexpectedly we found ourselves in different countries and different schools that we were applying for. Sometimes we were waiting for an unbelievably long time for any news about the selection and matching process. Finally as the school year started we set off to face the new reality, new tasks and duties in foreign countries.
At the end of September 2007 I arrived in Aalborg in the northernmost part of Denmark. I didn’t know much about Denmark then. As probably for most of the Poles it was for me a country of legendary Vikings, Christian Andersen’s fairy tales and the best toys ever – LEGO building blocks. In fact the only part of that country that I had in my mind thinking of Denmark was Zeeland with the capital city of Copenhagen. And now I found myself far in the North in the city which name its inhabitants pronounced strangely as ‘Oolborg’.
I was not the first Comenius Assistant in Ellidshoj School and everything was prepared for my arrival. My contact teacher was waiting for me at the station, the flat rented for me was better than I could ever dream of, the city was bigger than I expected and full of entertainment.
The host school turned out to be little village school. There were only 78 pupils at all in the grades 0-7. That made it a cosy place with a really family atmosphere. The welcome was so warm that I could immediately feel like home there.
Danish schools differ from Polish schools very much. It’s not only because the equipments and functional solutions in the buildings are different, but above all it’s because of methods being used there. Teachers in Denmark can feel free when it comes to both choosing the aids and the content of teaching. They don’t need to realise top-down programmes or syllabuses. That is why lessons of all the teachers vary from each other.
It seems to me that in Denmark one of the goals is to make children like school. Teachers are trying to minimize the stress that can be experienced by pupils. These more creative are coming up with their own ideas on how to make the lessons more exciting and attractive to students. Others use ready made, well-tried methods of active-learning teaching.
Danes seem to be enthusiasts of ‘learning by playing’, especially in lover grades. They often suggested that I should organise lessons so that children will have fun and barley realise how hard learning is.
In my school it was popular to combine grades for working at projects. Sometimes there were 2-3 grades combined but twice a school year week-long projects are realised in the school and all the pupils are in them. I had the opportunity to participate in of such project-weeks when children were getting to know cultures of five different countries from five continents. Students were divided into five groups each working on other country. They were making posters, cooking traditional food, making little books on the topics chosen by themselves, creating simple art crafts (examples of traditional folk art from the country). I had the opportunity to join the group working on my homeland, Poland. I was answering hundreds of questions concerning our history, culture, language, nature and life in Poland.
Danish schools are really concerned about teaching practical subjects. School is fitted with a kitchen, carpentry workshop, art workshop, needlecraft and sewing workshop and the music room with variety of excellent musical instruments. Children are learning there useful basic skills that are indispensable in adult life. They know how to use basic tools; they can cook and play the instruments. After each lesson they clean the workshop or classroom.
As at school there are enough computers (both stationary and laptops) for almost all the students and all the computers are connected to the school network and to the Internet, they are very often used as a tool during various lessons. While teaching English, science, art or telling children something about Poland I usually used the computers and equipment available at school. PowerPoint turned out to be an excellent tool to show complicated ideas in a simple way or to illustrate with pictures what I wanted to say.
Teaching subjects such as science or art in a foreign language was a real challenge to me. As children in lower grades didn’t understand English well, I must have been choosing the simplest words and support myself with written text, illustrations and gesticulation. Thanks to translations, that were usually offered to me by the teachers in lower grades, my lessons were understandable for all the children. Language barrier encouraged me to looking for and using teaching methods other than traditional. I was trying to motivate students and encourage them to active participation in the lessons. Carrying out scientific experiments together with children turned out to be an ideal solution for science lessons. The results could have been easily written down in students’ mother tongue and all the conclusions were drawn on the observations, so usually there was no need of my own comments: children enjoyed sharing their own observations.
Other lessons that I carried out: art, P.E. or domestic science were rather practical and even when children didn’t understand everything before the work started, it was easy to correct all the misunderstandings later, during classes, or demonstrate how to do the task. At the same time pupils really took advantage of these lessons as they need then to use English for an everyday use, for simple communication. Even students, who were rather silent during English lessons, in the school kitchen or art workshop weren’t shy and they talked with me in English.
Teaching English in Danish school made me aware of the differences in teaching methods between the countries where the second language is not related to the students’ mother tongue (Poland) and ones where we can find a lot of similarities (Denmark). Danish students are meeting different difficulties than their Polish peers when learning English. Many elements of the language can be acquired just by association with Danish. That’s why other teaching methods are used in Denmark than in Poland.
In Denmark children usually start learning English in 3rd grade. It is quite late comparing to other European countries. Foreigner coming to Denmark can be, however, surprised how easily all the people met in everyday situations can communicate in English. Children seem to be exposed to the foreign language from their earliest years: they can hear it at TV (programmes for adults have only Danish subtitles), they became familiar with it during holidays spent abroad or can come across foreigners anywhere in the city because Denmark has a high immigrant rate. That is probably, apart from the similarity to their mother tongue, why Danish children learn English quicker than Poles.
I was surprised to find very long readings even in the English course books for lover grades. Apart from the fact that they were to difficult for most of the students, it was barely impossible to finish the reading exercise during one lesson. Maybe that is why children soon after the beginning of such a lesson usually were bored. I had the impression that teachers also didn’t like the textbooks. They were using them only when they had no other better ideas. Comparing to modern and colourful course books I know from Poland, these were really outdated and uninspiring.
As course books seemed to be useless teachers were coming to school with many creative and interesting ideas on how to improve these lessons. I have never learnt so many songs, rhymes, games and unconventional exercises. However, to make the learning process a kind of continuity for pupils they were using also simple drills. Almost every lesson started with ‘small talks’ that were a good warm up and were aimed to give the students some practice in everyday English.
Teaching new vocabulary teachers were often trying to make children aware of the similarities between English and Danish. They also gave pupils a lot of spelling exercises to eliminate common misspellings. There was not a lot of grammar because basics were easily understood by most of the students and they generally had no problems with constructing sentences properly.
My duties were preparing and carrying out lessons that were in my schedule. However all the teachers were giving me a lot of freedom and I could choose the topics and ways of carrying on lessons. What is more I could freely change and modify my schedule. I often participated in projects realised in younger grades that meant missing classes with elder children.
Apart from that during all my assistantship I was writing an English diary that was published at a school’s website. My contact teacher at school translated my diary into Danish so that even children who didn’t know English could read it. My diary seemed to be the most interesting for teachers who were curious about my comments on cultural difference and observations on Denmark and Danes.
Teaching students in a foreign country some basics of my mother tongue was an obligatory part of my assistantship. As in the school there were no extracurricular activities in the afternoons, I was trying to weave teaching Polish to other lessons. Children liked this way of learning. Usually we were learning Polish equivalents of new English words. In lower grades I was teaching pupils Polish songs and rhymes. However, I was surprised how difficult the Polish pronunciation was for Danish people. My demonstrations of Polish were usually greeted with laughter.
Most of the Ellidshoj School students either had never hard of Poland or hadn’t be interested in our country before my arrival in Denmark. Now they hopefully know where Poland is, which language we use, they are aware that we are in European Union and that life in our country looks more and more the same as their life in Denmark. I was trying to tell them as many interesting facts about our history, nature, monuments, famous Poles, fine arts, folk customs and traditional cuisine as it was possible. For the youngest interesting was the comparison between Polish and Danish Christmas traditions and getting to know fortune telling tradition on St. Andrew’s Day or the custom of putting small gifts into children’s shoes on St. Nikolai’s Day, the 6th of December.
It seems to me that my staying at Ellidshoj School helped adult Danes to discover that Poland is no longer that poor, grey, sad country that it seemed to be twenty years ago. Children made friends with their peers from Poland and got to know that some of them have exactly the same interests as they have, that they listen to the same music and watch the same TV programmes. Breaking stereotypes worked both ways. I myself discovered in Denmark a lot of things that I never expected to find there.
Comenius Assistantship was my first long term and more formal contact with children at school. At the beginning I was anxious about how children would respond to my presence at their lessons. After all first day at Ellidshoj School filled me with optimistic feelings. Family atmosphere at the school, exceptional warmth between all the people there make both the teachers and the students feel that they can always relay on the others and won’t be left alone with their problems. I feel that observing how you can build real relationships, community at school, how warmth and good example influence students behaviour, was the best lesson for me that I’ll try to use in the future in my own work.
Comenius Assistantship was for me not only a teaching practice period. Apart from observations and trying out various teaching methods, I get to know how educational system in another country looks like. Visit in the neighbouring school, where a friend of mine was an assistant too, and talking with teachers enabled me to gain some knowledge about good and bad points and problems of Danish primary schools. My staying in Denmark made me aware of flaws and gaps has Polish educational system but also taught me to notice its good side.
* The complete diary with pictures and Danish translation was published on the Ellidshoj School’s website: www.ellidshoej-skole.skoleintra.dk There go to ‘Sprogeassistenten’ and look for ‘Anna’s dagebog’.
Please check the Methodology and Language for Primary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Methodology and Language for Kindergarten Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
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