Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 4; July 02

To Be and to Be, that is another question Teaching one's mother tongue, rather than EFL.

by Claudia Bertini, Argentina

I am an English teacher. Spanish is my mother tongue. I am used to teaching English to young learners and adults. After several courses plus years of working, I got very used to being in front of a class and greeting students in English. In fact, this sort of confidence, does not limit itself to the greeting, it goes beyond, of course, and it has a consequence: the ideas, the programming, the material, the content, the teaching flow before, during, and after the class seems to be set in English. The whole mind-environment is sensed in English, to understand English, to apply it in English, to celebrate English…as if it was an obsession or caprice the intellect suffers and enjoys for better or worse. I had been thinking so much and for so long about how to teach this beautiful language I do not own, but love.

One day, I was shocked by what I call The Mirror Effect. There came the possibility to teach Spanish to English speakers. The challenge interested me. There is little opportunity to do this in my hometown, and I thought it wonderful to be in contact with people from Britain, Asia, Australia, and the USA. I accepted the job. I firstly realized I was more conscious of rules and usage of English than of my "taken for granted" mother tongue. That is why I ran to look for books and guides, which led me to the second discovery: I noticed greater difficulty in finding material to help myself and my new students in approaching the task. Oops! No panic! I could at least translate and adapt successful games and activities. Besides, to provide an example of any kind would be easier, for I would intuitively know what to say here and there. Yes! Time to face the English native speakers and greet them Que tal!

Back home I noticed I had mistaken the marker and had written with permanent ink on the board of a high executive in the company. The funny thing was that the source of my odd feeling did not come from this error, but from the experience of facing questions about how "different" and "illogical" Spanish was. I do not know whether it is a common sensation, a psychological issue, or a personal feeling, I merely wanted to pen a few words about it, and I will appreciate if someone feels like writing to me any comment.

When teaching English my students and I share a language which has been acquired in the same way: we were born in a Spanish speaking community. On the other hand, English is the target language, they begin their learning process as I had done it earlier. That, I believe places me "naturally" on the same side of the mirror: Spanish speakers vs English language. Now, teaching Spanish to English speakers, there comes an artificial shift. I needed to stay on the side of my new students who solicited my sympathy to encourage their discovery of a new thinking. Such a shift is almost physical: me right in front of a mirror, confronting my own language and its entire body of culture. Maybe, the most impressive attempt to touch – to become aware of the glass reflection, is the verb "to be" split into the Spanish two forms ser and estar. I could not think of any other language which had a dual verb to be. Ser is used for the transcendental, as Borges said, estar, for the contingent. I believe teaching the verb to be is the climax of the Mirror Effect, for I never saw my mother tongue as before. And teaching it was no longer a matter of inverting knowledge, something powerful, revealing, took hold of me probably in a similar way to the moment I started to study English. However, the path this time was spiral instead of lineal.