Along the path from 'I can't' to 'I can'
A muture student comes to grips with French
David Cranmer, Lecturer, Modern Languages and Music Departments, Universidade Nova, Lisbon
It's a curious thing, though in many ways unsurprising, that when we ask someone about their knowledge of another language, whether it is "Parlez-vous français?", "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?", "Fala português?" (for people from where I live) or "Do you speak English?" (when asking about my native tongue), the focus is entirely on speech - completely ignoring the skills of listening, reading and writing. And for me personally, reticent by nature, more comfortable in writing than in speech, the question of whether I can speak a given other language, as opposed to managing with the other three skills, is indeed the crux of the matter.
It is a truism, I know, to say how valuable it is for language teachers to put themselves in the learner's shoes and learn another language. And I well recall when I was undergoing training as an English teacher some 25 years ago, being subjected to a number of first lessons in other languages, partly, at least, as a means of illustrating this point. Personally, I detested these lessons, not because I disagree with the point (on the contrary) or because of anything personal against the languages in question, but because it goes completely against the grain with me to be made to speak bits of a language that I cannot speak. I found myself victim to a form of aggression - forcing me to learn a language in a manner that was totally alien to me, just because in those days that was the way teaching was supposed to be done. And such was the feeling of violence I experienced, that I have rejected methodological bullying of any kind ever since.
In retrospect I would identify the essence of this conflict as having been a collision between what was in my mind - "I cannot speak this language" - and what was in the teacher's - "but you can speak this little bit." For although some learners can speak little bits without any trouble, others (including me) simply do not function like this. In my own case, at the very least, I have to have an intellectual grasp of why the words I'm supposed to speak are as they are. More fundamentally, I find it very hard to cope with having to speak anything of a language that in my mind belongs to the realm of 'I can't'. I go on learning little by little, consciously and unconsciously, within the world of 'I can't' till one day I feel I have acquired a certain degree of command that enables me to say "I think I can now". I thus beg to be a heretic, to part company with the teaching philosophy that expects students constantly to be 'taking risks'. Risks I will certainly take, but in my own time, thank you very much, when I feel ready to face the danger. For that is the way I function.
This whole question of 'can' and 'can't' has always been very present for me in relation to French. Like so many others of my age, I began to learn French at school when I was 11 and continued with it up to my 'O' Level exam at 16. Less usually, I began German at 13 and, as I soon found I preferred it, by the time of my 'O' Levels it was better than my French. Furthermore, whereas I studied German for another two years, to 'A' Level, I only studied French for another term. The result of this is that, though as an adult I have always considered German as being a language that I can speak (however rusty it now is), French has always been one I cannot.
In 1992 research needs took me to Paris. It was the first time I would need to speak French since I had left school, 20 years before. As I quickly found, and I was not surprised, I was utterly tongue-tied. I seemed to understand nothing that people said to me and speaking was a complete non-starter. All my food shopping I did at a supermarket, so that I wouldn't have to ask for anything. I only once ventured into a proper shop, where the book I wanted had no price written on it. I simply handed over my credit card, thus avoiding the need to ask! As for the book, which I really did want to read, at least in part, for my research, I found that even my reading competence in French was grossly insufficient. So much for 5 years' schoolboy French - it was quite useless to me in my hour of need. French was well and truly confirmed as belonging to 'I can't'.
About five years ago, curiosity on my own part and the interest of a student of mine in working with me, led me to begin research into the French composer Camille Saint-Saëns and his links with Portugal. Discovering that this was a far bigger, more complex and more exciting field than ever I could have imagined, I had the idea of putting on an exhibition at the Lisbon Music Museum to draw the general public's attention to it. The idea was greeted with great enthusiasm by the Museum's Director, with the result that I would need to take the research further, identify objects to exhibit and facilitate borrowing or photographing potential exhibits. However, there was a major problem. Unsurprisingly, some of the items would be in France. I would need to go there, find what we needed and negotiate terms of loan or reproduction with the respective institutions. To make matters worse, the French, like the British, have a reputation for expecting others to speak their language and I couldn't speak French to save my life. Faced, therefore, with the prospect that my project could only advance if I did something radical about my French, I decided to have lessons, setting as an objective to reach the level necessary - not an advanced level, but a sufficient level for the transactions I would need to be able to carry out - within two years.
For all kinds of reasons, the best solution seemed to me to attend classes at the Faculty where I teach, but I felt that my French was so limited that I needed to revise as much as I could in advance or I would simply be nowhere near the necessary level even for the first year. So I dug out a book I had had for years but never used, the 11th impression of the 3rd edition of T. W. Knight's Living French, Hodder and Stoughton, 1977, full of old-fashioned exercises, such as I like, and spent a couple of hours a day during my summer holiday, doing them and noting down forgotten and never-seen-before vocabulary in classic manner, French on one side, meaning in English on the other, which I proceeded to memorise as best I could. In this way, when I came to phone my colleague eighteen months ago to ask if she'd mind my joining her class, I could at least feel that I had already begun down the road I must travel. She was very welcoming and reassured me that while the class might have a few near-native speakers, children of Portuguese émigrés in France, I could expect there to be others whose level was very modest, so I need have no worries as to my own abilities.
Reassurance - and I needed a lot of it - also came from another rather unexpected quarter. I had decided at about that time to go to a one-day colloquium on the religious orders in Portugal in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It turned out that the very first paper was to be given in French. The speaker spoke slowly and clearly, bearing in mind that her audience was not French, and I found to my great pleasure and surprise, that I could at least follow the drift of what she was saying, even though I missed things with annoying frequency and kept wondering about the meaning of this or that word that kept recurring. I felt already that I had learnt something from the exercises I had done in the holidays and that my objective might be attainable.
And thus I began my classes. It was very painful indeed in the first semester. Our main written task took me over eight hours to write and that was on top of the planning. But at least I was beginning to feel that, even if I needed massive recourse to a dictionary (the outstandingly good Collins-Robert) and an inordinate length of time, I could make myself reasonably understood in writing. On the other hand, the oral presentation I had to give - on the provinces of Burgundy and Franche Comté - was desperate. I prepared everything carefully on overhead projector transparencies but as for actual speech, the most I could muster was just a few words mumbled over each transparency. How glad I was when it was over.
The second semester took an unexpected turn. I was invited to give a paper at a colloquium to take place in Paris that May. To my horror, it would have to be given in French, though all the speakers were Portuguese or spoke the language, since, as I have already remarked, the French as a rule expect others to speak their language. My paper could, of course, be written in Portuguese and then translated, and this, naturally, was what I did - my teacher kindly did the translation for me and coached me with the pronunciation. One thing I would say about my schoolboy French - I had been well taught where pronunciation was concerned.
I also had much of the second semester to prepare for my visit. Unfortunately, pressures of work meant that I had to miss quite a lot of lessons, but I did make a point of doing the written tasks, which once again took an inordinate length of time to produce. My oral presentation this time was on Camille Saint-Saëns, a topic I could not merely identify with but which was central to my whole learning project. It was very carefully planned, not scripted but with detailed notes, anticipating the language I would need. This presentation went a good deal better than that of the first semester, leaving me feeling that at least with proper preparation, I could just about get information across in speech.
With these things behind me, I was excited at the prospect of going to Paris but also very scared. I felt I could read my paper all right but how I dreaded the thought of any questions that might get asked. And what a relief when the only follow-up was a few comments from a friend of mine who was also present, nothing that required me to say anything, for speaking French (as distinct from reading a translation aloud) still belonged mostly to the realm of 'I can't'. There were, nevertheless, certain promising signs. The first day of the colloquium I scarcely understood a word of what my fellow contributors said. I was still very tired from the journey and the frantic days before coming, and as so often happens, everybody had written papers that were too long for the time available, with the result that they raced at high speed through their text. But the second day I was more rested and my ear had grown more attuned. One of the papers I felt I had really understood. That made me feel good.
But if listening was moving further into 'I can', I still didn't feel this with speech. The morning I left, I was looking at some old postcards in a street market. I found myself wanting to make a spontaneous comment to the vendor, but it took me nearly a quarter of an hour to work out how to say the spontaneous comment…
Once again during the summer months I did some grammar exercises, though, being rather busy, very many fewer than I had hoped. On the other hand, I did borrow a book in French from the library, on the French Huguenot composer Louis Bourgeois. Although I needed the dictionary here and there, I found that I could read it without undue difficulty. This, naturally, had a tremendous morale-boosting effect, for it meant that reading in French was becoming part of 'I can' territory.
In September I discovered an excellent online auction site for collectors, based in Belgium. They had a number of old postcards on offer that I wanted. So I became a member of the site and placed my bids. As most of the sellers were French or French-speaking Belgians, the transactions had largely to be done in French. It took me a couple of hours to compose the three or four lines of the first e-mail explaining that I lived in Portugal, asking about postage and method of payment, and proposing how to deal with the change. But once done, it served as a prototype for the more than a hundred I've composed since then. Simple e-mails in this area passed into 'I can'. Occasionally, I even dared to make a comment on the postcard or send a special word of thanks for a particularly good transaction.
Psychologically, this small step had a profound effect on me, for at last, in a small and simple way, I was communicating regularly with real French speakers for a real purpose. More importantly, it was easy. Somehow a switch had clicked on, a switch that said "in however limited a way, you can now manage in French".
I thus began my second year of French with a very different attitude towards the language. It's not surprising that when I came to give my first oral presentation - on a Mediaeval French poem - my teacher remarked afterwards on how much more at ease I now seemed. And the written assignments, though they took their time to do were something I looked forward to with pleasure and not dread.
Most unexpectedly in late December, I received an invitation to give an organ recital near Lille in June. This was already very much when I had in mind to go to France anyway for my Saint-Saëns research trip. With this opportunity, the fare would be paid for, contributing usefully to the funding of the visit. In my mind, however, there remained a nagging worry: "I am comfortable writing short e-mails about postal charges, I can give short prepared talks, I can read books provided they are reasonably straightforward, I can write compositions given a dictionary and enough time. But I really don't think I can speak French yet, not hold a proper unprepared conversation."
About a month ago, a friend of mine, a musicologist, phoned to ask if he could forward to me an e-mail from a French musician, looking for 18th-century Portuguese repertoire to perform, something my friend felt I was better able to advise on than he himself. I was happy to oblige and duly received the e-mail, in French, of course. So first of all, I would need to write a full-length e-mail in response to the questions raised. This was no longer a composition, just as an academic exercise, but composing a real text, an exercise in real communication. It took me over four hours, but I wrote it and sent it (without having it checked by a native speaker first). Within a couple of days, back came the reply, making it plain that my message had been entirely effective and asking if we could meet when he was coming over, a few days hence. Since he had added that his English was very much worse than my French and that he spoke no Portuguese at all, the conversation would have to be in French. The hydra had to be confronted: a real full-length conversation with a real, normal Frenchman (not a teacher), on serious professional matters, with little preparation as such possible. To add to this, we would be joined by his wife and children afterwards for dinner. And so, last week it happened. I ended up speaking French for three hours. It was tiring, needless to say, but in the course of the evening I only had to look three or four things up in the dictionary. At the age of 50, for the first time in my life, I can no longer deny that I can speak French. I can go to France next month not worrying whether those I have to talk to can speak English, but confident in the knowledge that I can speak French.
And that line would make an excellent close to this testimony, but there is one thing missing still: a few words of reflection on the path I have been travelling along, the real purpose of my writing this in the first place. To my mind, there have been a number of distinct processes at work. In the first place the change from 'I can't' to 'I can' has been gradual but not necessarily steady. There have been periods that felt like stagnation, especially when time pressure and clashes with other obligations have prevented me from attending classes. On the other hand, there have been unexpected moments that have acted as challenges, where I could have drawn back but where I chose to take the risk. The opportunities came from outside, but the choice to take the risk was always mine. That was even so with the oral presentations, where with each successive presentation I reduced the extent of written support, as I felt able to risk having less total control. Now I feel I would need relatively little more written support to give a presentation in French than if I were speaking in Portuguese or in English.
Secondly, the evolution from 'I can't' to 'I can' was not the same in all four skills and it is certainly the skill of speech that has taken me the longest. There is a moral here, for we often tend to think that our learners find writing more difficult than speech and at advanced levels devote correspondingly more time to it.
There was also that rather indefinable and only partially explicable change in attitude that occurred last September, when a switch clicked on. Perhaps it was the moment when the balance shifted, when the 'I can' was beginning to outweigh the 'I can't'. What I can say, though, is that though I do not know exactly when it happened, there was certainly a sudden recognition of the fact.
I shall never know how much of this process has been a reawakening of French I first learnt long ago at school and how much one of learning for the first time. Other things have contributed too: my more than 25 years' experience of teaching English and reflecting on it has certainly helped me beyond measure in terms of awareness of how languages work and learning strategies. Indirectly, my knowledge of Portuguese will also have helped - though it has additionally been a source of interference, not the mother-tongue interference we tend to think of but interference from a second language, in my case much stronger than the influence of English.
What I do know, however, is that in learning French again I have also learnt a lot more about myself and how I function, and to that extent have grown still more aware of how very differently I function from the implied paradigms that underlie a good deal of English Language Teaching methodology. With this awareness I look with great fondness on my three children and the very individual way each is tackling the learning of English in an almost entirely Portuguese-speaking environment.
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