From school failure to life-success in learning a second language.

In this interview Andrew, who has recently retired from being Head of Technology in a large UK secondary school, describes his growth into French.
It is maybe interesting to reflect on how our failure as language teachers may be redeemed later in the learner's life by their energy and wish-to-learn being finding release and fulfilment. This, at any rate was Andrew's case, thanks to a woman!

hlt:: I think you told me before that you weren't a star pupil at French….., not at school.

Andrew: : No, not at all. Boy's technical school, er..1960ish…two years of French.. I couldn't learn the grammar…I was lazy…didn't want to learn je suis, tu es bit…couldn't see the point, struggled, never been away…out of the country…Form teacher was the crafts person, taught craft, run clubs, making options at the end of the third year or end of the second year, in those days, he said I ought ..yah, could make things quite well.
"That's the area you should take your career in - give up these things like languages and have no need ".So that's where we were as far as languages…………

hlt: : Did you have contact with other languages at that stage?

A: : None at all. It wasn't a very popular option in a boys' school in the middle of the Medway towns at that time anyway….

hlt: : So there were kind of sociolinguistic reasons against it………

A: : Yes, as well as being lazy cos it was something that you had to do…had to really work at in the way it was being taught at that time, and… a lot of rote-learning,, a lot of sort of learning grammar that I….didn't understand in English either. And in the English teaching…you had some language training but it never seemed to match with the language learning that was grammatical, structure…that was going on in French.
You know……. the sort of past perfect tense, you know, sort of something that didn't crop up in …when the teaching of English or, whatever it was, was happening in English. Then I went on to A levels, teaching training college, Goldsmiths in London, handicrafts,….that changed halfway through to design technology. Three years of that. During that time I sort of socially met a couple of young French girls which, I enjoyed their company, as most people probably would've done at that time. Then moved off into teaching in Reading. then I met Martine and when I met Martine I had no French other than the very rudimentary hello, goodbye… We'd always talk English.
Martine was here a year , assistant, for a year, er…her English was very good and obviously she wanted to practise her English and not actually concern herself with teaching me French, at the time.

hlt: : Did you want her to teach you?

A: : At the time……. no, I was quite happy with how the relationship was going, how we were communicating and didn't really see the absolute….sort of need to break into it and still hadn't been to France, um, at all. Only trips out of the country prior to being.., prior to 22, had been a week's holiday in Austria. Not a very well travelled youth at the time.
Then went to France to meet the family-things were quite serious, or getting serious and really enjoyed the culture that I found myself in. so, culturally, I was being awakened.

hlt: : What sort of things did you enjoy at that stage?

A: : Um… it was ..the wine, the food was obviously there…which has stayed…! But it was a sort of opening having sort of, all right I'd been to London, New Cross, there for three years, a multi-cultural area, going to a….going to France which was sort of mono-cultural, I suppose, down in the depths of the Loire Valley…but just the way in which people….the walks of the people…the sort of…the market-place, the shopping, the sort of the countryside.
Yes, and the family was well integrated into the village…so I could walk through the village after a while, er, and…well, talk to the people cos I couldn't communicate with them at all, other than saying 'hello, goodbye' and Martine sauntered along and trying to translate everything I said. And then it started getting frustrating. Cos I do like communicating…
Things started to get frustrating when friends turned up, school friends of Martine or close family friends of roughly the same age. If you've ever been in the situation where they're starting reminiscing and they start going and you're here and there is no way you can interrupt, that's, you know, say, you know, nudging Martine and saying "what they saying?"
You know, get's tiresome it's….you could see that Martine, I could see that Martine and her friends were sort of enjoying the conversation, you know, that the way they talked….

hlt: : Did you feel this on the first visit?

A: : Oh, yeah.. .yeah , yeah sitting round….something I'd never done in England, sit round the table for 4 hours and really talk…and I'm sitting round a large table with people in their late eighties-there was…Martine's grandmother was alive at the time,…great….great …..Great grandmother was alive at the time and also there was 5-6 year-old children all sitting round the table, all chirping in their little bit every now and then.
This was a quite….for me was a, amazing event,...something I sort of wanted to get into, quickly.

hlt: : So technically, how did you start?

A: Martine gave me some….I said: "I'm going to go out with your father.." He's a great fisherman, ( I enjoy fishing) " I need some basic phrases, teach me some basic phrases that I can latch onto ". They did tell me that the most important phrase was 'Merde' I think that might have been the first one, not phrase or even word. you use that one, you can go anywhere. C,a va, all right,j'ai soif,j'ai faim… which has become a family joke because they think, you know, if you teach those four, very simple phrases, you'll survive for ever in France!
But I wanted to go further, so, fishing techniques and talking about fishing became important. So I learnt some very simple phrases, which, on reflection, were really just jokes between us, you know, er but was as there in a way to, to build up relationship with the family, with the father-in-law-to-be.
Then I thought, "well, I'm not going to have Martine on my back all the time, translating, doing things, so I started learning just nouns, names of things.
We got married, we had a house erm…time…I, I was doing evening classes, I didn't have time to go…. I was teaching, teaching evening classes…we needed money at the time to sort of do what you wanted to do er…so I didn't have time to go to evening classes and at that time I thought book learning wasn't for me and I tried tapes and they didn't work because they weren't pertinent to what I wanted. So loves of a life were fishing and eating and drinking.

hlt: : So how, practically, did you go about learning? Suppose you wanted to be able to say 'jug' what would you do?

A: : I'd ask somebody: "how d' you say that?"

hlt: : They'd say cruche or pichet

A: : Pichet,….c'est un pichet

hlt: : And then?

M: : And then it lodged.

hlt: : It lodged like that?

A: : You know…I'd want to know what sugar….,knife, fork, pepper….

hlt: : Did you take notes..?

A: : No, because I wanted to use it, so I got cookbooks in French, because that's my … I love cooking, so I tried to follow cooking recipes…..
So I started, I'd go shopping with Martine's Mum….it seemed really strange over there, you know, "Andrew wants to go shopping with you", you know, because I wanted to see what they were buying, how they were buying….when they talk about un livre de beurre I thought: " this is really crazy, what's un livre de…a book of…. A pound…a pound of butter-how could we buy a pound of butter when we're in France you know 500 grams c'est un livre. I was picking up little things like that and I suppose……..
Now, when I want to wind a French person up, I always ask them what the rules of….how something is masculine or feminine…that's interesting because they can't really explain.

I wanted the family to give me shopping lists to go buying myself so I thought I've got to have confidence to go out and actually talk to these people and buy things….

hlt: : That was when you were sort of at the one word stage. What happened then?

A: : Well, nothing because they just moan at me: my grammar is absolutely atrocious: I'm not sure whether I'm coming, going or I've done it. But I started listening to what people were saying to try to put things into…..Nobody said…they recognised my accent, I was English… but because I had a , I think I had quite a large vocabulary of words things started to be put together and started linking together. I have to say that it took me about a year to realise that c,a va was two words.
So I started putting things together…..being left with young kids who could only speak French….there was two children, Martine's sister had two young children, um, before ours came along.
On visits I sort of looked after them and sort of conveyed sort of simple thoughts to them and they would come and talk to me.

hlt: : Presumably unthreatening..

A: : Oh, yeah, I've never found anybody threatening with French, maybe I've just been very fortunate. No one's got cross with me because I didn't understand, or no one's sort of made a …you know, there's little stories that the family sort of talk about how I learnt French or little mistakes that I made…part of the mythology of coming into the French family, which is quite quaint now….I was learning …I was learning in this fashion of wanting to talk to people, wanting to talk about….there were teachers in the family - so I wanted to talk about my experiences of teaching and listening to their experiences of teaching. Wanted to talk to Martine's mum about how she made her sauces, what you put in first and what you put in next.

hlt: : I think you told me when we talked before that you got to a stage where you were able to sort of talk to groups of teachers about ICT things.

A: Not so much ICT, more design technology, which is really my strength. We went to France as an exchange, put up an exhibition of the work that our kids had done and groups came round and looked at it. I had to talk to them: what we're we doing and why we're we doing it. Then I went to a conference in Paris and I talked in French about our aptitude tests that I designed for Chaucer to a group of about 20. And, you know, there was some English being chucked in….well you know I've stuck here but I managed to sort of put it over…not sure that I could do it cold now….but could!
No, I didn't prepare for the talk…I used what I had…and when I got stuck I sort of went back and then took another road.

hlt: : When you talk now do you monitor what you are saying….or do you just talk completely spontaneously?

A: : I think it's spontaneously now. Certainly when there's French people about I enjoy listening.

hlt: : So you sometimes stop and correct something you've said, suddenly realise it's wrong…?

A: I do if I…I get the quizzical look of non-understanding…….

hlt: Thank you very much, Andrew, for this really interesting interview.