Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 5; September 02

Respect for the Students' Mother Tongue

Simon Marshall, UK

As someone who is fascinated in all languages, I often ask learners to tell me how, for example, a collocation alters in their own language, or if, say, they use the present perfect a different way in their language from in English etc… They seem to love this type of question because they know that I am interested in their Mother tongue- " and without a mother how can we be born ?" ( G.I. Gurdjieff)- the students seem to exist, indeed live in different way in the classroom during this question.

Suddenly, they are the experts where they help me aspire to their language, rather than always scaling the rocky heights to mine.

On many occasions, in intensive phoneme-based pronunciation slots, I ask members of the class to teach me and each other ( multi-lingual class) a tricky sound in their language - that allows them to see that it is not only difficult to learn " r" in English or the strong "r " in Spanish, but difficult to teach it, too. This teaching each other is a great empathy builder. I have had some lovely, warm discussions with Japanese, Korean and Chinese learners about the tribulations of producing the unvoiced "th". It is not merely a lingua-dental physical trial , it is overcoming the trenchant self-disgust of sticking one's tongue out in public! Aesthetics, social acceptability and even linguistic credibility are as much part of learning the sounds of a language as negotiating the physical contortions necessary to articulate them successfully