Humanising Language Teaching
Year 1; Issue 7; November 1999

About bursting into English - Silvia Cosentino, Cultura Inglesa, Brazil.

Dear Editor,

There are moments that are rare and special. This happened to me the other day. I thought about how many of these moments I have lived through without realising what was going on. That is why moments you can learn from are so important. They give us the chance to watch our work as if from a spectator's point of view, learn from it and possibly be able to repeat the process.

Let me tell you about the class where this special moment happened. Many students in this class had been my students before so I knew what they had gone through to get as far as CPE 2. One of the greatest fights had been to cut Portuguese. I used to get furious at them whenever I heard some Portuguese being used. And mind you, some, only some. I couldn't make out why they had to resort to the mother tongue if they had such a high level of English.

Suddenly I decided to become a scientist and observe what was going on with a calm heart. To my surprise I realised that Portuguese happened just because they had to socialise. The jokes, the negotiation of activities, the secrets, the parallel class story… this other communication had to be quick and efficient. I also realised that they had no difficulty in using L2 to perform the proposed tasks. I then wondered why they couldn't share feelings and intimate information in L2. I asked myself why L2 was still alien to them. I had lost touch with this moment in my own learning of English. And finally, why couldn't they have fun in L2?

The magic moment came, at last. I asked them to discuss their findings in a given exercise. I was thinking about how to organise the next stage of the lesson when a strange sound came to my ears. I prepared myself to shout “ English please!” Then my mind went quiet and I realised the shocking sound was English, my students were speaking freely in English. For the first time I could hear only English. I was astounded, rooted to the spot, almost petrified. Like in one of those flashes people have in near-death experiences I saw their past and their present and I realised that IT had probably happened before but I hadn't been mentally present enough to notice it.

What had provoked this change? What I would give to have been able to freeze that moment and analyse it!. The analysis might have allowed me to produce the same effect with other groups.

And then I broke in on their conversation:

“Attention, please!”. Some were so involved that they did not hear me.

“Could you please look around? What do you see?“ They laughed. They looked at me as though I had gone insane. They replied:

“Students…Teacher,” with more laughter.

“I'll tell you what I see. I see l5 students communicating in English.”

This provoked more laughter still, but I went very serious and shared all I had witnessed. I told them about the glorious moment I was having as a human being. I told them how lucky I felt to have been there. I revealed that everything made sense all of a sudden and shared with them the feeling of “it has all been worth it”. Slowly their faces changed from mocking to bliss.

What happened then is very hard to put into words. I can just say it was hard to get the lesson going again. I wondered whose learning it had been, their learning, my learning, our learning..? I was sure that real life was taking place and I was finally empowered with the ability to watch it.