There was, however, only me and a seagull down at the pool in the late morning. I heard some splashing, turned around and saw Mrs Gaviota give herself a bath in the pool. Fortunately I wasn't actually in the water at the time. I think that might have freaked me out a little, swimming in circles around a seagull. She hung around for a while after I got into the pool, as if to register her protest that there was a PERSON in the water! Last seen, she was flying off with nesting material in her beak. Otherwise, the pool was mine. Perhaps the clouds put off the serious sun worshippers. As I was leaving a couple of people turned up, the sort who have clearly arrived home from work and want to cool off quickly before lunch. Having a pool is truly one of the delights of a civilised life! I have been reading the ramblings of a civilised man: the physicist Richard Feynman, who worked in Los Alamos on the production of the atomic bomb. You could, I suppose, argue that the bomb is not the most civilised thing in the world. Weapons of mass destruction rarely are. But the man himself is a delight, finding joy in discovering things, playing friendly jokes on people and happily prepared to make fun of himself as well. He spent some time teaching at a university in Brazil, where he was disturbed, and quite disgusted, to find that most of the students In his classes theoretically knew all sorts of things about physics but in reality did not actually understand what they had been examined on, and declared to have passed! They had learnt definitions by heart but had never fully understood the concepts. Consequently they could not apply the concepts to real situations and experiments. Their pride prevented them from asking questions. In fact anyone who asked questions we mocked and looked down on. He made a speech at the end of his secondment there, provoking academics there to rethink their approach!
I was reminded, reading this, of a discussion Phil and I had just yesterday about the parlous state of foreign language teaching and learning in many schools in the UK. (Richard Feynman, by the way, taught himself enough Portuguese to give lectures in the language!) Teaching A and AS level French and Spanish in sixth form colleges, I was constantly coming across students who had achieved high grades in their GCSE exam without having much linguistic knowledge. Seemingly, they had been told in advance what questions they could expect to be asked in the spoken exam. They prepared, with the teacher's help, excellent answers and learnt them off pat, without fully understanding what they were saying. Of course, this did not apply to all students but certainly to many. They were horrified to discover that I was not going to do this for the spoken exam at this higher level, but expected a genuine conversation!
There is always a certain amount, indeed quite a lot, of rote learning involved in language study. But it has to be the right stuff. In that way the verb forms, agreement of adjectives, use of prepositions and constructions become second nature. What's more, if it is structured properly, this rote learning becomes a liberating tool, leading to independent language use. But it requires a lot of hard work, as does any skill. Great musicians almost certainly have a gift for whatever instrument they play but they will also have spent hours doing routine practice to hone their skills.
Somewhere along the way, in the last twenty to thirty years, there has been some throwing out of the baby along with the bath water. We are churning out students who can ask for directions but can only understand the answer if the person they speak to sticks to the script. When I was first studying Spanish and French we spent an inordinate amount of time translating sentences from one language to the other. I had school friends who found the whole thing very confusing but they struggled on and achieved a reasonable level of competence, although some of them could not string a sentence together. Clearly that approach was not totally successful.
Then came a move to make foreign language learning mimic the process of first language learning. This is not really possible; you will never again have that completely clean slate to work on and need to take shortcuts to speed up language acquisition. But there were changes and improvements in foreign language teaching, notably as a result of borrowing techniques from the teaching of English as a foreign language. We still made the students learn language patterns though and I think that on the whole we did a decent job.
But then, inevitably things went a stage further and suddenly it was considered somehow wrong to expect students to learn lots of grammar rules. If it was too hard they would be bored and give up! Where did that idea come from? Teaching in a large comprehensive school in the seventies, my pupils were expected to master the present tense, the future and a couple of past tenses by the end of the second year (year 8 in modern parlance) and I sent them home with masses of questions to answers, repetitive exercises to complete and stuff to learn. And for the most part they rose to the challenge and enjoyed the code breaking element of language learning.
A lot of that seems to have disappeared. I think it needs to come back. By the time youngsters are deemed old enough to have opinions and ideas, and this happens at an ever earlier stage nowadays, they should be equipped with the tools to express some of those competently in a foreign language. That's where the fun, the interesting part of language learning lies.
Bring back the challenge, the fun, the interest: that's what I say!
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