MY LINGUISTIC CAREER

When I was a child, I lived in a rural community with two official languages, English and profane. There were actually several types of English. There were short forms and familiar terms that were used only with the family, more formal language that was used in the community, and then there was a very proper English that was used when the minister came to visit. Profane was used mostly by the men, never when ladies were present, and occasionally, when the men didn’t know there might be a child sneaking around where he wasn’t expected. 

When I got to school and learned to read and write, I realized that there were even more distinctions between spoken and written English. You might be able to say, ‘I was playin’ in the garden’, but if you were going to write it down, you had to write ‘I was playing on the swing’. You could not drop the ‘g’. 

Learning to spell brought even more difficulties. It was fairly easy to learn the ABCs, but knowing the names of the letters did not help in learning how to pronounce the words. How do you know whether it’s ‘a’ as in ‘apple’ or ‘a’ as in ‘able’? How do you know whether it’s ‘I read a book every day’ or ‘I read a book yesterday?’ 

They taught us little rhymes like: 

I before E 

Except after C 

Or when used as eh 

As in neighbour or weigh. 

I’ve never found a rule that would show how to pronounce these words: cough, tough, through, plough, though. 

In my day, teachers did a lot of teaching by rote. This meant a lot of memory work, learning multiplication tables and spelling. We did not ‘look see say’, we had to sound out the letters, figure out what the words were, and then memorize the spelling. 

When I learned to read, write, and spell, I found English puzzling, but fascinating. When I got to high school, I was faced with a new challenge, French. I’d never heard a word of French spoken in my area and I never expected to hear it there, but it was now a required course. There were other required courses like mathematics and science that were even more challenging to me. I had real difficulty with math. 

French was quite a different matter. Although it was not familiar, it had a beautiful sound and dependable rules. Letters were pronounced the same way from one word to another unless they had an accent. There were a couple of tricky combinations such as ‘eau’ and ‘aux’ but they were always pronounced in the same way. As I was already used to learning by rote, I found it very straightforward to learn the different pronouns and endings in order to say, ‘I go to school, you go to school, he goes to school’ and so on. Once I got used to following that pattern, I found it easy to make the changes to say, ‘I went to school’, or ‘I will go to school’. It’s just a pattern that you have to follow. 

I had always planned that I would be a teacher someday. I was one of those children who lined up her dolls and toys on the steps and taught them elaborate lessons in a make-believe school room. As I watched my fellow pupils struggle with a foreign language and rebel against having to learn a language, they were sure they would never use, it occurred to me that maybe this was my destiny, to learn the language well enough to teach it in a way that would be more appealing. What a dreamer I was! 

The following year Spanish was offered, as well as French. Learning Spanish was almost like playing a game, given that words that didn’t sound like English, sounded like French or at least they sounded familiar, and the spelling was so much simpler than French. 

We were also required to study Latin for one year, and I confess that was not as much fun. Even I felt that it was a waste of time because it was a dead language. It was so complicated and required so much putting together just to express a thought. I did acknowledge that so much could be expressed in a minimum of words in Latin, but I never for a moment considered being a Latin teacher. 

I did become a teacher, but not yet a teacher of French. At first, I taught in a private kindergarten, and I thoroughly enjoyed working with small children. I might have stayed teaching preschoolers, but I fell in love with a young army officer destined for the Korean War and thus began our long journey together. On our various postings, I continued teaching and preparing for the day when I could be a qualified French teacher. I studied French at UNB. I learned to read, write, and pass written exams. I could write scholarly essays about Literature or Philosophy. I could comment on the satire of Molière or the poetry of Verlaine, but I somehow could not lose what one of the professors termed my “terrible English accent”. 

I left UNB with a BA in Honours French, but I never managed to understand a word of the conversations I overheard in the cafeteria. There was no conversational French being taught. There was also no effort being made to teach students how to teach French. When I complained that I felt I needed what the army calls ‘T of I or Technique of Instruction,’ so that I could go out and be a teacher, the professor replied, with disdain, “Madame, we are not a trade school!” 

We moved to Montreal where my scholarly French failed me on the bus and in the shops. So, I went to a ‘Learn French’ class. The instructor took me all the way through the placement test and asked why I would want to take a basic course. I explained that I had been unable to follow the directions of a bus driver. The response was a shocked, “Madame, you don’t want to speak like a bus driver!”. 

Before we were posted to Rome, I thought I should try to learn some Italian, so I attended adult education classes in Montreal. I did learn quite a bit of Italian, and I also learned quite a bit about teaching a second language to adults - they don’t want to talk about ‘la plume de ma tante’. They wanted useful vocabulary; like getting a haircut, fixing the car, or giving a message. It was when we were learning to give a message that I saw the value of Latin. We had to use ‘afternoon’, which is ‘pomeriggio’, which we all found hilarious. We joked about Pinocchio and recalled Topo Gigio on the Ed Sullivan show. Our teacher was not amused. She pointed out that ‘pomeriggio’ came directly from the Latin ‘post’. After. And ‘meridiem’ middle of the ‘diem’. Day. We were all familiar with the expression per diem at work. We had never realized we were speaking Latin. 

When I packed for Rome, I put in my high school Latin textbook and later had fun visiting places we had so painfully read about long ago. Italian did not turn out to be as easy to learn as French, certainly not as easy as Spanish. Italian is more like Latin, and uses not only tenses past, present and future, but cases nominative, accusative and the rest, like German. 

When we were posted to Germany, I tried to learn some German by using a teaching machine. This was a very early version of machine learning or programmed learning as it was called in those pre-computer days. It was a box like machine with a hand turned knob on the side and a window at the top, which allowed you to see what was written on a series of sheets of paper that fit in the box. It was a very simplified form of language learning that did teach vocabulary and spelling, and to a limited degree, by using phonetics, show how words should be pronounced, but it was not conversation. Again, I realized that language teaching to be effective had to be spoken aloud, exchanging ideas making conversation. 

Once we got to Germany, I found I really needed to be able to speak the language. We were living in a small town where there were no English speakers around and no classes available. My best lessons in German came by chance. I had advertised in the local paper for a cleaning woman. A few days later, a woman arrived newspaper in hand to show that she was applying for the job. She spoke no English but by charades and gestures explained to me that she was not a typical ‘putz frau’ (I knew the term for cleaning lady) with wrinkled stockings and untidy hair, but that her husband had his motorcycle stolen and could not go to work, so she had to work instead. I’m not sure how we managed to communicate. I did not know the word for motorcycle, and I certainly had not learned about wrinkled stockings from my little knob turning box, but we agreed that she should come and clean for me. 

She did a good job and was patient with my attempts at German. She insisted that I speak correctly and not try to get by with English words that to her sounded like Low German. She never tried to teach me to write or spell but she made me feel comfortable with greetings and day to day chat. 

Some years later I completed the Qualifying Year in Education, which gave me my teaching certificate, and I was hired to teach high school French in Manitoba. The students were not much more enthusiastic about learning French than they had been in my home high school days but at least the teaching of French was becoming more common in the workplace and the need to be bilingual was recognized. 

I wanted my students to get the idea that they could learn to live their lives in a second language, not just do grammar exercises and conjugate verbs in a classroom. With this in mind, we did some exercises in class that were more like real life. We set up a hotdog stand, had them place their orders and give their instructions in French. The grade 10 students ate it up! The grade 11 students were more enterprising. One of the classrooms had a door that opened onto the parking lot and some of the boys took advantage of that door, brought in a motorcycle, and played out a little skit of father and son bargaining with a motorcycle salesman. Of course, I don’t suppose any of those boys ever became bilingual, but it did change their attitude. 

When we were posted to England, I attended classes in conversational French offered at an adult education centre in the famous area of Bloomsbury in London. There were students of all ages from a wide variety of European countries and the classes were conducted entirely in French. We were encouraged to tell something about ourselves in the best French we could manage. One of the most intriguing stories we heard was from an elderly Russian woman who told us that she had been a refugee five times. 

After London we came home to Ottawa and the perfect job for me. The Ottawa Talmud Torah School Board was looking for a halftime teacher of French for their primary school, which included nursery, kindergarten, and classes up to grade 3. They offered a trilingual program where the children spent one quarter of the day immersed in Hebrew, one quarter in French, and the other half of the day, following the Ottawa Carleton core program, in English. It was a delightful job, working with little children who were completely without attitude towards a second or third language, and who slipped back-and-forth seamlessly from English to Hebrew to French. 

I was sorry when after only two years we were posted back to New Brunswick, but I was able to keep teaching when I was hired as a part-time lecturer at UNB. I was teaching a freshman course for students who were required to have one French credit to graduate. It was not much of a job and the pay was minimal, but it had its personal rewards. It was a bit of a thrill to be part of faculty meetings with my former professors. Also, I got a real kick out of applying the green windshield sticker that read, ‘Faculty and Staff Parking’. 

When we were in Rome, I had enjoyed a few months teaching what I called ‘cocktail party English’ to the wives of Turkish officers who were training for NATO positions where there would be a lot of social life. The men all spoke English but not the women. I did not offer grammar or written work, just casual conversation and greetings, days of the week and some shopping. It was a golden moment for me the first time one of them left the house saying, “See you later.” 

I enrolled in the Masters Program in Linguistics as I have always been interested in learning more about language, how we use it to bring people closer or keep them at a distance, to sell or to persuade or to shock. All languages seem to show people’s status and place in society by the way they speak. As I mentioned, we had a special way of speaking to the minister. A German cleaning woman did not want me to speak Low German. A French-Canadian teacher refused to let me speak like a bus driver. Some of the courses were fascinating. Semantics helps us understand meanings. Sociolinguistics and Psycholinguistics help to explain how we use language to deal with other people. I enjoyed that part of the program but when it came to the real theory of how language works as a system, I was right back in math class again. So, I fell back on what had succeeded before – ‘memorize what you cannot analyze’. It got me through the program, but it had nothing to do with teaching. 

My last paid teaching position was at the Canadian Forces Language School in St. Jean Quebec, teaching English as a second language to young French-Canadian sailors. They may not have enjoyed the English classes, but they were highly motivated to get their language qualification so they could get to their ship. 

I did some language learning myself during my sojourn with the sailors. I learned that French also has some expressions that can be considered profane! These words are not for use when ladies are present and ‘they can make a sailor blush’.