Bye bye holidays

This summer has flown by. It has been the best summer ever for all of us. The weather was gorgeous so we had the chance to go either to the beach or to the swimming pool almost everyday. We didn’t really have as many “English moments” as I would have liked, I mean, I hardly organized activities with a particular goal. However, we just “lived in English” as much as we could.

In an attempt to innovate and make the most of my time, we played with words and dealt with grammar. Kids had fun and learned at the same time. Also, we reviewed food vocabulary by writing down shopping lists and reading recipes.

Nevertheless, our biggest achievement consisted of changing the name of many objects. My 6 year-old child is able to say sentences in English, and he feels proud of himself when he does it, so he is doing it more and more each time. However, my 4 year-old boy can’t construct his own sentences yet (though he knows some questions by heart like commands and short expressions. 

In any case, all of us, the five of us, even when we were talking in Spanish we got used to naming some things always in English. For example, we said things like: “¿Quieres un poco más de watermelon?”, “¿Dónde dejaste el dummy?” This way they learned those words as I remembered to change from Spanish into English again and again (when I was talking in Spanish for any reason).

These are some of the things we did

Am I monolingual in my own language?

The other day I was asked for the translation of a particular English word, and I honestly answered that I didn’t have a clue. As a consequence, we started a debate about the knowledge English teachers should have about the English language.

Sometimes I think we are expected to know the entire dictionary, but I reckon we should be better at successfully teaching what we know.

The better we teach, the higher level students will reach instead of the better English we have, the higher level students will reach. 

I base my opinion on my own experience. I am Spanish, but my vocabulary is quite poor. Do you know those language learning methods based on a certain amount of words? ‘Learn English in 1000 words’ is one of the most popular ones. I think that if I analyse my own Spanish, I probably use just… 400 words? But I’m fluent, I’m Spanish, I mean, I’m a native speaker.

So, couldn’t this happen to me in English? I mean, am I not fluent for not having a very rich vocabulary? I completely disagree.

I think that English teachers must be fluent and their English must be very good, but they will never succeed as a teacher if they are not better at teaching.

Teaching implies sharing your own knowledge, making it be understood, and helping students to learn those concepts. Teachers should teach I order to better students’ learning and each student should develop their own way to understand and remember things.

Undoubtedly, and all this comes after a deep student observation.

Misunderstandings

As deaf as a post?

I’ve always heard that the sooner we start to learn a second language, the better it is. Also, recent theories say that the best way to learn, and I fully agree, is by imitating the natural way of acquiring a second language. That’s to say, learning a language as children learn their own mother tongue.

On the one hand, here in Spain things are supposed to change (from Government’s perspective), which means that teachers have been told that they have to teach the four basic communication skills full time in English and following the natural way of language acquisition. In other words, children first understand, then speak, then read and finally write. So the correct order is: listening- speaking- reading- writing.

On the other hand, the problem is that things in Spain were done the other way round for a lot of years, and we still have a big bunch of teachers who are not fluent enough to put the theory into practice.

Last but not least, I’ve heard that we (Spanish) are as ‘deaf as a post’ when it comes to learning English, but I think we didn’t receive the amount of input required to develop language skills.

From a practical point of view, as our input was poor, we couldn’t develop a good ‘intuition skill’ for understanding a second language.

As usual, children are better than adults. They amazingly surprise us by saying things we have never wondered about.

I’m quite concerned about pronunciation. Specially if mispronouncing implies a change in meaning.

I do the same at home, my kids are young and as they are still learning how to say some words correctly in Spanish, I don’t particularly correct them when they mispronounce words in English, but the other day something happened at home: my 4 year-old misunderstood me. It was hilarious! The dialogue was more or less like:

HIM: “Mamá, ¿cómo se dice abrochar en English?

MUM: Button up

HIM: ¿eh? ¿Culo arriba?

MUM: Why are you saying ‘culo arriba’?

HIM: Dijiste “Bottom up”. Bottom, culo, up, arriba.

MUM: Ah! No, no, no, Bu-button, not bo-botton.

The thing is, he was probably right because I maybe said ‘bottom’ (or kind of). I learned English in Dublin, and then lived in Cork, and in many regions of Ireland the sound /ʌ/ is pronounced /ɒ/.

It was fantastic. This dialogue really pushed me to keep on speaking English to my children. It demonstrated me that the new language is truly getting into their wonderful, little brains.

CLOTHES

I’m back…

These days have been a bit different at home, kids were excited for their school festival so they were nervous, restless… For kids nervousness means happiness, but for mums that means quarrels and shouts.

I can’t change school events, so I did what I thought it was best: I joined the enemy!

I knew it was going to be impossible to sit them in a circle, to read them stories and talk about them afterwards, and that kind of thing, so as I had in mind to work with CLOTHES, I made my kids help me.

I love playing games IN ENGLISH. They think they are just having fun with mum but I am actually ‘organizing’ the game and repeating the same words all the time. My purpose is to teach them a particular vocabulary, not just play. Seriously, I love playing with them for the sake of playing, but I wouldn’t do it in English because it’s not my mother tongue. When I play in English it’s because I’ve got something else in mind.

In this case my ‘Guinea pigs’ (lovingly, I used to call them my Guinea pigs) coloured and cut clothes worksheets. We pretended we were hanging up the laundry (believe me, children think this is fun) so they had to find and hang up the garment they heard me call out.

They also did two types of carton board dice, one with drawings of pieces of clothes, and the other with clothes names written on it.  This game consists of rolling the dice, reading the word and saying the name of the drawing. If both dice match, you score a point.

We had fun with these activities, but I know they don’t understand this vocabulary yet. They still have to listen to these words many more times before they can start saying them spontaneously. No doubt, it means I HAVE TO say those words in English every time I use them.

Remember, the bigger the input, the quicker the output.

Compiling information

Back again! Although this time, I’m finding it a bit harder to explain in another language, all about what we’ve been up to over the last few weeks. It can be quite difficult sometimes to find the required inspiration to write in English when all your thoughts and feelings flow so quickly in your own language. You don’t always know how to express things or how to make yourself understood on a blog post but once you finally start to put pen to paper, words usually begin to flow like verbal diarrhea, allowing you to type at the speed of thought, which normally only happens when you’re writing in your mother tongue.

Anyway, the thing is, during these past few weeks I’ve been basically compiling information and useful activities from websites, Instagram, Facebook and other online sources, where I found the inspiration I needed to shape up this mad process of ‘bilingualising’ my family.

All of us, parents and teachers, like doing things our way. We all have a particular method we like to use but in saying that, there’s no doubt we can all make good use out of online resources to customise our own particular style. 

Here are some of the links I usually take advantage of:

https://www.youtube.com/user/SuperSimpleSongs?gl=ES&hl=es

 http://learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/en/

http://supersimplelearning.com

https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/teaching-kids/resources

 I’ve also put together recently a list of topics I’d like to cover at home with my kids. I have sorted them by level of importance according to my point of view and my kids’ needs. What I mean is there’s no point in starting with numbers if my toddler can’t count, but starting with the parts of the body would make more sense, since it’s a topic of conversation my three kids can follow.

Other crazy things we’ve done over the past few weeks in my small apartment were crafts and projects on national festivities and celebrations, which helped me ‘bilingualise’ my kids without feeling like I was doing any work.

Here are some examples:

·      St. Patrick’s cards: I got the kids to cut and colour some paper shamrocks and we talked about how this festival is celebrated in Ireland.

·         Seasonal mail boxes: we had some fun making a Spring mail box out of cardboard and left it in our hallway so we can post each other surprise letters and notes. This will help reinforce their writing skills in both languages (they write in Spanish and I reply in English) We dedicated this mail box to Spring and we got to talk about all the different seasons and dealt with specific vocabulary and talked about the things that take place during that time of the year.

·      

      Family trees: taking advantage of the topic one of my kids was covering at school, we designed a ‘rabbit family tree’. I printed three types of bunnies whose age gap was pretty clear. They were rabbit families with different colour paws for each family. The kids got to sort them all by colour into small families.

·      


      A food pyramid: following again a school topic, we designed a poster using both flashcards and name-cards.

Here’s some advice:

Arrange for a fun-focused day and learning will flow!!

You can follow Biligualising on Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/bilingualising/