Why participate in LTMOOC?
Because I love learning languages!
So it all started about 20 years ago, my first year of secondary school, and French was obligatory. Not that I minded, my teacher loved her subject, and that love resonated with her students. Fast forward 10 years, and I lived and worked in Paris for about fourteen months. To this day, I still learn French.
In my second year of secondary school, after a thrilling ride through Homer’s Odyssey, my Classical Civilisation teacher begun to teach us Latin. What was the first thing I learnt?
“Latin is a dead language, as dead as dead can be. First it killed the Romans – and now it’s killing me!”
Of course, that sentiment was far from the truth. I was more than sad when my teacher responded to her calling from God to teach in Africa. But I will never forget her advice for learning Latin cases while walking up and down stairs. And I will never forget how I learnt to conjugate my first three Latin verbs by doing just that: “ Porto, Portas, Portat, Portimus, Portitis, Portent…Doceo, Doces, Docet…Traho, Trahis Trahit, Trahimus, Trahitis, Trahunt”…ad infinitum! To this day, I still figure out the meanings of new words, by remembering the vivd stories from my Latin class, about Caecilius the father, Matella the mother, and Quintus, the (fifth, apparently), son.
Having graduated from university, and having spend goodness knows how long studying French, it was time for a change. And the obvious switch was from French to Spanish. I learnt Spanish at “night school” via well-subsidised Adult Education classes. This equated to a couple of hours a week during term time. In other words, very slowly over a long period of time. Spending every holiday possible in Spanish or the Canary Islands helped. To this day, I will never forget my wondrous 2 month stay in Malaga, where I went from not speaking to actually being able to form coherent sentences.
Reaching the giddy heights of Intermediate Spanish, I started to feel jittery. Suddenly, studying became very serious. I began to miss the carefree days of being a beginner. And so, I decided to switch from Spanish to Italian! My work involved communication with Spanish & Italian counterparts, my boss was Italian, and I love the sound and rhythm of the language: so it made sense. I went to “night school” for about a year, mixed in a couple of short immersion programmes in Italy, followed by a private tutor in the office. To this day, I will never forget my boss questioning my trading strategies, “Che cazzo, fai?!”
Present day sees me tackling a very different language beast: an Asian language. Mandarin Chinese. I’ve had no end of problems with this one. I have attended university classes, self-studied, had a private tutor, and now I am back at a private school. And still, I am unsatisfied, (and still languishing in a permanent Advanced Beginner zone). I think it has something to do with the fact that I have had so many different language learning experiences, I now have a lot of ideas as to what makes a successful lesson (and what does not). Not to mention I have been trained in Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), which emphasises interaction as the means, and, the ultimate goal, of study. And there is not nearly enough interaction and fun activities in my class as I would like. To this day, I am thinking about how I can use my past experiences to influence a more communicative approach in the TCFL/Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language industry (and thus, helping myself, as well as others, at the same time).
To conclude, then, I originally joined LTMOOC to learn how to create fun online activities, based on authentic resources, for students learning English. Now, I think there is more of a need to focus my attention on developing such materials for those (of us) learning Chinese.