I attended the IDT (International German Teachers) conference in Jena, Germany, in 2010 and learned the following: – the value of chunking language so students don’t experience cognitive overload – that everything is lexical until a learner has acquired sufficient language to begin making connections. “Voy = I go” and “Fui = I went” are just vocabulary words to a new student and equally easy to learn. They don’t know enough to grasp that they are part of a system. Starting with rules of the language is ineffective and frustrating for most students because it doesn’t yet make sense. Imagine trying to explain “commutative”, “associative” and “distributive” concepts of addition and multiplication while children are still learning to count and don’t even know how many “ten” is.
People in general conversation do not distinguish clearly between present and past tense as long as it is clear when he activity occurred. Listen carefully to conversations, and you will often hear people saying things like, “Yesterday we went to the movies . . . and so this guy says . . . and then I look at him and say . . . .” This is such a common phenomenon in both speech and writing that when I was doing literary criticism we had a name for it: the historical present.
Then think about how children learn their first language. We do not reserve certain tenses for age five or later. Parents talk to their children using all tenses. Obviously learning a foreign language in a classroom isn’t exactly like learning our first language, so we have to be more focused and deliberate about what we do. However, as long as we make certain students understand what we are saying, we don’t have to limit ourselves to speaking in a particular tense. In fact, based on what I learned from the IDT conference, it makes sense to use past, future, conditional and other tenses long before you officially look at them. You will see light bulbs go on because students have sufficient language to understand the meta-cognitive piece.
Perhaps a personal experience will help illustrate this. After learning Hebrew in seminary, I went to UCLA and studied Near Eastern Languages and Literature. As part of the course of study, I learned Arabic. The class was taught very much with a grammar base. One day the professor was trying to explain the “idafa” concept to the class. I watched as highly motivated students struggled to grasp the concept; this was, after all, a first semester beginning class. My notes for the day consisted of the following sentence: “Idafa is similar to the Hebrew Construct State”. From my study of Hebrew I already had sufficient linguistic understanding to grasp the concept. My classmates who had never studied a Semitic language before did not.
So tell your stories. They are wonderful. (As an added bonus, your students see you as a real person and not just the cardboard figure that stands in the front of the room and lectures.) Tell them in present tense if that is most comfortable to you. Tell them in past tense if that feels more natural. Just be sure your students understand. You might even tell the stories in the present tense and get students to act them out while you tell them. Stop every few minutes and ask your students about what they have seen and heard. If it then is natural for you to go to the past tense – and for most of us it will be – do it. I’ll bet some of your students will start asking questions about why you changed forms. You can simply say something like, “Well, when we were acting it out, I was talking about it while it happened. Now it isn’t happening any more, so I have to talk about what happened.”
Many people think that students who learn this way take longer to get the language. That perception is colored by what people are testing. Yes, students will take longer to verbalize a set of rules. They will take longer to acquire massive amounts of vocabulary. But they will much more quickly be able to understand the language itself and interact with you in it. And they will much more quickly be able to use the language. Fluency isn’t knowing a lot of words, it’s being able to use a few words so that they sound natural to a native speaker. Once a student can use the language, adding vocabulary is a relatively easy matter – it just takes time on task. Unfortunately, most districts, schools and departments are still trying to apply a paradigm that originated in the nineteenth century for teaching reading of classical languages to a completely different situation. The end goal is different, and the students are different. Works that I have read state that students learn differently because of the influence of computers and the internet. We can’t teach them the way people in the 1800s taught.
Yes, it does take time to get good at using the target language 90% of the time and still ensuring that students understand, but doesn’t anything that is worthwhile? And, thank God, we don’t have to be perfect at it. Every good teacher is striving to improve, and I know you are one of them.
