I was making tea this morning and the term:
…quando cœli movéndi sunt et terra….
just popped into my mind. This was from the Libera Me from the Faure Requiem. But I hadn’t heard it for thirty years back in South Carolina when I sang it over an eleven year period in my church. So I don’t know what that means in terms of how we learn languages. I mean, it just popped into my brain, I had no control over it. I just said it because I had sung it for eleven years in a row, I guess. I am most interested in the affective part. I mean, does it count if that segment of the piece is spectacular, and the words are sacred, and full of deep meaning? Those are words that lower the affective filter so low because they have such beauty. Just thinking out loud here. I’ve always felt that we ignore the affective piece in our work far too much. The best teachers, many of whom I have worked with here in our community, all seem to share that quality of being able to lower the affective filter in their classes through sheer good will and respect for the students. Just ranting here.
Maybe a great way to learn a language, if I wanted to learn me some Latin, for example, would just be to sing along with YouTube vids like this:
Judy’s comment on Robert’s article on Comprehensible Output maybe relates to the point I try to make above:
Stephen Krashen has asked me to write up this story about the father of one of my students. His father’s family came to France from Italy when he was a baby, and grew up bilingual, speaking an Italian dialect from northern Italy at home and French with playmates and at school. His father returned to Italy as a young man and brought back an Italian wife who spoke no French. Their first son spoke Italian with his parents and French with everyone else, becoming bilingual like his father. But by the time the second son was born, the mother had acquired some French and the father and older son often spoke together in French, which everyone in the family understood by then. When the younger son tried to speak Italian, they laughed at him. So he quickly stopped trying, although he understood his parents perfectly when they spoke together in Italian. As a child he went to Italy with his parents on vacation, but could not speak Italian, although he understood the dialect. He needed his parents or his brother as interpreters to communicate with those who didn’t understand French. After his own marriage he decided to take his new bride, who was French and spoke no Italian, to the native village of his parents. There he found no one who could interpret for him, so he was forced to try to make himself understood in Italian. He was 24 years old and it was the first time that he had tried to produce output. It took only a day or two for him to start speaking fluent Italian. People told him he had a slight French accent and occasionally made gender errors, but otherwise had no difficulty communicating.
The Faure Requiem is just so beautiful. Maybe it means that we have to bring the beauty of language, that invisible quality that connects us to the stars, into our instruction. So that the words we say in class glitter and don’t have snot on them, as in the kind of snot we see when the teacher is showing off and doesn’t care how the kids’ hearts feel during the lesson.
Maybe it is that if a person is to learn a language they have to want to know what it means for real and they have to be in a happy environment with love and respect there. That doesn’t describe a lot of foreign language classrooms of past decades, where the teacher acts like a know-it-all. And then when they go and force kids to speak and then be graded on it, that just offends me.