Contemporary Retirement

Many people express the desire to learn a foreign language once they retire. If this sounds like you, here are some tips from Sue Johns of the Kingsway English Centre that might help you out:

Speaking a Foreign Language is about Successful Communication

Grammar is the most important factor to consider when speaking a foreign language. Get the grammar right and everything else falls into place. Wrong!

This comes as a surprise to anyone who studied a foreign language at school in the 20th Century. Lessons in those days involved conjuring with conjugations, getting tense about tenses and endlessly trying to get your endings to agree. You were lucky if you actually heard the language being spoken and exceptional if your teacher was a native-speaker.

No wonder that your 'O' level French didn't allow you to feel relaxed in a French restaurant - you were more bothered about whether you'd got the correct past participle than whether you had ordered an endangered species for your main course.

If this was your language learning experience then you probably think that, if you couldn't master a language in your youth, you won't be able to in the full-bloom of maturity. Wrong!

Best practice in language teaching these days emphasises successful communication. Successful is different from perfect or accurate. It means you understand the gist of what someone is trying to tell you or that they understand what you are trying to tell them. So what if you use the imperfect tense imperfectly? Maybe that is why it was so named!

Grammar is important but, in the early stages of learning a language, there are more important things to grapple with, especially if you want to communicate verbally. Firstly you need vocabulary and secondly you need to know the basic rules of pronunciation.

Recently one of my English language students produced the following grammatically perfect sentence: " I couldn't find the bus-stop" . However her pronunciation of 'could' was 'cold' and 'bus' became 'booze' so it sounded like she wanted some cold booze. I'm tuned in to learner errors so I didn't offer to share my G& T with her, but what if she had approached a stranger in the street? Would she have been directed to an off-licence and then left wondering how that was going to get her home?

Unfortunately many teachers (and many learners) believe that the ability to master the full range of tense forms is the key to communicating in a foreign language. Wrong! Some years ago I was on a French course in France and one of the participants was desperate to perfect his use of the subjunctive. The teacher was happy to show off her knowledge when really she should have picked him up by the lapels and said (in French of course), " Look matey. The subjunctive is the least of your problems. Your pronunciation is incomprehensible, you lack elementary vocabulary and you probably don't understand what I'm saying now!"

So if you want to be able to get by in a foreign language I have a few pieces of advice:

1) Listen to as much of the target language as possible. This could be in the form of tapes, CDs, videos, TV/radio programmes or native speakers speaking to each other. Listen without worrying about understanding. Listen for the stress and rhythm of the language. Let the language wash over you and get a feel for it.
2) Learn the vocabulary appropriate to the situations you are likely to be in. Find a text book with accompanying cassette/CD so that you learn the words and the correct pronunciation at the same time.
3) Learn words and their natural partners at the same time. For example the nouns 'salt' and 'pepper' are often found together as are the verbs ' stop' and 'go' or the adjectives 'black' and 'white'.
4) Learn common phrases or sentence beginnings eg " Could you tell me the way to..." or " I'd like to rent a car" . This will be quicker and more accurate than trying to construct something yourself.
5) Before signing up with a teacher or school, ask them about their approach to teaching elementary level students who need the language for living/holidaying in a foreign country. Use some of the points above to find out if they worship at the altar of grammar. If they do, is that what you want?

Then it is just a question of letting go of your inhibitions! Your confidence will build each time you have a successful exchange in the target language. Go for it!

Sue Johns is a Partner at Kingsway English Centre in Worcester. Kingsway specialises in short, intensive courses for adults who need to communicate in English.
See http://www.kingsway-english.com/

This article was featured in the Village Vita newsletter for November 2006. For more information about Village Vita, click on the following link: http://villagevita.com.

posted by Annie Harrison  # 7:55 AM