Transcriber: Tim Morley Reviewer: Ivana Korom
Good morning. My name's Tim Morley,
and I'd like to tell you about this innovative,
somewhat different way of introducing
primary school kids to learning foreign languages.
Now, a lot of primary schools in the UK
now have foreign languages on the curriculum, which is fantastic
but there's a skills gap:
we have on the one hand lots of primary school teachers,
fantastically effective, motivated, trained, super,
but most of whom don't even speak a foreign language
let alone have any training in how to teach one.
On the other hand, we have lots of
secondary school modern foreign language teachers,
who do a super job with a GCSE class,
but put them in front of a group of seven-year-olds
and they're somewhat out of the their comfort zone,
and we can forgive them for not wanting to get involved.
So there's this skills gap, and this project "Springboard to Languages"
that I've been involved in for the last few years
aims to do that by teaching Esperanto to primary school kids.
Now, the title of the talk gives you a flavour of the, shall we say,
healthy skepticism on behalf of some of the parents.
"You're teaching what to my child?"
"What on earth...?" "Is that Spanish?" "Why?"
All perfectly justifiable questions which I will attempt to answer.
So, first thing: it's not a course in how to speak Esperanto.
The aim of this is not to send children out into the world
as fluent Esperanto speakers to use
in their everyday lives and in business, and so on.
That's not the point.
Most of the children, the vast majority,
will probably never meet another Esperanto speaker in their lives.
That's fine, that's not the point.
So what is it about? It's about all of this.
Key thing: language awareness.
Esperanto is a very much simpler language
than any other that I've ever come across
and I've learnt a few and I've taught a few.
It was designed specifically to be simple and quick and easy to learn
and it is an order of magnitude quicker and easier to learn
than any other language I've seen.
And so the kids quickly get past the stage
where they just have to remember stuff,
and can get onto actually using the language creatively, which is great.
It helps to develop all the mental gymnastics that's involved
in having two languages in your head
and switching between the two and finding equivalences between them.
All of those skills get developed with the nice simple language,
and then all those skills can be carried on
to study other languages afterwards.
It's a successful, inclusive experience.
"Inclusive" in the sense that, in any given class,
a much higher percentage of that class
will be capable of getting their heads round Esperanto
and doing useful things with it than is often the case with other languages.
And, I dare say, a successful inclusive experience.
Reactions from the kids, and feedback from teachers, headteachers,
and from parents, once they know what's going on,
and I should say, academic assessment as well,
suggest that this is good. It works.
Let's have a quick look at Bloom's taxonomy,
which underpins a lot of curriculum planning.
We start at the bottom and work towards the top.
There's a danger with primary school language teaching
of getting stuck at the bottom.
It involves lots of remembering, lots of memorising
of conjugations, of masculine and feminine nouns,
of spelling, of pronunciation —
there's lots of memorisation that needs to be done
before you can get on to the higher order skills.
In many language classrooms in primary schools,
where we're trying to teach French or Spanish or Mandarin
we kind of get stuck at the bottom,
and we never get on to the creative stuff,
and there's a danger that children will lose interest before then.
Esperanto minimises the memorisation that's necessary
and we quickly get up to the higher order,
more interesting and exciting skills.
English literacy — learning Esperanto helps kids with their English literacy.
I've seen 5-year-olds who were struggling to read and write in English,
but who discovered that they were capable of reading
by reading Esperanto. It was so much easier,
and that gave them the confidence boost that they needed
to get on with the English.
I've seen 9-year-old kids, when faced with the task
"Circle the adjective in this sentence,"
the first thing they do is to translate
the sentence into Esperanto in their head,
because adjectives are much easier to spot in Esperanto.
So it's helping with their first language literacy too.
And even numeracy, the way numbers are verbalised
in Esperanto helps to clarify how the number is put together.
And when you're 5 and you're learning about adding up
and tens and units, it's really helpful.
I've got a few examples of that in a moment.
So Esperanto brings all of this to the classroom.
Almost as a side-effect, it can also bring
contact with foreign cultures
— obviously a major motivator for learning foreign languages —
and I've been in classrooms and taken part in videoconferences
between British classrooms
and classrooms in Slovenia, in Hungary, in Germany.
There are a number of Comenius projects —
Comenius is the name of the grants given
by the European Commission to primary schools
to establish links with other schools across Europe —
there have been a number of Comenius projects
where Esperanto is used as an inter-language
between the children, and the adults too.
So Esperanto brings all of this to the classroom.
Now, an analogy. How not to get there.
This guy is a bassoon player.
He gets an enormous amount of pleasure from playing his bassoon,
maybe even earns a living from it.
I would suggest that if you wanted your child
to become a professional bassoon player,
the best way to get there is not
to give a bassoon to a 7-year-old.
"There you go, Johnny, play us a tune!"
It's not going to work.
It's a big, cumbersome instrument even with adult hands.
With children's hands, it's really really hard to play.
There's lots to memorise, there are lots of fingerings to remember,
the reed is really hard to get even a squeak out of,
never mind a proper note that you'd want to listen to.
And so, if you were to do that, 6 or 12 months down the line,
the result would be, "I don't like this,"
"I can't do it." "I'm no good at music."
"I don't want to do music."
So of course, that's not what we do. We start simple.
Quick show of hands: who learnt the recorder in primary school?
I certainly did.
Yes, that's just about everybody.
Who still plays the recorder, for pleasure or in a band?
Oh, one or two, super. More than I expected!
A few people carry it on, but the vast majority of us don't.
So is this some massive failure of primary school policy?
Why did we all learn the recorder? That's not a useful life skill.
Of course, that's not the point.
By learning the recorder, we learn about music.
We learn major keys and minor keys.
We start to read music.
You learn about rhythm and time signatures,
keeping time with others, and harmonies.
All of that musical knowledge goes in through the simple instrument
and then it can be applied to the bassoon
or the pipe organ or whatever you want to play.
So, by analogy, French in the classroom is a bassoon.
Spanish in the classroom is a bassoon.
Chinese is an extra large bassoon with added tones!
(Laughter)
Esperanto is a recorder. That's what it's all about.
Now, just before I go on, I just want to say:
I can't be doing with presentations where they put up a wall of text
and then stand here and read it to you.
That's not a presentation, that's a report being read out loud
and it quickly gets dull.
Having said that, I am about to put up a wall of text,
and I am about to read it to you.
Bear with me, there's only one of these.
It's a quick snippet from a report
by the University of Manchester's School of Education
who've been evaluating the Springboard to Languages project
and in this part they're writing about School A,
where kids at the time had about 18 months of Esperanto,
and School B where they'd had French for two years,
and they'd just started the Esperanto.
They did a French test, and this happened.
"Does Springboard help to learn other languages?"
"Pupils were invited to decode the French sentence:
(French) "Elephant's ears are very large
and the nose is very long."
And they observed: "The only children
to successfully translate the whole sentence
were, interestingly, from school A -
the kids learning Esperanto, who've never had a French lesson
in their lives -
"These two children used interesting metalinguistic
decoding strategies - cognates, punctuation, context.
In other words, the language skills that they'd picked up through Esperanto.
"School B children, who had been learning French since Year 1,
performed only marginally better than School A children
in a test of French."
So the skills that the kids had got from Esperanto
helped them to almost catch up in a French test
with kids who had been learning French.
So, what's so special about Esperanto?
Why is it so good at this?
I'll give you a few quick examples.
Here, at the top, we've got the numbers:
(Esperanto): one, two three, four, five,
six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
That much, you have to memorise, OK.
But once you've memorised that,
you've got everything you need to get all the way to 99.
There's nothing else to learn; afterwards we just apply it.
11, 12, 13 is just "dek unu", "dek du", "dek tri"
literally "ten one", "ten two", "ten three"
until you get to "dudek", literally "two tens".
And then it's "dudek unu", "dudek du" and so on
all the way up to 99.
So, for children who are learning about hundreds, tens and units,
actually they translate the number into Esperanto,
I've seen this happen in the classroom,
"so... 27... dudek sep... so 'dudek' is 'two tens'
so that's a '2' in the 'tens' column
and a '7' in the 'units' column..."
So by translating the number into Esperanto
it clarifies what's going on, what that '2' in '27' actually means.
It's "dudek", it's two tens.
At the bottom there, "sesdek tri" ... anybody?
"73!" Uh, it's 63, but thank you for the effort!
And again, this illustrates the minimisation
of things to memorise —
when you learn "patro", "father", you can derive "patrino"
— "-ino" means "female or feminine equivalent" —
so "patrino" is the word for "mother".
There's no separate word to learn.
"Instruisto" is a teacher, and if the teacher
happens to be female and you want to refer to that,
you can call her an "instruistino".
You use the same "-ino" to mark anything as female.
"Hundo", any German speakers will recognise as "a dog";
"hundido" is "a puppy". "-ido" is the young, the offspring.
So from "kato" we can derive "katido", "a kitten",
and "kuniklo", any Latin or Italian speakers will know
is "a rabbit", and "kuniklido" is a baby rabbit.
Now, I've been speaking French for 25 years,
I've lived in France, and my family is bilingual English/French,
and I can't immediately recall the French word
for "a baby rabbit".
I know the word for a rabbit, but not for a baby one.
I can't remember the word, but in Esperanto, it's just obvious.
I can't not know that word! It's just obvious, it's there.
Now, "kontenta" means "happy",
and "malkontenta" — "mal-" gives you the opposite,
so it's "unhappy".
Same with "granda" for "big", and "malgranda"
is the normal Esperanto word for "small".
There's no separate word to learn.
There's always a "buy-one-get-one-free" on adjectives in Esperanto. (Laughter)
We've literally halved the number of words to memorise
with the single prefix "mal-".
So, this is just one little corner of the language,
but these principles extend throughout the whole thing.
I've found that learning French and other languages
is an additive process — I find a new word,
I learn how to pronounce it, how to spell it,
what it means, and I've added one word to my arsenal.
Learning Esperanto is multiplicative.
Every time I add a new word, it recombines and multiplies
with everything I've got already,
so I don't just get one word,
I get a whole new frontier of expressive capacity.
And this applies just as much in the classroom with children,
and so we quickly get to the stage where they can
creatively use the language, rather than just
repeating vocabulary and memorised sentences.
Far more interesting stuff.
Here's a case in point: I got heckled
by an 8-year-old, in grammatically perfect Esperanto,
about 3 months into a course.
We were doing an activity where I give an instruction,
the children follow the instruction, and tell me what they're doing.
So I give an imperative verb, and they use a present tense verb.
So I say "Staru!" and they all stand up and say, "Mi staras!"
I say "Sidu!" and they sit down and say, "Mi sidas!"
I say "Saltu!" and they go "Mi saltas! Mi saltas!"
So I said, "OK, silentu!"
And the whole class said, "Mi silentas!"
apart from little Johnny who shouted out, "Mi ne silentas!"
But now I've got a dilemma:
do I tell him off, or do I give him a gold star?
Because he has just made the whole class laugh
with a grammatically perfect utterance in the target language.
From a language teacher's point of view,
that's a dream come true. That's what we're aiming at!
So I put on my best "mock annoyed" face and said: "Vi! Silentu!"
and he said, "OK, mi silentas!"
But that has never happened in any of my French lessons.
Now that's not because I don't enjoy teaching French — I do.
And it's not because the kids don't enjoy learning it — I believe they do.
It's just that there's so much that needs memorising
and practising before that can even become possible in French
— or Spanish, or German, or other languages —
that it doesn't happen until years down the line,
and by that stage, unfortunately, lots of kids have lost interest
and have got the impression that they're no good at languages
because they can't say anything.
It's not their fault, and it's not the teacher's fault,
it's just really really hard to get to the stage
where you can creatively use a new language.
Esperanto shortcuts an enormous amount of that
and allows kids to get there and get the experience
of having another language and being able to do
useful, fun things with it.
And that's why we do it.
So: Esperanto? In curriculum time? In state schools?
Yeah, really! It's happening as we speak,
with lessons delivered by Esperanto specialists like me,
but also, critically, by class teachers with no prior knowledge of Esperanto,
who can also pick up the language remarkably quickly
and go ahead and teach it, so it eliminates
the staffing issue at a stroke.
I was slightly embarrassed the first time I discovered this,
but a class who'd been studying for a year with their class teacher
whom I had taught a minimum of Esperanto to,
the kids actually spoke far better Esperanto
than the ones that I'd been teaching for a year.
So what's going on here?
Actually, it's obvious: I only go into the school for 45 minutes a week.
I do as much as I can in that time, but that's it.
The class teacher is with them all the time,
so bits of Esperanto get drip-fed into everything they do.
It's in the maths classroom, it's in the English classroom,
it's in the register, it's all the time.
And so those kids got a huge amount more out of it
once the class teacher had taken over
than their predecessors had done from me.
So that's what we do. It works phenomenally well,
and I'm pleased and proud to be part of it. Thank you.
(Applause)