1/18/06

While I was working with the new trainees and on vacation, Pambro, one of the other English teachers at the high school and girls' college agreed to teach my sixieme class for me. It would've been great if he could've taken my classes at the high school too, but that'd be asking way too much, and with the teachers on strike, it wouldn't have made a difference anyway. I'm glad he did teach a bit in sixieme though- it was a chance for him to earn a little extra money, and hopefully helped the girls remember something, maybe even learn a little.

Pambro is a really nice guy, but shares the problem of the majority of Chadian English teachers- anywhere else in the world he'd be in the 'beginning or intermediate English learners' class, not teaching the class. Trying to have a conversation with him can be excruciating at times- I have to speak slowly and clearly to the point of ridiculousness, changing my syntax to something closer to French and dialing down my vocabulary to roughly a 10-year old level. Even then, only about half of what I say seems to register. It's tough when he tries to speak with me too- the accent and bizarre phrases, both of which come from Nigerian-trained teachers, I suspect, are enough to make me wonder if we're actually speaking the same language. So after the first few minutes our conversations usually switch from his butchered English to my hardly perfect, but mostly comprehensible French. I know that I still make plenty of mistakes en français, but I can express what I want to say at a reasonably high level and normal conversational speed, something which unfortunately can't be said about Pambro's English.

I feel bad switching to French when we do talk though- I don't want him to feel self-conscious or embarrassed about his English skills, but I also need to say whatever it is I'm trying to say. When I was in Paris less than a month ago, I remember how frustrating it felt when I would say something in French, and the person, picking up on my accent, would immediately switch to English. I realize they probably thought they were being helpful, but I remember thinking, "I can do this in French, for God's sake- if I was looking for English, I would've asked you in English, and saved myself the trouble." Some of my greatest personal triumphs while I was there were the times when I'd order food, ask for directions, or simply chat, without people realizing right away that I wasn't French myself. I realized later that one day while I was in Alsace visiting a friend of mine, not a word of English passed my lips for an entire day- I felt like celebrating.

Enoch, another one of my colleagues, speaks English much better- it's certainly not perfect, but we can at least have a reasonably normal conversation. He and Pambro both earned their B.A.'s in English at the Université de N'Djamena, which makes me think the key to speaking English (or any other foreign language, for that matter) isn't simply study, but partly a question of natural aptitude. The main factors in learning to speak a language successfully though, I think, are the method, a chance to use it in practical situations, and the teacher, something obvious when Pambro shows me his Cahier de Preparation, the lesson plans he was teaching my class while I was gone.

Looking at it, it reads like a manual of how not to teach English effectively. Dipthongs, tripthongs, phonetic transcription and dictation, all of which are useful if you're studying linguistics, not teaching 13-year old Chadian girls how to say "What time is it?" I couldn't possibly transcribe an English sentence correctly using phonetic symbols, but I could speak it correctly, which somehow seems more useful. Naturally, I don't say any of this, but simply thank Pambro (in French) for his help, realizing that the classes he taught in sixieme were useless at best, and harmful at worst. That may sound harsh, but I say 'harmful' because I've tried to give the class a sense that learning English can actually be fun, and not the endless cycle of copying, memorization, and repetition that makes up every other class they have in school. To have Pambro come in and do exactly that was probably a mistake, in retrospect. Furthermore, this is the first year they've had English, and if they could get a solid foundation taught in an interesting way, they might just have a chance of learning.

The problem is that virtually every Chadian English teacher I've met seems to use Pambro's method, teaching more grammar and linguistic structure points than anyone would possibly need to know or care about, and never once giving the students a chance to speak anything but the shouted repetition of what the teacher is bellowing. Is it any wonder that intelligent people like Hibé's son Desiré can take seven years of English (Sixieme-Terminale) and still not be able to speak a word by the time they get their BAC's? The focus on grammar, while useful, is taken to the extreme at the expense of any practical learning. If the students do learn to speak anything, it's simply a memorized text or dialogue, which for some reason are considered useful here. I've lost track of how many times people have given me variations on, "If only we had documents or texts, we'd be able to speak English perfectly."

No, you wouldn't- a language isn't learned by reading from a piece, and every time I hear that, I try to explain it as politely as I possibly can. Unfortunately it never seems to get me anywhere- the blind faith in the miraculous power of documents et livres to teach a foreign language isn't going to be stopped by me alone. In theory, we the 33 (and counting) English teachers of Peace Corps Chad are supposed to be improving the English of both our students and our fellow teachers. Between the apathy, never-ending strikes, and farcical teaching methods, it's hard to see (or even hope for) much improvement.

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