Buondì.
We don’t get many teachers here at OnlineItalianClub.com, at least as far as I’m aware.
Currently we have about fifteen thousand club members.
The stats function on our mailing system got broken about a month ago (they didn’t seem to notice, so were surprised when I got annoyed), but until mid-May between thirty and forty-five percent of people opened the articles emailed to them three times a week.
Virtually none of them are language teachers.
Hands up any language teachers reading this? (Looks around the class but sees no hands.)
There, you see! We are a club for people who are interested in learning Italian – strategies, techniques, materials, and so on.
You’d THINK that would include plenty of native-speaker Italian teachers, but actually no.
Our Italian school in Bologna has half a dozen teachers around most days, busy earning their salaries the best way they know how, and virtually never do any of them remark – oh I saw your article!
Could be because they can’t or don’t read English, experts in foreign language learning that they are.
Could be because they get their ‘continuing professional education’ elsewhere, or think they already know enough about language learning. It wouldn’t surprise me.
I hestitate to speculate, but anyway, there appear to be virtually no Italian teachers reading this stuff. My pearls of wisdom drop into a void unfilled with colleagues, with nary an echo or splash.
Until, that is, I make a mistake with an Italian phrase, at which point some Italian teacher is guaranteed to write and let me know.
It’s ‘Il corriere della sera’, not ‘La corriere della sera’, which I expect you knew, but I didn’t.
That’s because when I flick through this famous Italian newspaper, the enormous font on the front page shows the title as CORRIERE DELLA SERA and because I never had time or money to take an Italian course when I arrived in Italy with a pregnant wife and no job, so skipped the basics. Like memorizing the gender of half a million nouns, most of which I’d never use.
The lone Italian teacher club member was very pleasant about the correction, and acknowledged that he knew I didn’t care much about grammar rules, so no harm done!
I wrote back that there are no grammar rules for the gender of nouns. Descriptions, maybe, but nothing that predicts with accuracy whether a given thing (a courier?) will be masculine or feminine.
And if a ‘rule’ doesn’t predict with accuracy how language is used, then by my standards, it’s not a ‘rule’.
Oh, but there’s definitely a rule for the gender of nouns, I was told (still politely). If a noun is feminine, we use ‘la’, if it’s masculine we use ‘il’, so ‘Il corriere della sera’. See?
Um… that’s a ‘rule’ about the use of definite articles, I replied. It’s not a way of knowing the noun’s gender.
Ah, but nouns ending in ‘-o’ are… And those ending in ‘-a’ are… And the ones ending in ‘-e’ could be either… or… (like ‘corriere’).
NOT A RULE. That’s a description, and as such it may or may not be helpful, but has little basic relevance to how people learn a language.
Italians are taught this stuff at elementary school, and Italian teachers (who tend to have been receptive pupils) repeat it endlessly, without ever questioning it’s validity.
I hear precisely zero discussion amongst colleagues about whether ‘rules’ help, whether they predict, whether in fact teachers could be doing something more useful than just regurgitating stuff they learnt as children, and if so, what.
So, I replied to my correspondent, how come that when Italian kids start elementary school at the age of six, they’ve never had a grammar lesson, never been taught a ‘rule’ and yet can speak and understand the language perfectly well?
There was no reply.
‘In the literature’ as the experts are inclined to say, there’s plenty of research on ‘first language learning’ (how kids learn to speak their own language), with the hope that it will bring insights into ‘second language learning’ (what you and I are doing).
For a while it did, and one of the obvious insights was that people learn grammar in a sort of ‘organic’ way, in a fairly predictable order, and in a way that responds to their communicative needs.
Sadly those insights have yet to be fully included in syllabus design, at least as regards ‘italiano’. The Swedes are very modern, so in their efforts to teach Swedish to a million recent Syrian migrants, prioritise skills over grammatical accuracy.
Adults learning Italian in Italy, or in their own countries, might study the ‘passato remoto’ until they vomit, though they’re unlikely to use it in speech or writing, and will not often hear it spoken by others. Unless they read literature, or write it, the tense is fairly pointless.
If it was me teaching the ‘passato remoto’, I’d use it as a way in to literature, focus on the development of reading skills (such as guessing), and leave the grammar to look after itself. Life’s too short.
But it’s on all the tests, so has to be taught! Do teachers question this? Well, of course not! It’s another easy thing (for an educated Italian adult) to ‘explain’, another bunch of rules and endless exceptions.
By this point in the email exchange I had become rather irate. The Italian teacher had clearly picked up on that, so wrote back “Why the anger?”
The anger, I replied, is for the students.
Hands up who remembers a really good teacher from school.
If I push myself to be generous, I can recall perhaps a dozen.
I was in full-time education from the age of five to the age of twenty-one, so sixteen years.
Assuming I’d have had just one teacher a year until a certain age, then perhaps ten a year (one for each subject), we’re looking at a much greater number than a dozen.
Who remembers a ‘bad’ teacher?
Let’s refine that adjective as a teacher who:
- confused us
- belittled us
- failed to inspire any interest in the subject
- set tasks that were too easy or too hard
- make looking at raindrops trickling down the window glass seem engaging
and so on. Decide for yourselves.
I hated school. Literally hated it. I never once looked forward to going, always counted the minutes until the end of the day, and was delighted – at the age of sixteen – when it was no longer compulsory.
Clearly I had not the slightest interest in becoming a teacher, though I was interested in learning, and did plenty of it in my spare time, as most kids do.
At a certain age I could recognise virtually any military aircraft flying, for instance, and was always reading, or out in the garden making inventions.
But school was turgid. Virtually every school report my poor parents received and read eagerly – for eleven years from the age of five to the age of sixteen – contained the phrase ‘could try harder’.
But life is irony, so I ended up a teacher myself. Blame Margaret Thatcher.
More ironic still, I became a teacher of what was, to my students, a foreign language (English), despite not being able to spell and despite having been singled out at school as having zero talent for foreign languages.
So I became a teacher, and enjoyed it more than I’d expected, so worked hard.
Ragazzi, I was imperfect too, and still am. I don’t think a day passed in thirty years when I was satisfied with every lesson I taught.
I doubt there was ever a class, not even one in three decades, when whatever I had planned worked for every student better than anything else they could have been doing with their time.
What went on in those classes, with literally thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of students, was to a large part decided by me.
Students studied or they didn’t. They paid attention or looked at the raindrops. My lessons were acceptably good, or they weren’t as I would have liked them to be.
But one thing I always, always tried to remember was this:
It’s on me.
I make the decisions.
So if the learning outcomes are not as I’d hoped, it’s on me.
From my first day in front of the whiteboard, I tried to remember that.
Later I got my first management position, and then became responsible for a whole team of teachers, then became a teacher trainer, and finally opened my own school. In those roles, I got to see what colleagues were doing.
There was no getting away from it – in the classroom, learning outcomes largely depend on decisions made by the teacher (there are other factors – for example whether students have been grouped effectively according to their level and needs.)
Students don’t fail. Teachers fail. Sometimes the system fails.
As a ‘director of studies’, I saw that all the time. Every single day.
Two things – in thirty years of teaching, I met virtually no one who was exceptional at learning a foreign langauge, and absolutely no one who wasn’t capable of doing so, either.
Just as most humans range in height from four to seven feet, no adult being only one foot tall, or fifteen feet. People are people.
People can learn languages. It’s programed in (Italian six-year olds who’ve never been a told a grammar ‘rule’, remember?)
Education, on the other hand, is an artefact, just like a parliamentary system, a hospital, or a police force.
At a certain point in history, there were no schools. For hundreds of years, schools relied on physical violence to motivate their students. For not much more than a century, education has been available for free to most people in the first world.
But as far as I’m aware, no one has yet worked out a perfect way to teach anything, let alone something as complex and extensive as a foreign language.
The problem is – and the anger stems from this – a proportion of people working in these systems (the politicians, medical staff, cops, teachers) do as they were done by.
By which I mean that they don’t do as well as they could possibly do, if they spent their lives learning how, and trying to be better.
People are people, perhaps I’m being too hard on teachers, who work SO HARD for their meagre salaries (and in the Italian sector their guaranteed jobs for life, forever unbothered by quality assessment, which doesn’t appear to exist, or management, which has no power.)
Work hard doing what, though?
Work hard explaining the same old ‘rules’.
“My job is to explain rules, as they were once explained to me, and your role as a student is to ‘learn’ them.”
And is that the best use of my time? a student might reply, but usually doesn’t.
And the teacher would say…
Who knows what a teacher would say, as they are rarely if ever asked.
“Is this the best use of my time?”
“Well, that depends on your aims.”
“I just want to speak and understand.”
“Ah, and this week I’m explaining the ‘passato remoto’ so, um… no.”
It’s not a typical conversation.
But it should be.
THAT’S why the anger.
A lunedì.
P.S. 4 Half-Price Italian Easy Reader ebooks, just £3.99
Here’s a final reminder about this week’s half-price ‘eBook of the Week’ offer. It’s on four A1/A2 (elementary/pre-intermdiate) ‘easy Italian reader’ ebooks that we published way back in 2015.
Until Sunday 18th June 2023 any of them will cost you just £3.99.
Check the FREE sample chapters to verify which of them might be right for you. Too easy? Check out our Catalog for materials at your level!
Il grande pesce rosso
Michele is 10 and about to discover that, as Italians say, “lies have legs”…
- .pdf e-book (+ audio available free online)
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- 8 chapters to read and listen to
- Comprehension questions to check your understanding
- Italian/English glossary of ‘difficult’ terms for the level
- Suitable for students at any level
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Cena con delitto
Join us in the questura (police station). A husband and wife have witnessed a murder in a restaurant. Can the police commissioner find out the truth?
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Ciak si gira
Follow Marco and his best friend Luca – a young Italian student who dreams of becoming an actor – as they catch a train to Rome for an audition.
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Uno studente in viaggio
Follow the adventures and misadventures of Jean, a young French student exploring Italy for the first time.
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Sheila Brown says
Oh Daniel, please don’t deny us our very rare use of the subjunctive: If it “were” me teaching the ‘passato remoto’ …..!
(Only joking, don’t get angry!)
Daniel says
It’s officially optional, Sheila. Has been for decades for English language exams, which have to specify both as acceptable in, for example, cloze tests.
When I was a lad in the west country, people used to say “If I woz u…”, so I did too. And despite my criticisms of schools of that era, they were way ahead of where Italian schools are today, with an emphasis on skills and understanding and zero grammar teaching. Too much spelling, though…
Felice says
Glad we got that out of the way then, Daniel.. I was wondering about how much time to devote to the Passato Remoto – as you say, it does tend to appear commonly in Italian literature, including your own Easy Italian Readers at the Intermediate and higher levels. Secondly,if, on those rare opportunities I get to do a language exchange with native Italians, I am doing them a disservice by not picking them up on every error – as a rule, if I can understand easily what they’re trying to say, I leave it be. If anything, it tends to be pronunciation as English is notoriously for following any set rules (i.e. written to spoken).
Felice says
Oh dear – should read “WHETHER I am doing them a disservice ….”. That obviously blows my chances of every being a good English teacher (laugh out loud).
Daniel says
If you’re reading Italian, so notice the tense exists, that’s probably all you need. It looks so back-to-front (a bit like the present, but with first and second persons reversed) it can’t be anything else, so your brain will learn to handle the incoming form without effort. Minutes, or a few hours, or reading should do it.
If you’ve ambitions to write novels in Italian (or take dumb exams), I should invest a little more time. I don’t, so haven’t.
As regards picking up errors that Italians make in speech, I got very well paid for doing that for years. It was mostly pointless, as students virtually never stopped making the mistakes I’d noted and written down as feedback for them to study, except for the fact that it felt like good justification for what we were doing, which was ‘just chatting’. Turns out that ‘just chatting’, about work, what they’d done at the weekend, work problems and gossip, basically life in in general, was not just good preparation for real language use in the future, but actually was already real language use. Students still made loads of mistakes, but were much more confident communicators (and generally less stressed as a result of their weekly one-to-one with a sympathetic listener…)
Fiona Lascelles says
Language trainer – not ‘teacher’ here. To me, ‘language teaching’ implies simply giving information TTS. Language trainer ‘ on the other hand should be about encouraging and helping autonomous development, not in a didactic way, but working with the trainee’s abilities, styles and desires, to stimulate and guide their development. Let’s get rid of the word ‘teacher’ and all it implies regarding rules and Didactics …
JoAnn says
“So if the learning outcomes are not as I’d hoped, it’s on me..” Wow! I doubt I’ve had a teacher who holds that position. Thank you for this article.
Daniel says
Yes, depressing isn’t it?
But that’s what’s taught on teacher-training courses, or at least implied. Educators don’t start out by assuming it’s their students fault for ‘not trying harder’, as my teachers at school used to write about me.
The flip-side of this is that group classes are always going to be a compromise between students’ differing needs, and that students’ previous learning experiences, home environment, and a multitude of other factors, will influence what can now be achieved.
But the easiest way to explain away failure is to pin it on the students….