02/05 Interview with Jonathan

Language student and ESL tutor

We conducted an interview with my friend Jonathan, who has had a lot of cross-cultural experiences. Academically, he studied Spanish in middle and high school and took Arabic in college. He also has studied Arabic in Jordan, learned some Malay in Malaysia and some Indonesian in Indonesia, and is learning French in preparation for a trip to Morocco. In addition, he’s been teaching English as a second language to refugees from Bhutan, Nepal, and Somalia since the beginning of his undergraduate years. Our main takeaways and some quotes from this interview are below:

TECHNOLOGIES

A few different technologies have been helpful in helping him learn languages:

• Duolingo: a good basis to prepare for conversation, but it has its flaws: “The woman has a consistent way she says things and the man has a consistent way he says things, but I don’t have a clue which one’s correct.” “Sometimes the phrases don’t make sense. It puts things in phrases, which is something I like, but sometimes they’re very random phrases. They’re not things you’d ever say.“
• Anki: flashcards (used briefly when learning Romanian)
• Italki: provides paid online classes and helps match free conversation partners. He plans to use this for French and possibly Moroccan Arabic.

LANGUAGE & CULTURE IN RELATIONSHIPS

Jonathan learns best when he can put what he’s learned into contextual practice. Having established friendships is important for this. The friends he’s made while teaching English has been a main motivation. He talked about the group of friends he made in Jordan with whom he talked in Arabic every day.

• “We’ll sit down and we’ll practice things, but it feels informal, language learning. We’ll have a conversation with him.”
• “Sometimes we’ll help them with mail or connecting them with translation services or welfare services or calling people and things like that as well. It’s intertwined, building a relationship with them in a real friendship, and then it’s teaching them in the context of that.”
• “My favorite part is just the relationship with them, this friendship that we’ve built. … this is the closest that I’ve felt with a family. … It feels like a real friendship.”
• “Being able to speak Arabic with them and having that connection has helped with the friendship part as well. They think it’s cool and it brings a smile to their face when they hear me speak Arabic.”
• “When I am teaching English, I care about them as people and as friends, and the fact that they’re refugees and they’re in need and they want to learn English … it’s not this formal removed kind of thing.”
• When needing to practice Arabic in Jordan: “I’m very introverted and don’t tend to like to go up and meet new people, so having someone else there who would just go and walk up to people helped. Sometimes he would just walk up and I’d be able to go behind him and jump in. But after two weeks we made a solid group of friends. After that first two weeks, we’d met people and we’d hang out with the same people every day.”
• “Having actual people to talk with and relationships where I can use it [is important to my learning]. When I don’t have that context, I very much struggle.”

MOTIVATION

His motivation for his most successful language-learning experiences comes from wanting to communicate with people in different cultures.

• “It was all directly connected with me knowing I was going to travel somewhere and wanting to get by a little bit.”
• “I hate feeling like a tourist, I absolutely hate it. I think that’s part of my motivation: I don’t want to be a tourist anywhere. … it feels to me like it’s American pride of “I’m American and English is this global language so they’ll cater to me, I don’t have to try to cater to them.” I don’t like that almost colonial mindset.”

TRADITIONAL CLASSROOMS

He hasn’t found traditional language-learning settings to be very helpful.

• “[in classes,] they teach modern standard Arabic, which is, like, there’s no good equivalent in English but like old, old English, like Shakespearean English, and so it’s not what anyone speaks.”
• “We had Malay class and when it was the traditional one I was the worst one in the entire class of 10 of us or a dozen of us. We’d have a vocabulary list and I would never remember my word when it would come to my turn. But then when we did the one with the pointing at things and pictures, I was suddenly the best one in the group. It uses a different part of the brain, I think.”
• “I don’t ever find myself wanting to understand the [grammar] rules. I just want to be able to communicate with people. That’s what I care about, is being able to communicate.”

LESSON PLANNING

While teaching English has overall been a good experience, he finds lesson planning to be difficult.

• “The part that I hate the most is the lesson planning. It’s nerve-wracking to me and it’s challenging for me to constantly think of lessons.”
• “when it’s me by myself, I have this fear: will it last the whole time, will there be awkward moments in the middle…”
• “It involves thinking about the topic, figuring out what would be the core initial ones we’d want to start with, the most important words or phrases within that lesson plan that we’d want to start with, and then how many we want to do and then building from there. … That part’s a challenge too: what’s the logical progression in terms of themes and topics? One term they use is “domains” — language domains. What’s the next logical domain to tackle?”

CULTURAL LEARNING

Learning what differences there are between cultures and how to act appropriately is really important to communicating clearly. It’s also key to serving cultural groups well.

• In the classroom: “Some of it we would just talk about. Other things would come up in vocabulary words. Like we learned the vocabulary word for “shame”, and we talked about some practices…”
• With the family he teaches ESL to: “We’ll talk about religion. It’ll be the prayer times so he’ll have an app and the call to prayer will come off when they’re hanging out. So we’ll talk about prayer and talk about different stories from the Qu’ran and the Bible, different cultural things they’re experiencing in the schools or their life in Yemen, all kinds of things.”
• In Malaysia: “Some of the things we had was just on a Powerpoint. … We also had a family come in one time and talk a lot about their practices and how they do things. We all demonstrated. We cleared out all the furniture and they taught us a lot about their practices of prayer and things like that. That’s another way that we learned it. … To a certain degree, the actually doing it was slightly more helpful. But learning things by Powerpoint is an easy introduction to it. Taking a step further and learning it more in depth, and actually learning it from the people, it sticks with you a little more. It’s a different method to actually do it. The action can help you remember things.”
• In Jordan: “With Arabic, at least in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, men and women would speak differently. So they’d have the letter (gka), like (gkoff/cough), women would say like an a, and men would say like a g. The instructor would teach us how men would speak and she’d teach us how women would speak in the different countries. She made us aware of those differences, she didn’t just speak a different way, she taught us and explained to us that these are the different ways and she taught us both ways.”

EXPECTATIONS & CULTURAL DIFFERENCES

Setting fair expectations about what they’d be doing day-to-day and being aware of cultural differences before they leave will affect how people react to being in a new environment.

• In Indonesia: “If I had a better sense of what we were actually going to be doing when we were there, I would have been mentally prepared for it a little better. … I think expectations and mindset can play a lot into how you experience something emotionally.”
• Indonesia: “I wish I would have had a little more knowledge of Indonesian culture, because there were some things that I experienced and hit me rather hard… like the fact that they don’t think that if you’re a young single male, you can’t possibly take care of yourself. … Even my friends, hanging out with them, even though they were my friends and I enjoyed hanging out with them, it was still emotionally draining having to think carefully about all of my words to make sure I used easy-to-understand words and communicated everything simply. That was one where it would have been nice to have a better sense of the cultural things I would have experienced so that I could have had a better expectation. Culture shock hit me rather hard for a few weeks.“
• Indonesia as a team leader: “My team had a host family, and they had all kinds of cultural faux pas. The culture is very indirect. The principal of the school would tell the main teacher, who would then tell me, and then I would be expected to tell my team of things like how they were sitting on the couch wasn’t appropriate, or they were closing doors too loudly. They weren’t ever told these things ahead of time, so they didn’t know going in those important things they were supposed to do. … I tried to explain that the culture’s more indirect, they would never directly confront you about things and they wanted to save face, but my team very much struggled to understand that. That’s not something we really talked about going in.”
• Earlier iterations of the Somali ESL program: “They had a school that they were going to do it in, and it failed miserably. No one showed up. Everyone had said they really wanted to learn English and they had all these teachers prepared, they were going to do it in a more formal kind of style, and it didn’t work. So the intern, they sent him to do a kind of cultural anthropology kind of study to figure out what had happened and to make recommendations to how it could be successful. He went in and did a deep study of their culture and came back with a recommendation that it would have to be more informal, home-based, and that the formal method wasn’t going to work with them.”

WAYS OF LEARNING

Since traditional classrooms haven’t really worked with him, he’s used a variety of learning methods both himself and with his ESL students.

• “I think that’s important, to vary things up, to learn the same words in different methods. Or there might be some methods that some people work better with, so it gives you options if one method doesn’t work as well.”
• “What I learned from my six weeks in Jordan is that I do much better when I have a context to actually learn it in and apply it in. I can’t just learn it independently. So having each lesson was something we could directly use either in a taxi or with our friends, so all the lessons were directly applicable to speaking with people. And every day was practicing speaking, so I got to use the phrases we learned over and over again every day, so they stuck in my brain.”
• “The biggest strategy is studying topics, or particularly phrases or a set of phrases, that are directly related to what you would say in a conversation. It could be a topic like what you would say in a taxi, or how do you greet people, but they’re all things that are directly practical.”
• “When I was learning a little Malay, it was in Malaysia, [we used] pictures where you don’t have to translate it. If you hear it, you can listen to it and see it. It uses a different part of the brain, I think. You’re not translating it into English, you’re just identifying the word that you’re hearing with what you’re seeing.”
• Teaching ESL: “We formed a team of a dozen people and we began going in pairs to people’s homes, using what’s called the “GPA”, the growing participators approach. Which is the one I had used in Malaysia where you point at things and it’s more meant to be more oral based, particularly for cultures that are more oral storytelling cultures. … It’s an approach that says that you want to listen for hours and hours before you begin to speak. It’s not centered around reading things or words, it’s centered around hearing things and seeing pictures and actions and doing it.”