Last lessons

This week we have had two talks by Josep Maria Artigal and Saro Manrique, creators of the methods and materials for learning and teaching English applied in two fee-paying Basque school groups: ikastolak, and the religious schools. Unfortunately, I could only attend the first one, by Artigal.

I found it very interesting and enlightening, after having done my school placement in a school that applies this method. In summary, I would say that Artigal creates a setting for the foreign language lesson which is directly based on narrative, being the basic structure used by humans to construct meaning. Children can construct meaning in a foreign language starting from day one, when they can hardly take advantage of purely linguistic cues, because it is conveyed within a supporting system they are already familiar with: the story. Artigal shared with us how he thinks stories need to be told in order to function properly as scaffolding elements in the foreign language learning process. He also stressed that it is only when students retell stories that they actually learn the language. That made me realise that what I experienced in my school placement was very far from what he intends, because we didn't give children opportunities to retell the story themselves.

Still, there is something too audiolingual in what he does, in my opinion. Why so much emphasis on repeating after him when he performed the German mini-lesson with us? Is that what he means by retelling? But I wasn't retelling the story as I repeated after him, I was only repeating sounds that made no meaning to me in isolation, although the general meaning was clear.

Artigal was also a very good speaker, as several classmates pointed out in the discussion we held yesterday, on the last day of class. He made us experience first hand his method, he used metaphors and plenty of visuals, which made it easier to understand what he meant, even if the contents of his talk didn't follow a very linear order.

My overall impression on his method is that if you only read his teacher's guide, like I did, you will most probably get it wrong. Besides reading his texts, you need to attend his talks. I don't know if this is due to a commercial strategy, because we can't forget that at the end of the day he runs a business, or he has improved his message over the years and he hasn't taken the time to write it down, but whatever the reason is, I am very grateful we had this talk.

I could sense that our teachers were a bit disappointed with some of the comments that were made on the two talks. There was certainly a lot of negative feedback. I agree with our teacher, when she told us that we should have said those things during the turn for questions after each talk, and that if after a talk we feel that the speaker didn't tell us anything we didn't know before, maybe we should wonder whether they had explained it so well that it seemed too simple. Nevertheless, I have to say that personally I wouldn't dare share some of my doubts with an expert who is a stranger, when I am aware that I don't know enough about the topic to say much. It is much easier for us to share those thoughts with our teachers, who are also experts, but close to us.

The very last day of class we received some guests who gave us interesting information on a Master's degree, and we also had the chance to see what some of our classmates did on their school placement. We learned about interactive groups in Orokieta Herri Eskola, which I found very interesting, and about how they manage to get students to talk English among themselves in Txantxiku Ikastola by turning it into a collective challenge.

Both experiences were fabulous, and terribly inspiring, and they reminded me of how bad I would have liked to do the school placement somewhere where exciting things are being done, and with supervisors working on action research, which I have been interested in since the first year of the degree. Instead, I had to choose my school with a very practical objective in mind: being close to work, because I needed to work for a bit over six hours everyday. I know I did the right thing, and I think I learned very useful things, but when I see things like the ones our classmates brought I can't help to think that I would have loved to be there.