06.01_OUR COURSES IN ITALIAN SCHOOLS

06.1 OUR COURSES IN ITALIAN SCHOOLS. Introduction

06.2 Program for our visits to schools in 2002-04

06.3 Proposal for a more ambitious program of visits

06.4 Comments from 18 year olds in a "superiore" in Bolzano

06.5 Comments from a "media" in Capriolo in Bresica

06.6 Comments from a "media" in Lumezzane in Brescia

06.7 Comments from a "medis" in Taio in Trentino

06.8 Comments from teachers who have seen our work

06.9 25 page diary of visits to 5 schools

06.10 Problems of teaching English in "superiore"

06.11 Problems of teaching English in "media"

06.12 Problems of teaching English in "elementare"

06.1 OUR COURSES IN ITALIAN SCHOOLS. Introduction

06.2 Program for our visits to schools in 2002-04

06.3 Proposal for a more ambitious program of visits

06.4 Comments from 18 year olds in a "superiore" in Bolzano

06.5 Comments from a "media" in Capriolo in Bresica

06.6 Comments from a "media" in Lumezzane in Brescia

06.7 Comments from a "medis" in Taio in Trentino

06.8 Comments from teachers who have seen our work

06.9 25 page diary of visits to 5 schools

06.10 Problems of teaching English in "superiore"

06.11 Problems of teaching English in "media"

06.12 Problems of teaching English in "elementare"

06.13 Comments scuola media Brunico

Due to the 25 years of experience teaching foreign children in Middlesmoor, I was invited to do numerous teacher traing courses. A Head teacher who had already sent her daughters to us in Middlesmoor then invited us to bring a team of teachers to do an intensive week, prior to the new school year in the first week of September.

We have returned for each week since and extended the visits to other schools in the Brescia area and also in Trentino.

As a result of all these experiences and perhaps because Valentina and I have written a book for Italian "superiore", we were invited by the "Istituto Pedagogico " of Bolzano to visit 10 schools for 50 hours each in 2002-03. These schools were both "media" and "superiore". On separate invitation, we have also taught at Elementary school.

The 25 years of experience in the summers at Middlesmoor had already focused my ideas on why children seemed to learn so poorly English after often considerable years of study. As the years went by we have tended to ignore all text books and invent our own material. The experience in Italian schools lead me to an even more radical examination of the accepted wisdom and its accompanying text books and above all the main documents of orthodoxy, The "Common European Framework" and "European Portfolio of Languages". As a result of my accumulating experience I shared some ideas with a friend who is now an "authority" in the Italian world of teaching. I was very shocked by the way she was unable to consider any of my experience since according to her I had put the clock back bt thinking that there was a place for grammar to be rehabilìtated (though I emphasised it must be a new version of grammar). After reading both of the Brussels documents that have taken over nearly all language teaching, I found that they were not offering anything new, but only a revamp of that which I think has failed in the last 20 odd years in which the "communicative approach" has been the "new thing". Rather than I being "a dangerous person, undoing our good work", as the authoritative inspector said, I think she and her like are responsable for some very bad ideas and practice.

On this website I want to raise a rather lonely voice against this accepted wisdom. I do so because I think that both teachers and pupils will be cheated by this new wisdom that is so inflated with funds and official pressure. What is pumped up as new is in fact the same old notions.

In the course of the teaching in Italian schools, I have been steadily extending the material built up over the years in Middlesmoor and this material of nearly 400 pages, plus the whole library of 500 newspaper articles should be published on a website - if I can find a rich sponsor!

A most unorthodox aspect to my teaching in all levels of schools is that I am quite convinced that grammar is central - right from the outset. Obviously, at elementary level, the children don't realise that I am "teaching" grammar, but it is the conceptual frame of the material I choose. It is odd that I should be ostracised by powerful people for such a practice. Great play has been made in the last generation of teaching fashion, with a superficial attempt to import into schools, aspects of native language learning by the small child. Schools can never resemble the genuine "immersion" of the mother and child. However, even the mother is no "natural" speaker. The mother cleverly focuses, artfully censures her "natural" speech. The mother is a miraculously instinctive language teacher. Yet even she does not avoid "grammar". She does not give rules, but she certainly gives artifical repetition and focus. After all "grammar" is no monster, but just those regularities that precisely a child tries so hard to master! What elementary kids need and then, through initial lack, all kids in subseguent school years, is many of a mother's tricks of teaching.

However, once agian it must be repeated before going on, the school is not the 24 hour home.

What I refered to as the last genration of accepted wisdom had a key concept at its heart. We should not think of "learning" a language but instead in order to take a new approach, we must use the word "acquire". By this change of nomenclature, a whole MISCONCEPTION of damaging proportions was imported to language teaching. A child can be siad to "acquire" its own language, in the sense that yes we need another word if "learn" has been contamoinated by all the dull brain beating of school days. But that "acquire" is not occuring by just being immersed in "natural language". Asd we have said the mother is a subtle teacher.

In elementary schools, I have seen a most peculiar hesitancy about teaching anything other than colours, numbers, things - nouns, in fact! This is odd, because the surrounding nd sustaining wisdom of the didactics is speaking in English and using natural speech.

I can't see why the pronouns, to be, adjectives and present continuous can't be dealt with since they are the bed rock of all future fluency.

I am (not) Italian- I am (not) going

you are (not) noisy etc - you are (not)

he is slow- Is he slow - is he leaving

why, what, who, when, where,

There is a huge amount of varied "game" work to do with this "lesson material ". It also is the stuff of ordinary basic speaking. Without it we can't possibly pretend to be doing "natural" speaking.

Days of the week, months, numbers, colours, seasons, sun and flowers are fine but alone they seem to me a cop out: avoiding the issue. Typically this simple fare is added to by songs that are so "natural" as to be almost completely unintelligible(!) and therefore, unavailable to an intuitive "acquiring" process of language learning. They are TOO complex given the limited time span.

Consider this highly focused and so artificial "play".

A. Who are you?

B. I'm the King

A. You are the King!!?

B. Yes, I am the King. (seizes crown)

A. No, you aren't, I am. Give me it! Soldiers!! (soldiers enter)

B.Soldiers! Take him! Off with his head!

A. No, soldiers, I am your king! Please! (they take him away. CHOP. A cry is heard)

B. (alone) He isn't the King. He WAS the King. Now, (puts on crown) I am the King. (SOUND OF ANGRY CROWD OUTSIDE!)

This practice with position change is so important. In 2 hours a week, it needs much more focus than a real immersion - the immersion of say a child suddenly finding himself in a foreign school because his parents have moved country for work.

This is true for all levels of schools.

This is NOT just an odd view to be dismissed. At all schools we ask for anonymous comments and they are too consistent in their thanks for "learning so much", while at the same time having had so much fun doing it. Often even adding that in 5 days they have learnt more than in 7 years at school. They also emphasise how much they now UNDERSTAND!

Such overwhelming consistency has to be listened to. They are telling us something.

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