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Volume VII - 2002-03
Language Learning through Lies and Fantasies
by Aixa Perez-Prado
Aixa Perez-Prado is an Assistant Professor of TESOL program at Florida International University. She has taught English to non-native speakers and worked in teacher preparation both within the United States and in Central America and North Africa. She is currently working on putting university TESOL courses fully and partially online as well as on developing partnerships with bilingual educational programs.
I don 't remember the first
time I heard English, but I do remember the smell. It was the smell of cinnamon
and maple syrup.
Smells I wasn't used to and didn't appreciate. Equally disturbing was the
lack of smells that typically surrounded me, the bus fumes, the leather, my
grandmother 's face cream. English came to me in a place I didn 't know, and
had no interest in knowing. It came to me in loud words and strange sounds.
Sounds I 'd never heard people make. Trapped in this unfamiliar place without
the ability to go home, I began to rely on my imagination for comfort and
direction. Little by little, the power to pretend, to fantasize, to create my
own world allowed me to accept the one I now lived in. My imagination helped
me to grasp the language around me, to negotiate this culture with its hollow
sounding words and to make those words my own.
Despite a rather shaky beginning, at the end
of three months time I was apparently speaking like a native. At least according
to the teacher that my mother spoke to in the fall shortly after I started
my first official year of school. I had spent long hot weeks in all-English
summer camp before then. This new teacher couldn 't understand why my mother
was concerned about whether I understood what was going on and whether I could
communicate effectively. The teacher hadn 't realized that I was a non-native
speaker, and had only been in the United States since May.
How could this be true? How could I have passed
myself off as a native speaker after so little time had passed? I hadn 't wanted
to learn the language; I wasn 't motivated to learn the language. I wanted to
go home. Instead I was immersed in an all-English environment for approximately
ten hours a day. Thousands of miles from the country I knew, powerless to change
my actual circumstances, and all of four years old.
Eventually I majored in English in college, studied
TESOL in graduate school, taught EFL abroad and ESL in the United States. English
became my dominant language and a language I learned to love. But during those
first few months of immersion something more significant than studying a language
occurred. I learned to play in English, to sing in English, and to exercise my
imagination in the language.
Remembering Anger
When I think back on those
early days in English, I mostly remember anger. I remember the resentment
of having to be in a strange new place with strange new people who didn 't
love me and who I didn 't love. But I also remember lying. I remember lying
to myself and eventually to others. Living in a fantasy world that I created
through language, first the language in my head and then the language all
around me. Of course I hadn 't become perfectly fluent in just four months,
but I had learned to fake it in English. As it turned out faking it in English,
that is relying heavily on my ability to pretend I was fully communicative
when I really wasn 't, would be a big step in my language acquisition process.
At the age of four, I felt certain that my father
could never have intentionally left me to this linguistic fate. He would never
have left me at all, I thought, only death could have kept him away. And so
I imagined him dead, and myself an orphan. Or at least half an orphan since
my mother was still around. I should explain here that my mother had been
in the States for a year already, they were separated, and I hardly had any
memory of her. So she was, in effect, a stranger to me. A stranger that my
father had left me with so that he could die. I imagined his death at sea.
He was caught in a storm and though he battled bravely through the night in
shark-infested waters, calling out my name, it was all in vain for he perished
anyway. Either that or he was on a remote island somewhere a castaway, building
a house of twigs and thinking of me. Writing me stories in the sand that would
disappear with the wind and the waves every day only to be rewritten again.
I don 't think I shared this information with anyone: the rest of the world
just thought my father had left. After all, I didn 't have the language to
express this truth for the language to be understood was English here and
my mind worked only in Spanish. I do know I told my mother he was dead, much
to her dismay, but I didn 't let her in on the shark-infested waters bit.
Later I imagined many other things, like fake
sisters and brothers. Being an only child, I had nobody to share my righteous
indignation with. Nobody was there to fully sympathize with the gross affront
of being left in an English world when my soul
belonged to Spanish. So I made these brothers and sisters up, giving them names
and ages that tended to change depending on the day, the situation, and who
I was pretending to talk to. Soon these imaginary companions were the partners
in my first combination Spanish/English interactions. I complained to them
and they agreed with me, understanding everything I said. They were the best
of listeners.
Daisies, Daisies
After some time, I started
to imagine things less fantastic, more contextual, perhaps because I was starting
to learn the
vocabulary for these things. One of the first things I imagined in English
was that the song A Bicycle Built for Two had been written expressly
for me, and so I made a big effort to memorize this song. “Daisies, daisies, give
me your answer true, I 'll go crazy over the love of you …” I don
't know if these are the actual words of the song as it was written, but this
is how we sang it in school. I suppose I understood some of it, though not much. After
all for the longest time I thought the song was about daisies
because in school we called it Daisies, Daisies , and I knew that word
from the he loves me, he love 's me not ritual I saw on the playground
every day.
I remember the day that I mustered up the courage
to ask for that song during circle time. I had never requested a song before,
in fact I have no memory of having uttered a single word in the English language
out loud before this time. But I so wanted to hear Daisies, Daisies!I raised
my hand and saw the teacher 's eyes meet mine. I remember her smile and her
question, though I couldn 't understand the words of it. I stood up from my
kneeling position and made my way around the circle of children to the front
bench where she sat with her guitar and wavy hair. I got close to her ear
and cupped my hand around my mouth to hide my face, and very quietly whispered,
“Daisies, Daisies ” to her. . I don 't remember if she responded
to me, but I know that even as I made my way back to my spot on the juice-stained
rug, I heard the opening chords of my favorite song and felt like the most
powerful person on earth. I had spoken in English and I had been understood.
It seemed the whole world was singing a song of praise about me and my victory,
and the song began with my first word, daisies.
Soon after I began to imagine
myself talking and playing with the other children rather than watching silently
or crying in a corner. I could hear my voice telling the other kids how to
play a game I knew, teaching them with words they understood. I went back to
my house at the end of the long school day and practiced this in the mirror. I
made faces like the ones I saw at school, I laughed at my own jokes and asked
myself if I would be my best friend. I imagined the one girl in school whose
smile always met my eyes asking me over to her house, sharing secrets with
me, pretending to be my sister. This little girl, Avian, was black and I imagined
myself getting darker each day in order to match her skin with mine.
It seems clear to me that my imagination had
a lot to do with my language learning. After all, I had to imagine myself
doing and saying all sorts of new things with new words before I was able
to actually do or say them. I used my fake English when I was pretending before
my real English kicked in. When I was teaching English overseas and here in
the U. S. , I was constantly asking my students to imagine themselves in situations,
roles, and predicaments that demanded the use of English. I used simulations
and role-plays, journal writing and jigsaw activities. I asked my students
to imagine that they were in restaurants, post offices, grocery stores and
bars (or playgrounds, depending on their ages). I asked them to imagine that
they had won a million dollars, lost their car keys, had to decide which person
on a waiting list was most worthy of a donor heart. I asked them to create
fantasy worlds in which they could experiment with language without getting
hurt, worlds in which their imaginations were the signposts that told them
where to go.
Imagine
Now that I teach teachers to teach English, a
job that always seems difficult to explain to persons outside the profession, I
continue to ask my students to use their imaginations. I ask them to imagine
that they are the English language learners. I ask them to feel how tiring
it is to hear a different language all day, to feel how hot their cheeks get
when someone corrects their grammar in a rude or mocking way. I ask my students
to imagine their students, current and future. To create learning scenarios
for their classes, to imagine difficulties that might arise using certain activities
and assessments. I ask my students to take themselves out of our teaching classroom
and textbooks and to enter English language learning classrooms in their minds. I
ask them to imagine following their students throughout the day, and to wonder
what happens to their students when they leave the class. Will they get to
practice what they learned? Will what they learned in class make any sense
the outside world?
Lately I 've given my students ' imaginations
a toy to play with, the Internet. The use of technology in teaching and learning
has done nothing to limit our use of the imagination. The virtual world demands
a certain creativity, a willingness to succumb to fantasy and to actively construct
a learning context. By teaching online, I have had to imagine the faces of my
students, imagine the reactions to what I say and write and ask them to think
about. This is no easy task, and has been exercise for my own imagination. I
need to anticipate their needs as learners, their questions, their looks of
confusion and frustration when they don 't know what to do.
As a language learner, my imagination allowed me to navigate a new culture and language, allowed me to make sense of the world through a whole different set of phonemes. As a language teacher my imagination assisted me in guiding my students through a new world, in creating contexts of communication in which they could refine and delight in their newfound skills. As a teacher of teachers my imagination continues to be active, to work in virtual and real time, allowing me to give my students the power to trust and utilize their own imaginations to teach and learn and live in a world of language.