Inspiration can sometimes arise from unexpected sources. The following is a quote from The Lieutenant, a novel by Kate Grenville, set in the early colony of NSW. The quote refers to the main protagonist, Lieutenant Daniel Rooke, an astronomer, meteorologist and linguist, who sets himself the task of acquiring the language of the local indigenous people. "What he had not learned from Latin or Greek he was learning from the people of New South Wales. It was this: you do not learn a language without entering into a relationship with the people who spoke it with you..... The names of things, if you truly wanted to understand them, were as much about the spaces between the words as they were the words themselves. Learning a language was not a matter of joining any two points with a line. It was a leap into the other." p.233 Those words leapt out at me! This is what we should be on about in our language classrooms: focusing on the essential element of relationship. How can we do it more effectively? How will my lesson planning and pedagogy encourage students’ curiosity to explore ‘ the spaces between the words’?
Kate Grenville’s fictitious Lieutenant Rooke is based on the real life and work of Lieutenant William Dawes (1762-1836), whose notebooks on the Aboriginal language of Sydney only rose to significance in 1972. Dawes, a contemporary of William Wilberforce, was a religious man of deeply held convictions, the consequences of which would prevent him from remaining in NSW. In his later life he trained missionaries for the Church Missionary Society and worked for the anti-slavery cause in Antigua. But let’s return to those early days for Dawes and his encounters with the indigenous people. Imagine (as Grenville does so evocatively) being in his shoes, trying to understand and be understood when you do not share a common language or culture. Laboriously transcribing newly learnt vocabulary in a notebook, revising and practising. Imagine the reciprocal curiosity and willingness but wariness to know and be known. And then the realisation of what he was really learning. Perhaps with this story as a starting point, your students could be inspired to imagine a different purpose for those Stage 4 mandatory LOTE hours. And for you as a teacher to set the framework of relationship as the intrinsic motivator, facilitator and outcome for language learning in your classroom. What do students see as the modern day equivalent to the notebooks? A swipe and click on the latest translator app? Endless vocabulary lists from a textbook? Why not pose the question: Can ‘joining any two points with a line’ thus be enough for us to really understand a speaker of Chinese? What are the limitations? What else do we need to know? And why does it matter? How will you prepare to ‘leap into the other’ with your students this year? Libby Colla References: Kate Grenville, The Lieutenant, The Text Publishing Company, 2010 Phyllis Mander-Jones, Dawes, William (1762–1836), Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol 1 (MUP), 1966 http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/dawes-william-1968 The Notebooks of William Dawes on the Aboriginal Language of Sydney http://www.williamdawes.org/index.html Image source: http://www.aboriginallanguages.com/william-dawes-notebooks?lightbox=dataItem-il6f3471
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