TPR: how to teach Creole...?

I'm suffering from a persistent head cold that's messing up my right ear.  It's not just clogged or muffled, there appears to be some fluid buildup behind the drum that's messing around with frequencies and stuff.  So I went to the doctor, who really wasn't interested in my history (this has happened before, and the last doctor said it was liable to recurr) and more interested in what he could see (which isn't much, because the ear canal is badly inflamed).

Well, he's lived up to the stereotype of the French medical system and prescribed me more medicine than even my dear old granny had in the final years of her life.  The sound in my ear doesn't appear to be getting any worse, which probably means it's getting better.  (The last time I went back to the doctor several times over the course of the month complaining that it wasn't getting better, until eventually I got a different doctor who told me that even though the infection was gone, the fluid would take a long time to drain away, and there really was nothing to worry about.

It's not easy teaching a language when sounds are messed up, but in practical terms it only means that the students have to be more careful with their pronunciation.

But one little conversation in the waiting room really sparked my interest.  There was a guy there who must have been in his 60s.  His dad had been in the French military, so he had spent a lot of his younger years in Africa, where he had also been involved in teaching French to the locals, and his opinion on teaching was simple: "you have to move; there has to be movement".

Even though he wasn't familiar with the terminology, he was talking about the principles behind Total Physical Response: learning by reacting to commands, and then moving on to giving commands.  I'd been reading an amateur ebook on Mauritian Creole a couple of nights before, and something clicked...

Verbs in Mauritian Creole don't conjugate, and they have at most two forms: a "long form" with an /e/ sound at the end and a short form without it.  (There are some verbs with only one form, ending in a consonant.)  These two forms are more or less the singular and plural imperative forms: (you boy,) do that! and (you lot) do that!

On reflection, I may have jumped the gun a bit, because most French verbs in a fair percentage of their conjugations match quite closely with one of these two forms (parler, parlez, parlé, parlait, parlaient etc are all pronounced the same).

Still, there's enough data there to make me wonder, even if I can't draw a firm conclusion, because most French verbs not ending in -er (/e/) in the infinitive still become -ez (/e/) in the plural imperative.

The responsibility for the formation of Creole languages is often put down to the speakers themselves trying to muddle through the best they can, but isn't it possible that the pedagogy of the imperial powers has contributed to it to?

I doubt the man I was chatting to had ever heard of James Asher (the "inventor" of TPR) and I imagine he was doing what the French military and overseas administration had been doing for ages, given that their teachers probably knew little or nothing of the local tongues.

I'm certainly preinclined to accept this theory, as I have encountered a lot of very common errors in learner English that don't have their origins in native-language interference, and can therefore only be explained as teaching errors....

Rastamouse the Racist Rat

I was reading a Guardian article on a new TV programme aimed at teaching toddlers foreign languages.  I've not got much to say about the programme itself short of the fact that experts seem to agree that TV alone cannot teach a child a language.  There is some indefinable "magic" that the real world gives to language.  Until we know what that is, TV can only tickle the edges of the language learning experience.  So the programme will be a moderate success because parents love it, but the kids won't get much out of it in the long run.

But what sparked this post was seeing a reference to "the controversial Rastamouse".  Rastamouse was, in my opinion, controversial for the wrong reasons.  It was criticised for teaching "bad English", because it was scripted in a dialect on the creole continuum between Jamaican English and Jamaican Patois.

Ever since I hit the section on creoles during my university studies, I've wanted to learn Patwa, so I was really excited when I found out about Rastamouse.  But then I watched it.  Rastamouse does not teach bad English, but in fact bad Jamaican Patois.  Most if not all of the actors are English.  Would you have a bunch of English actors record a series filmed in French?  Probably not.

So I looked at the credits list.  All these voice actors... what did they have in common?  They're all black.  Voice actors, remember.  What relevance does skin colour have to the voice?  Rather more important is accent, surely.  And yet the IMDB CV for the actor behind one of the recurring characters only lists "British" under his accent.

In this manner, the BBC undermined their own point: if the speech in Rastamouse is not "bad English" but a separate and legitimate language, how could it be delivered by English speakers?

The implied connection of language with skin colour is abhorrently racist, even though it was clearly a conscious attempt not to be racist.

Language is about people and place, and if you want to make a cartoon series involving Jamaican Patois, you should get Jamaican Patois speakers to voice it, white or black, it doesn't matter.  Just Jamaican.

Creoles - the same story once again

So I was directed this morning to a news story on the BBC about the translation of the Bible to Jamaican Patois.  It's a move that's long overdue -- whatever you think about religion, you have to accept that the place of worship is vitally important in the survival of language wherever a large percentage of the population are religious.  The lack of a Bible translation and the use of the dominant language in religious services have been cited in the decline of many languages, including Scottish Gaelic.

It has been welcomed by some:

Several women rise to testify, in patois, to what it means to hear the Bible in their mother tongue.

"It's almost as if you are seeing it," says a woman, referring to the moment when Jesus is tempted by the Devil.

"In the blink of an eye, you get the whole notion. It's as though you are watching a movie… it brings excitement to the word of God."

Unfortunately, not everyone is so happy.

But some traditionalist Christians say the patois Bible dilutes the word of God, and insist that creole is no substitute for English.

You know what?  There was a time when people would insist that English is no substitute for Latin.  And even that was bigotted, because the Latin Bible was just another translation of the Greek, and it wasn't even that accurate!
What we have here is proof, if proof were needed, that a great many objections to minority language are a simple case of resistance to change.

Creole in primary education

The article doesn't restrict itself to the Bible, but follows on to a topic that is a matter of active debate in most creole-speaking countries: the place of Creole in the primary sector.

The story is always the same: the "big" language is of major economic importance, and therefore should be the focus of education.  As a political statement, it's appealling, and it doesn't take much thought to agree with it.  Which is just as well, because it doesn't really hold up to much scrutiny.

One thing that has been fairly well proven across the world is that kids do better in school if they are given "initial literacy" (their first experience of reading and writing) in their own language.  On the other hand, gaining their initial literacy in a new language actually hampers their ability to pick up the language accurately.
Worse, in some creole-speaking countries, the teachers are really only creole-speakers themselves.  Education in Haiti, for example, is very heavily orientated towards French, but the teachers really don't speak the language properly.  What you end up with is kids who aren't competent in either their own language or the "important" language.

All the figures show that the best thing to do is to start school in the kids' own language (and the teachers'!), and that the new language is best introduced in a spoken form, and by a native speaker.

Which isn't quite the same as what we do in Scotland with Gaelic-medium education, sadly....