#48 - My Language Journey: I Studied French, Spoke Spanish, And Confused Them On Every Exam

I'm doing something different today and sharing my candid origin story as a language lover.  From early childhood immersion in Japan to a Dominican study abroad wake-up call, tracing how real-world input shaped my teaching style. 

• early immersion in Japan shaping views on communication
• choosing French to connect friends and stop exclusion
• juggling French and Spanish and mixing systems
• study abroad shock and the gap between grades and speech
• differences between academic literacy and real-world fluency
• discovering proficiency and comprehensible input
• shifting assessments to what students can do
• maintaining language outside the classroom with habits
• the parenting choice to let go and protect joy
• honoring strengths of native and non-native teachers

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey y'all. Salut. Welcome. We're back in the Practical Proficiency Podcast. Thanks so much for joining me. If you're new here, my name's Devin. I'm the teacher, author, and curriculum consultant behind Practical Proficiency by La Libre Language Learning. And usually the podcasts on this podcast are very much so information-based because I'm one of those people who leans more toward if you have the audacity to put yourself in front of a microphone, it should be something that you are ready to speak about, that you have experience with all of that stuff. I'm not that into rants personally, but today I'm deciding to go in a bit of a different direction, not a rant for sure, but to tell you a little bit more about myself and my own language journey and why I got inspired

Why Share A Personal Journey

SPEAKER_00 0:53

to do the stuff that we all do, which is to teach, promote, and advocate for a better language instruction, why this topic is so important to me. And I want to walk you through a little bit of my own story with acquiring language, what language means to me, mostly because I think it would be really fun, but also from the perspective of I hope you get a lot of value from this, is that many times when I'm working with teachers, and I work with teachers in a lot of different ways now, you know, um with virtual sessions and my membership, or when I meet teachers that I'm doing workshops with, all that jazz. But I've worked with a lot of teachers. I was a teacher for five years. And in that experience from meeting and working with a lot of teachers, there's a common thread that happens, whether you are a native speaker or a non-native speaker in this field, which is there is a discomfort either with your own language abilities if you're a non-native speaker. And then if you're a native speaker, often working with native speakers, you of course don't need to take this language in an academic setting like school. So you might be along the lines of, I'm not really sure how to present this info to my students because this is my native language, so I'm not sure how to break it down. And I feel you, I'd be the same way if we were looking at English. So I want to share a little bit about my story with you so that we can come together and

Early Childhood Immersion In Japan

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understand that this is an experience that we all have in common and that we can shift our perspective on what we feel like we need to do more of in order to be a better language teacher, and maybe give you some tips along the way of how you yourself can become a better language teacher when it fits in your schedule, when it makes you happy, when it fuels this passion. I want to reconnect us a little bit to the passion that we have, which is language. Language is fun. So here we go. Let's start at the beginning. Well, the beginning, of course, is when we're all cute little babies and we're absorbing language like crazy from our adults and the world around us. So that was English for me, as you can probably tell by my accent. But when I was two, actually, my family has military ties. So we were stationed at Nafatsugi in Japan. And so my first experience with language and with kids and with school and not just my own siblings was actually in Japanese. And I have so many memories of being at school in Japan. But the funny thing that has happened, it's the funny thing about memory is that even though all of those memories were in Japanese, I remember them in English, my mother language, which is really funny. Like looking back on all of these times when my mom tells me all the time that, like, oh yeah, because I have three brothers and sisters, that y'all were my translators. I relied on you guys to speak a lot of Japanese for me. Um, my two older sisters both went to school, uh, Japanese school, because the Dodd schools over there aren't. I mean, they're fine, but they're not as good as the Japanese schools. Holy crap, Japanese schooling is impeccable. It's so much better than ours. Wow. But the Japanese school systems were just so good that we decided to go to the Japanese schools. And my mom is very much a sink or swim style learner. So she threw us all into the deep end and said, You guys will do great, your kids, you'll learn the language. My older sisters have much stronger memories, of course, because they were seven and ten at the time. Um, we were there for two years. But I was two to four, so going to school in Japanese just was like, what if it felt normal for me? And I have so many interesting memories of interacting with and having Japanese friends, using the language a lot, never ever feeling like I was out of place, except for a couple times when some people would touch my hair on the subway. That was like the only time. But the rest of the time when you're three, like it doesn't really matter that you might not speak the same language or that everybody else around you is different, or at least I don't have any core memories of that. What I do have are some really funny core memories of interactions with different people in my life, most of them, of course, being um people at school and my friends at school. So I don't know, I have no idea what level of proficiency I reached in Japanese when I was little. But if I didn't have any memories of having difficulties interacting and from some other retroactive memories from my family, it seems like we were socially proficient, school proficient, all that stuff. And like luckily, I was too young that we weren't really getting into characters and reading and all that. But it imprinted on me a strong memory and an importance for me of oral communication, interpersonal communication, because me myself as a three-year-old did fine and had a lot of fun and had a great school experience. Not knowing that much English, I used the target language almost exclusively, like for most of my day until I came home. Now, of course, all of that is like retroactively looking back at this as a linguist and a language professional. Scratch that. I'm not a linguist, I just really like linguistics. But like as a language educator, that's when I started thinking more about this experience. But when I was a kid, it like didn't matter to me. I just thought it was cool. And then when I came back to the States and started going to school in English, uh, I don't really have a ton of memories of that being a

Cultural Imprints Beyond Language

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problem or being different, except that I thought that school was really backwards when I came back to the States. I remember my first daycare when I was four or five that my grandma dropped me up at. That I had this feeling of like, why are we doing this? Like coming from a Japanese school where we were doing a lot of social stuff, but a lot of active learning experiences. And like I was in a band when I was four. We did swimming lessons, we learned all these like national songs, and we did stretches every day, and we were out in the garden a lot. And I remember going back to uh kindergarten, quote unquote kindergarten in the US, and thinking to myself as a kid, like, why is this all just playtime? Like it was really confusing to me. And it was also a little jarring that we like school didn't really feel like school, like we didn't have like strong objectives. But of course, my kid mind was thinking more about like, cool, this is more playtime, but like when are we gonna read more stories and stuff? So I don't know if it was just my specific daycare, but that is my very fuzzy five-year-old memory of like what is happening? Is this just like extended recess all the time? Super funny. Also, that was in the 90s, so who knows? I'm sure daycare is really different now. Um, I know the daycares that my kid has gone to has been, you know, very, very focused and dialed in on what like two to four-year-olds need, but that's that's my story, that's my bio. I remember coming back as a as a really spoiled four-year-old, coming from a Japanese school system to an American daycare and being like, oh, what are we doing here? So just take that or leave it as you will. Um, my next experience with language, like for a while I didn't even really think about it, except that one of the things that really stuck with me culturally wise that I didn't really realize at the time is that my gestures, my body movements, and the way that I liked to dress and wear my hair were very Japanese for like the first, like up until I was 10 or 11 and started caring about and paying more attention to what my peers were doing. The like my first experiences at school, I think were a lot more formative and subconscious than we think with the stuff that's not language related. Like if you look back at pictures of my brother and I with the stuff that we liked to wear, the things that we were doing and saying, and even like the cadence of stuff that we would do. Like when you watch like old video recordings and things. Myself as a language educator notices like, wow, there's a lot of interesting cultural elements that happen when you live in a different place that has a different culture than yours, and you just don't realize it. That there's so many things that I was doing that was just unabashedly felt non-American, felt very Japanese, like uh constant peace signs and things like that that uh definitely carried through the the way that I wanted that I interpreted being a kid was like. And again, take that or leave that as you will. That's just my own experience. So when I went back, well, not when I went back, but as I was growing up in a school system in the US, the that started to fade over time because, like, once you're 10, 11, and 12, you of course start paying a lot more attention to what your peers are doing. And by that time, like a lot of my Japanese memories were a lot fuzzier, you know, it's not as fresh. Um, but one thing that really faded that I'm very sad about is the language. I no longer use Japanese, I had no use for it, so it's gone. I don't have any of it anymore. Um, I am currently trying to learn some of it in my absolutely ample free time. Psych, I have none of it, but the drive is still there. I would love to learn Japanese and to get more into it because it is it's my first memory of language and it's really cool. It's a beautiful language, too. So I would love to go back to Japan and experience Japan as an adult and see what, or if there's any similarities from 30 years ago, what any of that is like. And it's a really special language for me because of that. Now, my first real experience as a language learner in a school setting was in seventh grade when I chose to take French. And I chose to take French in seventh grade because not Spanish like a lot of my friends, but I chose to take French because I used to go to a summer camp that was pretty close to the Canadian border. It was in where was it, New Hampshire? And so in New Hampshire there and in Maine and in New York and stuff like that, there's a lot of summer camps that a lot of Canadian kids go to because it's pretty close. And at that camp, I had a friend in my cabin in summer camp that spoke French and did not speak a lot of English. Like her parents were also very sink-or-swim, but she was tense, so it was a really intense experience for her. They sent her to a an English-speaking camp so that she could learn English. And like, let me tell you, it was very sink or swim for her. There were so many moments where she would be crying at night because she couldn't understand what was going on around her. It was really hard for her. But she came back every year, and by the end of her seven-year-old time, I guess you could say, the her English was amazing, like to the point where like we were really, really close friends and we could communicate really well in English, and she was saying jokes in English. So there's definitely a valid reason for that. I'm sure her parents were thinking of her well-being when she was, you know, 17 or 18, and she had seven years of the summer camp experience.

Choosing French To Include Friends

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But we went to summer camp together for a long time, and her language journey is really interesting to think about. Um, and I also had some friends who were uh semi-bilingual, where they had a limited proficiency in English, but their favorite, their of course, their mother language was French, but it was um they were able to communicate a little bit, but there would be some very interesting moments for me, whereas like a 13 or 14-year-old, like all you do is just like giggle with each other and make inside jokes, right? And my French-Canadian friends would have trouble at that moment and wouldn't be able to be in on the joke. Like we'd have to explain it so much more in order to get them in on it. But of course, it was important that they were in on the joke because they were our friends. So we that was a very eye-opening experience for me is being around other people who had some experience with language, but didn't have quite enough to fully connect the way that they wanted to and felt left out. So when the time came to make that choice, I was like, oh, hell yeah, I'm choosing French because I want to communicate better with my friends. And of course, the something I found really funny and I didn't really figure out at the time why. But the French that I was learning in my middle school classroom and then my high school classroom was certainly pretty good quality for the time. It was enough, but I never got nearly as close as my French-Canadian friends did with their limited proficiency. Like I couldn't really converse with them in French, like they could converse with me in English. And I always wondered about that. Like, what's going on here? What is the difference between what I'm doing and what they're doing? And they would always say, like, oh, you know, it's just uh we use English more than you do. So they were just talking about their own Canadian experience and like how they come here every summer in order to make it better and all of that. So I grew up with the impression that in order to get good at a language, you had to really use it and you had to use it for a purpose. And that immersion must be the only way to really go with that. So, and I wasn't really thinking about anything for a language career, but I just knew that language is really interesting to me and that I'm the kind of person who really doesn't like to watch people get left out. So it was one of the driving forces for me to be like, I want to learn this language so that I can help bridge that gap, or like maybe I could be in on the joke whenever they talk about stuff. Totally a good reason to learn French, right? And then in high school, I started to notice that in my classes that this was something that was easy for me. And we know in SLA research that there is absolutely a predisposition to language acquisition depending on your brain structure. And for me, I don't know. I don't really care to look too much into the evidence of this, but I have this intuition that my brain already has a lot of those pathways because I was a bilingual as a young child. So all of those neural pathways still existed in an L2, even though I was technically a monolingual, like using monolingualism in my daily life. There, those neural pathways were still there. They were vibrant, they were strong. The Japanese might not be using that pathway anymore, but the pathways were there. So when it was time to tap into another language, I just used those same neural pathways. I didn't have to recreate a whole new way for my brain to understand words that I didn't know. So I was very comfortable in the classroom experiencing language that I didn't understand. I was very comfortable listening to my teacher and trying to piece things together. And I didn't really get intimidated by reading texts. So that's three huge hurdles that most people have when they're experiencing a new language, which were easy for me, which was pretty cool. And it's the same experience for some of my siblings, but not all of them. So I have no idea if this is just my own brain or if this is because I have some bilingual experience as a young child from ages two to four. So go check out the research and see what that says about that. But I'd be interested to know. My other sister is just as into languages as I am. She speaks a lot more than I do because she does work that uh has always been international. She works with refugees. So she's lived in multiple different countries and had working proficiencies in many different places that she's lived in. And it would be, I would call limited working proficiency. You know, she's doing day-to-day tasks and interactions and working with people in that language. She works mostly in English because it's an international team, and that is definitely still the lingua franca, but she takes to languages pretty easily, and she also was a French major in college. So as I was deciding what I wanted to do and thinking about where I wanted to go for college and things like that, I've always found international things to be really interesting. I didn't know what I wanted to do with it, but I chose my field of study to definitely have some French in it because French was 100% hands down my favorite subject and was the thing I was best at. And the thing that I would go out of my way to study, and I would find so much nerdy fun in making flashcards and learning new words, and I was really into watching movies in French and all that kind of stuff. So that was not an issue for me. I, however, though, was not that into France, and I think that's worthy to mention when you are a French major that even though we are a global language, that France still dominates the conversation a lot of the time. And as I was growing up and we were learning all about this stuff with French, most of the cultural content really was about France and sourced in France. And my experience with French was actually French-Canadian. And then when I was a teenager, I went to Haiti and like four times. So Caribbean French and then Crayol, which is really different but related. So I was really disappointed as a high schooler going through a French program, being like, why is this all about France? I don't understand. The French that I use, like I've only met one person from France in my entire life, but I've met all these people from North America who speak French. What's going on here? So that was always a little bit of a sticking spot for me. And one of the reasons actually that I thought about leaving the French program at my school when I went to college. So as I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed going to college and trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I of course signed up for all the French courses. And while I was in the French program,

Juggling French And Spanish In College

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um, had a great time and met a lot of people who had similar interests in me. And we would do, you know, all kinds of nerdy shit, like get uh coffee and talk in French to each other and talk about all the fun French language shows we were watching, again, most of them from France, and had a great time. I loved it. And then it came time to make sure that I had something to go along with this career that would be something that I could make a living off of and be useful and all of that. And being a teacher didn't appeal to me when I was in high school. But when I was in college, I loved the idea of helping other people fall in love with language too. And then as soon as I got into a classroom environment, I realized that so many things and so many activities and uh different things that I loved to do as a kid were all natural teacher skills. Like I love getting up in front of a room and talking. I love sharing what I know and I love teaching people. It's one of my favorite things in the whole world is to teach somebody a skill. And I used to be that person at college parties who would, well, you know, we're just gonna go ahead and say that this is an adult episode. But like, you know, when you're when you're drinking beers with your friends in college, like I would always spiral into conversations about like, what about this? What if school was like this? What if our professors did this? Like, and my friends would be so annoyed with it, being like, please stop talking about education already. And here we are on an education podcast. So this is probably where I should have been all along. But many of those conversations, too, especially when you're drinking in college, would end up being in French. So I would find people who were also language majors. Like we would see know how sometimes the the people that you have similar interests in, you guys just find each other at parties. It happens all the time. I would I was famous in college for having all kinds of multilingual nights where I would. Spend many conversations in French talking to people, you know, like 2 a.m. leaving a bar. And it was really, really fun. I loved it because, you know, sometimes you're too shy to do that in your real life. But at 2 a.m., yeah, you have you have zero inhibitions about stumbling home from your bar of choice in a different language. That was actually a really fun part of college for me. I used to hang out a lot with the international students. And when I was in college, the love for French only increased because I was a French major. But I also noticed that the people who were not language majors that I was just interacting with on a day-to-day basis, there were so many Spanish speakers. There were Spanish speakers all around me. And I thought to myself, this is ridiculous. French is basically Spanish cousin. I should just start taking Spanish classes. So I had zero plans. I just said, I really want to do this. And I signed up for a bunch of extra Spanish classes with like zero room in my schedule, anyways, because I was already doing an education track and a French track. But it was really fun for me. It was a passion call for me. I really wanted to learn Spanish, so I jumped in. And uh here's where we get to the part of the story where then you start juggling two languages at once. And anybody who's ever done this has known that this is a really interesting phenomenon. When I was in college and learning Spanish and French at the same time, I was in this funny situation where I was reading literature in French and learning basic conjugations and conversation phrases in Spanish. And the languages are so damn similar that I would get marks off all the time for accidentally putting French words in my Spanish writing all the time, all the time. And I would also use a lot of French structures more than English structures in order to write and express myself in Spanish, because that was the L2 that I was familiar with. And from talking to other people, it seems that this is a very common phenomenon that even if your languages are not technically in the same family tree, like if you speak a Germanic language, like, well, German, um, or actually, I don't know if that's a Germanic language. Don't quote me on that. I don't know nothing about German. So um, whatever language family that German is from, is it Teutonic? Not sure. Um, let's say you're learning German and then you're also learning French at the same time. People will mix those words in together, even though they're not technically related on the family tree. It's easier if you're jumping from romance language to romance language, but it still happens if you if you move into L3 and L4 territory. Like words start to bleed into each other. What we found is that your L1 and your L2, 3, 4, 5 to infinity, they live in two separate areas, two separate zones. So the L2s, 3s, and 4s will mix up quite a bit, whereas your L1 and your L2 won't interact as much unless you don't have anything else to go off of. So that happens. It also means that yes, it's easier to learn and pick up another language, acquire it, I guess I should say. Once you've learned an L2, you can add an L3 and an L4 and an L5, but they do get jumbled up. So keep that in mind. It's definitely much easier than jumping from an L1 to an L2, but that's a thing. That is the thing to keep in mind. So as I was enjoying this little jump, um, I fell in love with everything about Caribbean history, Latin American politics, Latin American culture. It there's something really special in my heart about the Caribbean, and that is also where I chose to study abroad. And I chose instead to study abroad in a Spanish-speaking country because I didn't have a degree progression for Spanish. But as I moved up in into my junior and senior year of college, it became very clear to me that Spanish could be a really great career booster for me. And I I wanted to learn more Spanish than I did want to learn more French. I felt that, you know, with a degree in French, I would be pretty solid in my linguistic skills. I'd still be able to pass that test that you need to to be a teacher, to be actful low, um, advanced low, I mean. So I went all in on Spanish and decided to double dip and studied abroad in the Dominican Republic. Probably some of the best six months of my life. So incredibly fun. Um, also incredibly laid back, you know, classes four times a day in the beach every other day. Awesome. Absolutely amazing, so much fun. And the Dominican is one of the coolest countries in the world. I said it. It's awesome. But going to university there and living there, you of course every day is an adventure when you are working in another language. And I found and I look back on that language experience, regretting how much English I relied on, because of course I was in a group of Americans who studied abroad together. And uh when you're drowning that much in language, and I was especially drowning because I was the I was the bottom of the barrel learner for that group. Everybody else was a Spanish major or Spanish minor, and I was a French major who dabbled in Spanish. So I was drowning for a little bit. Um, definitely like my French friend, there were a couple nights where I was like, oh my God, I'd uh, I am so tired and I didn't walk a mile today. Why am I so tired? Oh, right. My brain has been running a marathon all day. Um something to briefly touch on with that experience as well is that it solidified for me that there are some definite stages to language acquisition because I noticed some things that were similar to my experience that were very similar to things that I had seen growing up from other people trying to get a working proficiency in a language. And that the moments of frustration

Study Abroad Reality Check In The Dominican

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and the moments where I couldn't communicate are the ones that I remember the most, but that I don't think I've ever grown in proficiency so quickly as I did when I was around Spanish all the time. My first experience, though, with understanding that something's a little bit broken about my language journey was one moment in particular before I left for my study abroad experience, and then another moment when I got back. So the first one is a moment I think that a lot of us can relate to, which is I'm barely packed because I'm a very last-minute kid, and I'm barely packed the night before my plane is about to leave to from you know JFK to the Dominican. And I'm prepping all my stuff and last minute going to the embassy and getting all my stuff together to travel internationally. And as I was sitting in the embassy in person in the like the New York office there, I told them and let them know why I was going to study abroad and getting my student visa and all that. And they were so excited, they were so friendly, and I got my first taste of like Dominican style cafe, delicious, so much sugar, almost cried. It was delicious though. And the wonderful folks at the embassy started speaking to me in Spanish, asking me all kinds of questions like where are you gonna stay? And I don't know any of the other questions they asked after that because I didn't understand a damn word they were saying to me. And I could see it in their faces that they looked worried about me, actually. That they were worried about how I was gonna do because they asked me a couple simple questions and I couldn't respond to them. And I'm sitting in this embassy filling out a form to live there for six months with a family, and I'm starting to wonder if I'm a complete idiot. Like what is going on here? And I'm also mad because I'm a Spanish tutor at my college. I got such good grades and did so well in my Spanish classes that friends would ask me for help with their homework, that I would lead study groups. I, you know, I was that kid, and I was that annoying kid in all those classes where I love language so much that I would help anybody who asked with their Spanish homework because I thought it was fun and I liked teaching. So here we are. But that kid, that same person who didn't have to study to get A's in my college Spanish classes, and I got up to 202 before I was eligible to study abroad. So I have like a 98 grade point average, or I don't know what that is in 4.0, but I have like a 98-99 grade in my Spanish classes. And I'm sitting there trying to speak to these native speakers, and I've got nothing. I've got nothing. So I'm sweating bullets on the plane ride. I put on headphones, but I turned them off, and I just listened to all of the Spanish around me to see if, like, is there some way I can cram for this? Can I just get as much language in my head as I can before I'm going? I'm scrambling to do Duolingo lessons, panicking before I do the study abroad program. And then I get there, and in the professor world, in the university setting, for some reason, the language is so much easier. I don't know why. I do now, as a as a language professional, that teachers use comprehensible language and they use academic language. They're talking about very academic things, you know, like they use similar words that I knew from my classroom settings, words like deadlines, test, paper. Now we're going to study this. Make sure you turn this in at this time, like entrega measured, that kind of stuff. Whereas street Spanish, conversation Spanish, I didn't I didn't have much. I really didn't have much. So I didn't have a lot of working proficiency in that. And luckily, my host family was used to working with newbies. So they were very, very friendly to me. They spoke slowly, they helped me out. And uh after a month of what was really sink or swim, I was fine. I actually started to excel. So that experience left this nagging doubt in my brain thinking about what am I doing in university classes that aren't translating to the whole reason I'm there, which is to communicate with people in this language. And it left me with this nagging feeling, this nagging suspicion that something's not working. I don't know what it is, but something isn't right. Something's not working with this. So as I continued, I had a great time with my study abroad and eventually got to the point where I was really comfortable using a lot of Spanish, but I also secretly regret how much English I would use at night when hanging out with my American friends because there was definitely a lot more than I could have done. But you know, you live

Academic Strengths Vs Real-World Fluency

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and you learn. Fast forward to the next semester. I come back to school in the States and I'm continuing my program, and I noticed that my French has actually suffered quite a bit, that my French is really behind. Like I it feels like I've lost a semester of French, which technically I had. I had decided to go all in on Spanish, but hot damn, my Spanish was so much better. So I noticed that as I was going into higher level Spanish courses, the courses that I took while I was studying abroad were all in Spanish and all on Spanish language topics and culture, um Caribbean culture to be specific. And so I was able to start jumping into classes with Spanish majors and take a bunch of Spanish major type classes. And I was progressing so much faster than I was in French. I mean, I'm sure you're not surprised by that. That's common after you have an immersive experience and study abroad and things like that. But as I continued in my French program and pursued my French major, I actually just got more and more frustrated. This is my own personal opinion. And one of the reasons why I don't think I'll ever pursue a career in um higher learning or academia is that I find it really frustrating as somebody who's very into the, hey, can I speak to somebody with this language? That most of my French major experience was spent reading texts. Like almost the entire last two years of my French degree was spent analyzing French poetry from France, from various eras, from reading French novels, both contemporary and in various literary movements and styles. Again, most of them from France. I love to read, but I do not like to analyze text. So I found it really frustrating and I really enjoyed my Spanish classes more because for some reason the Spanish classes have a lot more conversational focus to them, even though we also did a lot of literature at the college level. So that experience for me as a language major was not enticing or encouraging to me to be involved in the academic world of language at the at the higher level. I'm very much a secondary person because of that experience. Um so when I graduated and uh went to pursue, oh, and the second moment, I should go back to this. This was one of the moments that I noticed that there was definitely some hints in there about what I would end up doing with my with my language pursuit future. As a French major and working through all of this literary stuff and all of that, I started to notice a significant shift in my working proficiencies in these two languages. So in Spanish, I had very little difficulty starting a conversation and having a fluid, continuous conversation, although it would be riddled with errors. There was a lot of fluidity in there, and I could definitely get my point across. In French, I did not have the same experience. I was much more comfortable reading texts. I had a lot of high-level vocabulary and could write really well in French, but I did not have the same experience in Spanish. In Spanish, I struggled to write, but I had a lot of fluency in speaking. And in French, I had a lot of difficulty with speaking, but had a lot of fluency in writing. Very interesting. And as I was taking both exams in order to get certified to be a teacher, in South Carolina, I didn't really have to study for them. They were very passable tests for me. And luckily in this state, too, well, not luckily, but luckily if you are a teacher. At the time, there is, there was a shortage of language educators. So many schools were willing to look past the fact that I didn't have a Spanish major and say, as long as you can pass the test, you're golden in our books. So I taught as a Spanish teacher and a French teacher for a long time and actually had difficulty finding French teacher positions because Spanish was just so much more prevalent here for what we what we choose to teach. And I think that's the reality for a lot of us, right? And I put away all those things in a little backpack, thinking about like, hmm, language education seems to have some funny business going on with it. I put all that away in a backpack as I moved into the language education world and started teaching my first subjects. French one and Spanish one and Spanish two, and then French two later when I was really lucky, were such a joy to teach. Of course, it came with a lot of stress and pressure and a lot of busy work and all that jazz, but the actual teaching part of it was really fun, really enjoyable. I loved it. The all the other stuff, not so much. But I noticed in my teaching experience at the time, which we're talking about 2016 through 2020 here, those academic years, that in that time, proficiency was something that not a ton of people were talking about and practicing in my area, at least, but we're starting to pick up a lot of traction. And as I was trying to get students really excited about working with something as useful as learning a language and excited about learning Spanish, that the teaching methods that I had available to me didn't really line up with how I actually acquired skills in my language. So I kept trying to tweak and fix things so that we would be doing more interaction, that we would be doing more speaking in class, we would be listening to more music. So that was always in the back of my brain, but I didn't really know or have a word for this idea that I was going for, which is why don't we actually do the dang thing with language and like do less of this, you know, learning about the properties of language. And that started to become a fully fleshed out idea from the masterful work of teachers before me who had the same issue and were calling it proficiency. And we're using this tool called comprehensible input in order to make that happen, that they were focusing on the tangible, the real-world skill aspect of language rather than the academic side of it, the understanding how language works side of it, which is very interesting for me. But I noticed that a lot of my students didn't really care about it. Only I did. So if I'm the only one who cares about it, then

Entering The Classroom As A Teacher

SPEAKER_00 40:30

I was the only person listening at that point when doing grammar and conjugations and stuff. So that really pushed me to start looking into what this difference was. But at the time, I was also like my first two years of teaching. So I was just trying to survive, right? Just like everybody. But then I moved to a new school that was much closer to my house and a much better language department with tons of support. It was great. But I noticed that I was having a lot of issues with connecting with students and with classroom management. And I wasn't a new teacher, so I was wondering what was going on with that. But I had a lot of issues with management and with kids, even though Spanish is such a useful skill. Like to me, it's like, oh my gosh, like this can really help you propel your career like it did mine, or to help you make friends just with the people who freaking go to your school, right? Wouldn't that be useful to you? But they didn't feel that way. They walked into Spanish class expecting to learn nothing. It's like, what is up with that? Why does this keep happening? And because they didn't expect to get anything useful out of class, people were not really that into the whole idea of like making a classroom community or to connect with what we were doing. It and the the tests that we were giving like didn't feel important to them, didn't feel important to me either. So I figured if I'm gonna do this profession that I'm not well paid for and is mostly a passion project for me, then I'm gonna do it right. And I started using proficiency-based practices in class. And even though all the research was pretty cool, the reason that I'm so into it is because all of a sudden class was easy. I didn't have to walk into class all the time and wonder if students were gonna learn something that day. I started noticing that students were engaged in what was going on and that they were using the language a lot more and they were stressing a lot less about their tests, which is a huge win. There were even some specific students and experiences that I remember where there would be students that were really disengaged in Spanish one, and then we flipped the approach the next year in Spanish two. And even though it was messy, you know, we were trying out some things from comprehensible input, we were doing some things here and there, it was a very messy approach. And my assessments were a little bit all over the place, with some of them being traditional and some of them being proficiency-oriented. I noticed that with the proficiency-oriented assessments, that I actually got a feel for what students could do with the language and they didn't have to study as much for those assessments. It was a reflection of the work they were doing in class. And it was way more fun to teach, and my students were much happier. And I noticed that a lot of the my referrals went down a lot because students came to class for the most part and felt that they were doing something worthwhile, that it was meaningful for their time. Because I work with high schoolers, so it's important to note that when you're working with students who are also adults, not yet quite full adults in society wise, but brain wise, they're adults that it needs to be useful for them. It needs to be worth their time. So that changed everything for me. And from there I became pretty obsessed with it, with understanding how do we Acquire language? What works and what doesn't? What influences what we do in a classroom, which is a static specific environment, to what works in an everyday conversation or an interaction? What is it that we can do from these everyday conversations and interactions and this quote unquote immersive time? How can we replicate that as best as possible in a way that works for students? And here we are today. So after that experience, it shaped a lot of the work that I do now, which is making that transition a lot easier for people. Because once you figure out that moving towards proficiency is actually going to solve a lot of problems that you're having on a day-to-day basis, that you want to just jump in and get all of this proficiency stuff happening and firing off in your classroom. But it's not possible to just switch overnight. It's really messy if you're not following a strategy or a plan. So that's what I like to do. And I hope that it's really helpful to you. If you're here, then you must be here for it, which I'm very grateful for. Thank you, by the way. Now as we're diving into this here, I want to conclude this little language story with where I am now. So understanding now I spend most of my day in English, and I really miss my days in the classroom of when I was surrounded by language, even though it was lower level language with levels one and two, I was using language for the majority of my day. And something I think that teachers forget about when thinking about their own confidence levels with language is that it's important to understand that you are surrounded by your language all day, every day. And even though you're in charge of the input, you're surrounded by that input all the time for a nine-hour official workday. We all know it's more than that with the time you're putting

Discovering Proficiency And Comprehensible Input

SPEAKER_00 46:05

in. But that you're getting a lot of input during the day. And especially in the language department, you're probably interacting with a lot of other native speakers if you're non-native, or you're interacting with other colleagues who have that experience that your students need. If you are a native speaker and you're wondering how do I present this language that comes naturally to me, but not to other folks. That is invaluable. That time that you have with colleagues, use as much of it as you can because I now that I work behind the scenes to support you, I really miss that high-quality, high-value input that I used to have when I was attending department meetings in a different language, where all of the materials that I was looking at every day was in a different language, except for the occasional admin email, things like that. Like I miss being surrounded by a linguistic environment. And so what I do now is since I work from home and I'm supporting teachers from behind the scenes full-time now and not in the classroom, I try and get as much input as I can during the day by doing things like I'm always reading a book in Spanish or in French. Most of my phones and my apps are in a different language, and I have a daily language habit to help me maintain my proficiency because I'm not in a space right now where I can increase it. If I had more free time, I would absolutely join the local groups that involve language acquisition, like, you know, French coffee meetups and, you know, Spanish anything really, just being in a Spanish environment would really help with that. But I find it as a as an American, it's a lot easier to access Spanish. Like I have conversations, not as often as I would like, but just being around in daily life, like you can have a Spanish language conversation anywhere in America, which is so nice. So that happens for me a lot. But the French in my part of the United States really isn't there that often. So I have to really seek that out. And I've noticed that my French has degraded over time because of this. So this is something that if the time comes, I would love, love, love to spend more dedicated time to increasing my French proficiency. But right now I'm in a space of just maintaining it with apps and with a language journal. So something if you want to start doing is I have a language journal where I write in there and try and express my thoughts in French as much as I can. And I just free-flow and let it happen and then go back and see if I can learn from it later. Where are my sticking points? Where are the things that I'm still having trouble doing? Um, that's been really helpful to me. I do that maybe like once a week, maybe once or twice a week. And I would love to do more of it. And for Spanish, though, Spanish input is really not hard for me to find. There's so much Spanish language content around, and I that I find it easier to be surrounded by Spanish. So whatever your target language is, whether it's easy or difficult for you to find materials for, know that even if your language is at a lower level all day because you're teaching like the beginners one through three, you're still surrounded by a lot of language, which is really cool. And I miss that. So understand that you're still growing, even if you're using the lower levels of your language capacity when you're speaking with students. It's still language. It's still great. And now that I'm at this point in my language acquisition journey where my focus is to sharpen and maintain and all of that, the most valuable thing for me has really been at this position where I'm at, where I'm currently an actual intermediate high and trying to preserve it at both the Spanish and French levels for me. One of the most valuable things for me is watching and listening to native speaker conversations on TV with radio and all of that, and then trying to do some sort of output discourse with it afterwards. I also find apps like Duolingo really helpful because it keeps language acquisition at the top of my mind as a habit for me. And it's fun. Duolingo is just fun. And it's pretty proficiency-oriented now. There's a lot of interaction, there's a lot of speaking and listening and reading stories. It's very cool. Um, I also really like Busu. And I also, oh my gosh, what is the other one called? Shoot, I can't remember what it's called. But there's another app that I like to use where you get to interact a lot with native speakers and share language tips, and it's a little bit more specific to the CEFR levels. You can get a lot more advanced level content, you know, what from where I'm at, like B2 to C1, you can get a lot of content from it. Um, I will put it in the show notes and look up the name of it later if you're interested in that. But that's my language journey. Oh, you know, an important part of my language journey that I left out is that as a language educator, I always thought it would be really cool, very important, and give my kid a head start by helping them to acquire a language when it's the easiest. Like when I remember just using Japanese and not even thinking about it. So from ages one through five with my son, while I was still in the classroom, I spoke a lot of Spanish to him. Um, I tried to get him like at least 30 minutes in a day. And we would watch a lot of programs and TV and Spanish and stuff to try and get him some input. And when he was four, he really enjoyed it. He had some working proficiency. It wasn't a lot, but it was enough and it was fun for him, and he liked it. And then as soon as he turned five, he started fighting me on it. He didn't like it. Um, the moments where he didn't understand were difficult for him, and it was hard for him to move through it. And I was already so strapped from being a full-time teacher and full-time mom that it became really difficult to justify coming home and doing Spanish lessons when like my kid was crying and didn't want to do it. So I stopped. And he doesn't really remember any Spanish anymore because I didn't keep up with it. But I'm hoping that I did create in his brain some of those neural pathways so that

Classroom Shifts And Student Engagement

SPEAKER_00 52:35

when he wants to learn a language later on and when he starts taking his first language in school, he'll be really well prepared. But yeah, I that's 100% something that I dropped as a this is no longer a priority for me. It's not making my kid happy, it's not making me happy. Let's just drop it. I'm certain that I could have worked through it if I really wanted to. I have friends who have done it. But also at the end of the day, I don't think that as language educators, we should be feeling a lot of pressure to speak to our kids in our non-native language. That's a little insane. We're already doing a lot. Which brings me to the final point of the purpose of this little window into biography here is that I'm sure that all of you have a memory of going to a party or hanging out with your family and friends during the holidays, and somebody asks, What do you do for a living? And you say that you're a language teacher, and they say, That's so cool. What languages do you speak? And you rattle it off. And they're so inspired by it. Just remember that what you do at the end of the day, that working to a working proficiency where you spend most of your day in a different language is really impressive. It's still really cool. And it's just as impressive when you meet, like, for example, I have um some friends from the Congo who speak six languages. And they speak six languages because their mom is from one ethnic group, their dad is from another ethnic group, they go to the market and use this language, they go to school and use this language, and then in with their own family group, they use this language. So it's just, they have so many working proficiencies. I'm so impressed by Africans all the time. But the ones that I know speak multiple languages, including English, and it's just a part of their daily life. It just is because they need it, but they're not, you know, their working proficiency is different for each of them. But that to me is equally as impressive when you're working in multiple languages for whatever reason it might be. For you, it's part of your career and part of your passion, like it is for me. And for many other people, it's just a way that they they need it to navigate life. Um, there's a lot of Spanish speakers that I've met where it's just so impressive to see how much English they've picked up just from being at work, from learning from people around them and just walking around and being an American, watching TV and listening to music. Like that's amazing to me. Everything about what the brain can do with language, but also how much stick tuitiveness you have to have to get to a certain working proficiency where you can teach with a language, don't forget how impressive that is and how cool that is. It's still awesome. I'm saying that because I wanted to share where my language journey has taken me and where I'm at right now, so that we all understand as a community that as a non-native speaker, it's okay to not be at the proficiency level that you want to be at. In both of my languages, I am not at the proficiency I want to be at, and I'm working towards it. And also at the same time, I'm so proud of what I can do and where I've come and how much joy it's brought me in my life. And for native speakers, I think it's really important for you to remember that you bring so much to the table, and that all of the other things that perhaps you may be worried about, like how to structure your curriculum or what structure to teach and when, because this language is, of course, not something that you had to learn in school, that this is your native language, that you can fill to the brim your class structure, focusing on the strengths that you bring to the table. Because this is a bit of a loaded statement, but I do stand by it, that the academic approach to language is not the most effective one. That one that is focused in solely on learning structures at a specific time, doing a lot of dedicated reading and writing and study is going to lead to a different type of proficiency than what you want when you're interacting out in the real world. And so my approach with language is to make language class follow what students are comfortable with in an academic setting while balancing that with what we know really works with language based on the research, which is communication, interaction, context, and input. However, you do that, there's so many different ways to do that, right? And we all work under the giant umbrella of proficiency to express this idea. But you as a native speaker are so much more naturally inclined to provide communication, context, interaction, saliency, and input. And then the non-native speakers, we bring something really cool to the table, which we lack in our language proficiency, which is we've been in their seats. We know what it's like to struggle and fuss with that certain element of language when you move from English to another that is really difficult when you are coming from an English background. And we also know the places where it's going to be easy for us and we can move faster. And we know just what

Maintaining Proficiency Outside The Classroom

SPEAKER_00 58:04

it's like to be in their seats. We remember taking these classes and we can learn from those experiences and do better for them. And there's so much joy that we get out of language, but as professionals, when we all hang out together, I think we really do take for granted how amazing it is that we've all studied this skill for so long and have come so far with it. So I hope that brightens your day a little bit. And thank you for attending my small biography on what language has meant to me and how it has shaped the way that I interact with language in the world. I hope that in some way this is a story that you can see yourself in, that there's moments that you've had as a language educator or maybe a language learner that feel resonant for you and that we can all move together, understanding that our we have a lot of similarities in our journey. And in everything with human beings, we have a lot more similarities than we do differences. But the differences are also to be celebrated. So thank you so much for being here. I would love to know a little bit more about your language journey. So the cool thing that you can do on the podcast now is that you can text, you can send me a question in both the form that's at the bottom here. And there's also a place where you can put reviews and comments and all that. But the really cool new feature is that you can just send me a text and send me a question through that. So do it. Hit me up, I'd love to know. Or if you prefer to go through the regular channels, I'm at Devon at Lalibre Language Learning.com and you can find me on social, although I'm in my email a lot more than my social nowadays to focus on curriculum. The you can find me at La Libre Language Learning online as well. Thank you again for being here, and I will see you in the next episode. Let me know if you like these little biography journeys too. That'd be interesting to do some more podcasts, just more about what it's like to be a language teacher and a language learner. But thank you again for being here. I'll see you in the next one. Bye.