Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

As we’re confident that we’ll be on the move at some stage this year, we’ve started thinking through some of the logistics of the process.

Our first problem is that we don’t know when the sale will go through and therefore we can’t currently go out and buy somewhere else. Also, given the slow pace of sales here and likely delays in the process, it would be quite difficult to synchronise the sale here with the purchase somewhere else and especially so as each trade is separate here ie buyer/seller chains don’t exist.

That lack of synchronisation means that we’re almost certainly going to need an interim place to live in between living here and living in our new permanent home (where-ever that may be). Although simplifying the logistics of moving out of here it adds some other complications for us in terms of schooling for the kids and where to tell the removal truck to go. In that the interim place isn’t going to be our permanent home and may not even be in the country that we’ll finally settle in, it’s also looking likely that we’ll be needing to store the stuff from here somewhere but, of course, we’ll need some of that stuff whilst we’re in our interim home which means that we’re going to have to sit down and work out what we’ll need to take with us rather than put in the truck. That’s not so simple in that there’s a whole lot of kiddy stuff which takes up quite a volume not to mention items like the computer I’m typing this on, bedding and so on. Now obviously we could do without some of that stuff for a “while” but here too we don’t know how long we’ll be in the interim spot.

Far from simple, eh?

I’m just about to start the final course of my modern languages degree and although it’s actually the English course whereas all the others were in foreign languages, I’m finding that I’m dreading that first tutorial just the same!

Still, at least I shouldn’t find myself wanting to ask a question yet not knowing what the words are which can happen sometimes in the foreign language tutorials. It’ll be the very first tutorial that I’ve done in english for over 15 years so I’m sure it’ll feel a little bit peculiar.

In fact the first tutorial is a couple of days before the official starting date for the course so I’m not sure what we’ll be getting up to in it. Also it’s supposed to be an e-learning course so I’m not sure why there are any in-person tutorials at all although to be fair there are only four of them listed whereas normally there’d be something like twice that number for a course at this level.

At first thought, it probably seems to make a lot of sense to start speaking French to your children if you’re planning on moving to France and to keep doing that after you’ve moved. However, that first thought is very definitely wrong!

Unless you are a native French speaker, your accent, vocabulary and grammar just aren’t going to be perfect. Of these the accent is most noticeably a problem with many children from english speaking families still saying BON JUR rather than BOZHUR even many years after they have settled into a French school. However, both the vocabulary and the grammar are a problem too in that the French which children speak isn’t quite the same as that which adults speak so that you’ll often find it easy enough to chat in French to adults but really struggle in talking to their children.

Perhaps the greatest aspect of the problem is that if you stick to not-quite-perfect French with your children and they’re fairly young when you start down that path (say, under 5) then they may well grow up without any solid “native” language at all. This effect takes some years to be really noticeable but eventually you’ll find that you can’t explain how some aspect of grammar is supposed to work to them, not because your language ability isn’t up to it, but because they just don’t have a solid understanding of how any language works.

However, even if you get past those problems and are blissfully assuming that your children will grow up bilingual just naturally: you’re wrong, because they won’t unless you work at it. One of the most difficult people to speak to that I’ve ever met was an “English” estate agent who’d been born 20-odd years ago in France to English parents. He’d never been to England and never had the opportunity to even see British TV nor read English books or magazines so the only English he’d heard was from his parents. Net effect was that he had a perfect English accent when he spoke but was neither fluent not could he understand English spoken to him by anyone other than his parents. However, even these days few parents put any effort into building the English of their children and just assume that they’ll pick it up from them: this doesn’t work because the majority of English that you learn is at school therefore unless your children are going to a bilingual or english speaking school, they simply won’t learn it.

So, no, don’t speak French to your kids but do make a point of developing their english speaking, listening, reading and writing abilities.

Distance learning has come along in leaps and bounds in recent years as more and more of it has moved online.

One interesting aspect of the online nature of present day distance learning is that once a course is developed, many aspects could be made available at no cost in that, aside from tutor involvement, it costs next to nothing to distribute an online course. As usual, the Open University is blazing the trail on this one by offering some of it’s courses via Open Learn.

You can’t, yet, get a university qualification from them via this route but then this is an experimental offering at the moment. What’s on offer are segments of courses that currently form part of various degree programmes that they offer so if you’re thinking of taking a course with them it’s worth having a look at Open Learn to see if part of that course is available.

Would anyone study, say, 20 hours if they weren’t going to get something tangible at the end of it? Well, a growing number of people are doing exactly that even though the scheme isn’t terribly widely publicised.

I find myself in the peculiar situation of having finished all the foreign language segments of my modern languages degree and so have “just” one more course in the english language to do next year.

That completes the degree but I’d like to do something following it so have been tossing around a few ideas over the last few weeks since I’ll need to sign up for the first course of the next degree before next summer and won’t really have a whole lot of time to think about it once I get going on the english course next month.

One easy option, or at least easy choice, would be to complete the Diploma in English which means doing one more english course following the one I’m about to start. I’ve already eliminated the “art of engligh” course as being something that I’d not really be able to stick at which leaves the english grammar course. To be honest, I’m not really fired up about english grammar so that’s looking doubtful at the moment.

I’d also quite like to do their Creative Writing course but that seems to mean that I need to do the humanties course first. I’ve already read all but one of the recommended books for the humanities course so that’s a possibility I suppose though, again, I’m not really fired up about it either.

Which leaves the chemistry or physics degree that I’ve always meant to get around to doing. That’s also a realtively easy choice in that they both start with the same course so it puts off the choice of final degree for at least another year. I’ve heard really good things about that so chances are that I’ll run with that.