Discussion Topics

LEARNING THE HOST COUNTRY LANGUAGE and LOCALS’ LEVEL OF ENGLISH

April 25, 2022

In this article, ISC would like to highlight some of your recent thoughts and experiences on the topic of learning the host-country language and the level of English of the locals living there.

Many seasoned international school teachers want to learn the host-country language and put their best effort into taking classes, etc.

However, that is easier said than done. It can be difficult, expensive and often time-consuming to achieve this goal.

Some international schools offer free host country language classes to their newly hired teachers, but this can be optional and sometimes of a low quality.

And because homelife and the workday for international school teachers are often only in English, teachers really need to make learning the host country’s language a priority.

We asked five seasoned international school teachers their thoughts on some or all of the following questions:

• How often do you speak (or need to speak) the local language while going around your city/country?
• Has the level of English of the locals increased over the past 10, 20 years in your city/country?
• Have you taken language classes, for how long and how did they go for you? Did your school provide free host country language classes?
• Have you ever had to pass a host country language test in order to get permanent residence/citizenship, for example? and how was that experience?
• What is the level of your school’s expat staff with regards to speaking/knowing the local language?

Thoughts from an international school teacher who lived in Lebanon.

When I lived in Beirut, Lebanon, I was very keen to study Arabic there, specifically the local dialect (the spoken Arabic of Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Jordan). I had studied the language some prior to arriving and wanted to become more conversational. I worked in a school that had a lot of Lebanese teachers, so I would hear the language every day in school as well as out around the city which helped me to learn. Our school provided some lessons with an Arabic teacher from our school, but this wasn’t ideal because they put all of us together in one class, whether we were beginners or advanced. I ended up taking some classes at a local language school, which was really great. The challenging part was that I had to travel across the city in traffic to get to the language school and then the class was three hours long, 2x per week. Also, all of the people that I was studying with were full-time students of Arabic, so with a full-time job, it was hard for me to keep up with them! In Beirut, most people are trilingual to some extent (English, French, Arabic), so it is possible to get by without studying the language, but of course, it makes the experience of living there much richer if you do. I had a colleague that studied French while she was in Beirut and that also helped her to connect with locals.

Thoughts from an international school teacher on their entire career abroad so far.

I’ve committed to three languages in the past 20 years while living abroad. Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese. [I will be] adding Arabic to the mix when I move to the UAE in August and use my High School/Uni French in my kindergarten teaching (along with English).

Thoughts from an international school teacher currently working in Portugal.

In the school, there is minimal need to speak the language (Portuguese). Since we are an English medium school, almost all staff are fluent or at least functional in English. At times, it is easier to communicate with some of the staff in Portuguese, but that is rare. Since Portugal´ s economy is very heavily based on tourism, English is a required course in public schools. Although many people complain that it is not well done or the standards are not high, my experience has been that a large percentage of younger people in major cities speak English well. I have not seen a huge shift in this over the past 10 years that I have been here.

I took private lessons once per week from a former colleague. Having spoken Spanish for more than ½ my life, there were times when that was helpful. For others, it created much more confusion than help. Some false cognates could be rather embarrassing. Did my school provide free host country language classes? No. there was ongoing discussion of it, but it never panned out.

For citizenship, I was required to prove that I was at an A2 (high beginner-low intermediate) level. Although the design of the test was different from any I´ ve experienced before, it was relatively easy. For the oral portion, it was very much dependent on the level of the other student you were randomly paired with. I was paired with a person who used Portuguese in business every day, and we had a lively and interesting discussion, so it went very well. My partner was paired with someone who lived entirely in a predominantly English-speaking area of the country and had very little experience or skill. As a result, my partner’s score was negatively affected.

Approximately 50% of our staff speak several different languages, and many have picked up a conversational level of Portuguese fairly quickly. Those who don´ t have admittedly not made an effort to do so. One final point I would make is that as immigrants to a country, we have a responsibility to show respect for that country, by at least attempting the language. In Portugal, people are appreciative of the efforts of foreigners to try to learn the language and are very patient with mistakes. An attempt to learn the host country’s language is a sign of respect toward that country, and its people.

Thoughts from an international school teacher on living in a number of countries.

This is an area of high concern for me, and I am rather disappointed in the level of support I have found in the schools I’ve been with. I was on active duty from the mid-70s for 15 years, and in that time, one of the first things I tried to do was learn the language where I was stationed. I was rather successful, as I still speak three of those languages well enough to get by. However, in each international school, I have taught, I have asked if there were host-nation language classes provided for the teachers. Only one, in Manila, had anything. While my current school is in a country where English is one of the national languages, in other countries that wasn’t the case. In one country where the local language was Arabic, the number of people downtown who spoke English was quite limited, making it difficult to do simple things like buying a phone load, groceries, paying for electricity, and even buying gas. While I tried learning the language by myself there, and in Korea, the differences in writing and the lack of cognates to link to my Romance languages left me floundering. This is one area where the schools can easily provide lessons at minimal expense, yet make the expat teachers’ lives much more simple AND help them understand and appreciate the host-nation culture.

Thoughts from an international school teacher currently working in Budapest.

When I was offered a job in Budapest, Hungary, I was excited at the prospect of learning a new language “from the beginning” and even took a few introductory lessons before moving. Once I got to Budapest, many people discouraged me from learning the language saying it was “too hard” and “not useful outside of Hungary – don’t waste your time.” After a bit of time in the country, I decided that I didn’t really love the language, and I thought my time might be better spent pursuing other languages that I had already invested in studying (that I was actually interested in). I didn’t realize at the time that I would stay in Hungary so long and looking back, I now know that it would have been useful to study the local language. English is spoken more and more around Budapest, but it is mostly the younger generation that is learning it in school now (as opposed to in the past when Russian or German was more widely studied). There can be some challenges in not speaking the local language when going to shops or non-touristy places in the city – and definitely outside of Budapest. Luckily the school helps us with everything related to housing, cars, contracts, etc., so that part is not a problem at all!

These statements were submitted anonymously by ISC members. Thanks! If you are also interested in sharing your thoughts and perspective, please contact us here.

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Highlighted Articles

How to Learn French, Swedish, Spanish

July 20, 2019

“How about Italy?” she said.

I was lying on my friend’s couch. It was 2010. Los Angeles. I was 20, visiting from University in Boston. 

That year I had stopped playing competitive tennis. I had a spinal injury. I was depressed. 

“You love food,” she said.

2007. High school. End-of-the-year  evaluations. My Spanish teacher sat me at a desk in the back of the room, away from the other students. She opened a manila folder with my final course grade, and then closed it. 

“You have great tenacity,” she said. 

“But you’ll never learn a foreign language.” 

“It’s just a small application,” she said. “You’ll finish it by the afternoon!”

On the plane to Italy I sat next to a girl my age, knees shaking, scratching her wrist. She was crying.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. 

“My father died on September 11th,” she said.

We held hands. And we took Italian together. 

That summer we practiced Florence. 

Fast forward to 2012. I studied more Italian at the Middlebury Language School. A couple teachers there helped me with my application to be a high school teacher abroad. I moved to Crema, Italy. The town is now known for the Oscar-winning movie “Call Me By Your Name.” Some days I’m jealous. If only the director had spotted me years ago! Seeking male 18-24 American, speaks French and Italian.

I speak French because I moved to Bordeaux. 

Because why not? 

My roommate was a grandmother. I still remember her first email to me:

“Malgré my advanced age it’ll be a pleasure to pick you up from the airport.” What does malgré mean?!

Despite. She was 74. 

She stewed the best fig jam. Little dotlets of confitture and hot yellow butter, glistening against a crisp o’clock baguette. 

My new grandmother got sick. She had to stay in the hospital for several weeks. She couldn’t swallow properly. I should’ve noticed. All the little yogurt spoons in the dishwasher.

I had to leave France when she was still in the hospital. She held my hand. 

“Go, go, adventure!” she said. 

I left for Los Angeles, a Master’s program. When I finished, I thought I was moving to Sweden, a fellowship I was applying for, a project between Portugal, Sweden and the United States. 

I had to learn Portuguese and Swedish, enough so that I could pass the speaking portion of the B1 proficiency exams in both languages. 

I touched every word I could find, working with online teachers, making sure I made that girl on the plane, and my French grandmother proud. Go, go, adventure! 

I passed. 

If I listed to you the languages I now speak, it would sound arrogant. But to recount the sequence of events that make me feel like any language is possible, I turn to the territory of the heart. 

It’s quite random, who opens us. It would be easy to say that my high school teacher’s ignorance was what fueled me to learn many languages. Perhaps a little fuel. It’s a more profound idea to say that the ultimate compassion of friends, teachers, and strangers transform us. It’s not one individual who lets us learn. It’s the fragile edges of connection, from a sofa to a girl on a plane to a malgré grandmother, all who expressed self-love and towards-love simultaneously. Not romantic love, but a spiritual love, surfaced through the language of kindness. 

Kindness is not about the expectation of others. I was a New England kid who expected to stay in Boston my entire life. I was expected to never learn a language. Ignore the preconditions. Start listening to the language of kindness – “how about…?”, a child’s cry, the goodbye wave – as open acts to start a conversation. Language then becomes living – the courage to sit with others, which is a bodily language, a language of our senses, which I’d argue is the easiest way for us to learn a language, to be an expat. 

Resistance to foreign culture isn’t necessary when we’re close to the senses of others. Spoons in a dishwasher aren’t just spoons. It’s a physical memory I can recall. A relationship tied to a breakfast table. Jam is sweeter, adventure more of a quest than an itinerary. More words absorbed than “do you speak French?”

I speak what needs to be held, with hands, with my eyes, with my stomach. That’s real multilingualism. In fountains, gardens, kitchens, courts, alleyways, with the falling leaves, and flowers blooming. That’s real learning.

Go, go, adventure. 

Joshua Kent Bookman is a writer and artist. Like the characters of his book, “close to elsewhere,” he calls several places home, and has worked in France as an agricultural laborer, as a high school teacher in Italy, and tennis instructor in the United States. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1990. 

“close to elsewhere” was released this summer by the Swedish publisher LYS. This is Bookman’s first novel. 

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Video Highlight

Video Highlight: The Language of Should (a documentary short by Ron Rosenow)

March 5, 2014

The life of an expat is indeed an exciting one: the trips you take, the cool food you eat, and the awesome and inspiring people you meet.

There is also the language though, the language of your host country, which most likely becomes a huge factor that you are confronted with when living abroad.

ECIS ESL and Mother Tongue committee member Ron Rosenow created a movie that highlights the experiences of six expats in Barcelona.  It is called – The Language of Should. 

We just watched this documentary short at the ECIS ESL and Mother Tongue Conference in Amsterdam and thought to share it with the International School Community as it is something international school teachers think about on a daily basis. The movie takes place in Barcelona, Spain.

Excerpt: Expats live in their second language every day. ´The language of should´ tells their stories—or lets them speak for themselves—in a humorous, authentic and original way.

Personal and universal, the stories of these six North Americans in Barcelona will resonate with anyone who has struggled to learn a second language, and to fit in.

Director Ron Rosenow, himself an expat in Barcelona, brings his unique perspective, humble and humorous tone, and a lot of empathy for his subjects, to this 30-minute documentary short.

Currently on www.internationalschoolcommunity.com we have 26 international schools listed in Spain with 3 of them being in the city of Barcelona.  The number of comments and information that have been submitted for each school is listed to the right the link to each school.  Here are a just a few of them:

• American School of Barcelona (119 Comments)
• Benjamin Franklin Int’l School (49 Comments)
• Sotogrande International School (6 Comments)
• American School Madrid (27 Comments)
• American School Valencia (21 Comments)

If you know about what it is like working at one of these international schools in Spain, log-on today and submit your own comments and information.  For every 10 comments you submit, then you can get 1 month of premium membership for free!

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12 Common Myths and Misconceptions about Bilingual Children

Common Myths and Misconceptions about Bilingual Children #8: If a bilingual child experiences any languages problems in one or both languages, dropping one of the languages will fix the situation.

December 16, 2012

As teachers working in international schools, we are most likely teaching and working with bilingual children (or even, more likely, multilingual children).  Many international school educators also find themselves starting a family; with potentially bilingual children.  We all know colleagues that have ended up finding a partner from the host country while living there, getting married to them, and then starting a family.  None of us are truly prepared to raise a multilingual family and for sure there are many questions and concerns that we have.

What is the best way then to teach and/or raise bilingual children?  What does the research say are the truths about growing up bilingual and how bilinguals acquire both languages?

On the Multilingual Living website, they have highlighted the 12 myths and misconceptions about bilingual children.

Myth #8: If a bilingual child experiences any language problems in one or both languages, dropping one of the languages will fix the situation.

Reality: There is no evidence that this is so.  Children who have problems with two languages generally also have them with one.

This myth is a hard sell for teachers, and especially for teachers at an international school.  We feel so strongly sometimes about how important a child needs to learn in the primary language of instruction that we forget sometimes the importance of learning in a second language (which could also be their mother tongue language or their third+ language).

Many international schools offer more than one language of instruction.  If you are at an IB international school, then you must have more than one language of instruction.  This issue then is how to teach two (or more) languages to the same student.  Is your international school striving to create ’emergent bilinguals’ or just striving to have the students become English proficient?  We know it is good to have students grow up learning multiple languages, but how do we instruct that child to acquire those languages most effectively?  International school administration and staff should be discussing possible answers to this question more often!

Being that acquiring a second language is almost always a bit different for every child, it is hard to tell sometimes what is really the best way instruct that child in a second language.  You could also say the same thing when talking about learning in your first language as well; all children learn their first language differently (e.g. different ways, different speed, different learning styles, etc.) too.

Almost all international schools offer classes to instruct their student population in the host country language.  The expectation usually is that all students at that school will have the opportunity to learn (and to become proficient) in that host country language and to have the right to attend those classes.  Many times though, there are other options for learning during that host country language time for certain students.  For example, students that are new-to-the-English language (if the primary language of the international school is English) or struggling readers and writers in English often don’t attend the host country language classes, instead they go to extra English classes or reading and writing intervention classes to help them get ‘caught up’ faster.

Let’s take a look at the new-to-the-English language students.  Many teachers believe that learning in this new language (a 2nd, 3rd, etc…) will create problems for the child and that they will get confused. Being that you can’t very well tell if those 3-5 extra classes in English will be in direct correlation to an accelerated growth in their English proficiency, it is hard to justify taking them out of the host country language classes.  Additionally, most would agree these new-to-the-English language students don’t actually have language learning problems either.  If we take those 3-5 lessons of extra-English support and put them during lessons in context of their regular English classes with their mainstream teacher, that just might be a better way to utilize that support.  In addition, those students will then get the opportunity to learn in the host country language as well.

Many times at international schools students don’t go to learn in the second language because of them having language problems in the first language.  Teachers typically justify that by limiting the child’s experiences to learning in just one language that it will be of benefit to him/her in the other language…thus making things less complicated and confusing.  If we agree though that the solution of dropping one language to help solve the learning problems of the child is a myth, then I wonder how that would change the language learning structure at international schools.  We might then come to an agreement that all students, disregarding any language learning problems, should have access to attend classes in a second language or at least the opportunity to become proficient in another language.

Teachers are always looking for the best educational solutions for their students. When it comes to the language acquisition though, there are many myths out there that are still going strong.  It might be important to keep in mind that just because you have structured the struggling student’s timetable to only involve learning in one language that doesn’t mean you will have solved this student’s language learning problem.  A better strategy might be to find more effective ways of instructing the child in question, and use that strategy disregarding which language that student is learning through/in.

So, what do you think about the topic of bilingual children dropping one of their languages to help fix a language learning problem? Please share your comments. Are you working at an international school right now where this topic is of current interest and attention?

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12 Common Myths and Misconceptions about Bilingual Children

Common Myths and Misconceptions about Bilingual Children #7: Parents who do not speak a language perfectly will pass their errors and their accent on to their children.

October 18, 2012

As teachers working in international schools, we are most likely teaching and working with bilingual children (or even, more likely, multilingual children).  Many international school educators also find themselves starting a family; with potentially bilingual children.  We all know colleagues that have ended up finding a partner from the host country while living there, getting married to them, and then starting a family.  None of us are truly prepared to raise a multilingual family and for sure there are many questions and concerns that we have.

What is the best way then to teach and/or raise bilingual children?  What does the research say are the truths about growing up bilingual and how bilinguals acquire both languages?

On the Multilingual Living website, they have highlighted the 12 myths and misconceptions about bilingual children.

Myth #7: Parents who do not speak a language perfectly will pass their errors and their accent on to their children.

Reality: This might be true only if the child never heard any other speakers, which is unlikely to happen with parents who are nonnative speakers of either a majority or a minority language.

It is difficult to know what to tell international schools parents with regards to how to talk to their children.  There are many worries (from the teachers and the parents) about doing the right thing and not making any mistakes that would damage their child’s learning of a language.

If the idea is that the students at international schools learn how to speak from their teachers, the same might just be true that the teachers learn from the example of the students (for in fact, they are in the majority in the classroom).  Being that many international schools have classrooms that have students with varying levels of English proficiency, they are bound to have acquired some of the errors of the majority of the classroom (and the same goes for the teachers working with them who may also acquire those errors).

Language acquisition theory tells us that students learn most of their social language from their peers at school and at home, not necessarily from the teachers.  However, what does second language acquisition theory tells us about how much parents can influence their child’s language acquisition?

Many international schools tell their parents to continue speaking in their mother tongue to the child, and many do without even the school telling them to do so.  But the issue then is, how can the parents help support the English language acquisition of their child while they are attending an international school that has a target language of English?  International school parents do their best to help their child and their English homework.  They also do their best to provide play-dates with their native English speaking peers at school.  International school parents can also try and encourage the English acquisition of their child by providing them opportunities to interact with English by playing games, watching movies/tv, using the internet or by using various apps on their i-pad.  It is true though that they can also create certain opportunities to practice speaking with their child in English with no harm done with regards to passing on errors that they make or an accent that they are speaking in.  As the myth’s reality states: their child will have many other opportunities to listen to and interact with the target language (via various media sources, their teachers and peers, etc.) which will most likely be providing them with other model examples of the target language.  It is indeed a group effort in terms of how a child acquires a second language, it doesn’t appear to just come from the model and influence of their parents.

If you are asked about this topic by a parent at one of your next parent teacher conferences, have a discussion with him/her about this myth’s reality. Also, have a talk about the challenges that expat (bilingual) families face with regards to the delicate balance of what language they speak at home.  Parents can send a message to their child about the importance of the continuation of their mother tongue language, but they can also send a message that they can also communicate in a second (or third, fourth, etc.) language.  Enjoy the time and opportunities that may arise to interact in the target language at school.  These parents can also get the opportunity to practice in that target language and move along further in their proficiency.  Many times international school parents tell their teachers that before, their child couldn’t speak the target language so well and that they [the parents] were more proficient.  Then they are surprised to find out months later that the tables have turned and now their child knows more than them!

So, what do you think about the topic of parents not speaking a language perfectly and then potentially passing on their errors and their accent to their children? Please share your comments. Are you working at an international school right now where this topic is of current interest and attention?

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