Classroom Language vs Survival Language

Cá bhfuil an leithreas? 

It’s almost a joke among people who have taken Irish classes that, after more than a decade of formal, compulsory study, the only thing most people know how to ask in the native language of Ireland is “Where is the bathroom?” It was, of course, the only thing their Irish teachers ever insisted that they say in Irish. Want to go to the loo? You’ll have to ask for it in Irish. 

Buried in this punchline is a deep shame at the failure of language education to produce daily speakers of the language. But buried in this same punchline is the answer as well: using language teaches language. We know how language acquisition works because we watch infants acquire the language of their parents and guardians all the time. It comes from immersion, mimicry, repetition, and from short, functional phrases used to express vital everyday needs. And while we might be tempted to treat adult acquisition of language as fundamentally different from childhood acquisition, we need look no further than the wreckage of conjugation tables we’ve left in our wake over the last several decades to see that this isn’t necessarily true.

So many of us have taken language classes, whether in school or as adults, and walked away feeling as though we’re no closer to actually using the language. A few weeks ago, one such student looked at me bug-eyed when I told him that his French class would probably move on from the passé composé to the imparfait, and that he’d need to begin to differentiate between when one or the other would be appropriate. “French has two past tenses?!” he asked, sounding incredibly defeated. I decided it would be best not to mention the passé simple, the passé antérieur, or the plus-que-parfait. 

Lacing high-stress situations with additional grammar anxieties is a recipe for a linguistic Molotov cocktail. When you’re stranded on the autoroute and calling the dépannage to rescue you, it doesn’t matter if your car broke down or was breaking down. You need a tow-truck either way, and you just need to get that information across quickly and effectively. That’s Survival French, not Classroom French.

This is not to say that Classroom Language doesn’t have its place; it does. If you truly want to integrate into a new culture, you’ll often need enough Classroom Language to be able to demonstrate sufficient proficiency to be granted residency and even citizenship. Those stakes are only getting higher, with countries like France raising the standards for language proficiency across the board for everyone from long-stay visitors to newly-naturalized citizens. But what starts as a worthy attempt to learn a language through its grammar often becomes a cage. We are, perhaps, capable of composing a thoughtful email (given unlimited time and unrestricted access to online translators), but we struggle to follow simple exchanges in line at the grocery store. We can explain the difference between the subjunctive and conditional moods, but we panic the minute an unexpected development throws our best-laid plans out the window.

Survival Language is the language we need ready access to on a daily basis. It’s the language that gets us through encounters in some of the most mundane places but also some of the most high-stress and high-pressure situations. It is usually built up over time in fits and starts, using trial and error—and, frankly, a lot more error than trial. It’s what happens when you sit down at a restaurant, and you have practiced your very careful je voudrais, only to find that none of the native speakers around you use that phrase. It’s born in that awkward silence when someone asks you a question that you hadn’t anticipated and for which you weren’t prepared. 

When offered in a class format, Survival Language gives students the opportunity to practice, fail, make mistakes, hear others make mistakes, and be corrected immediately by someone who has been there before. That requires speaking-first education, which is the same reason so many Irish people can still ask for the bathroom, but do little else with the language. It gives opportunities for role-play, discussion of regional variations in vocabulary, different accents that might be encountered, and it does it all in a safe environment where the point is to mimic pressure when the stakes are low so that higher-pressure scenarios feel less daunting. 

Common frustrations, like speaking on the phone (when you lack the ability to read body-language or get a point across using miming) or what questions to expect if you ever have to call emergency services, are much easier to deal with when they’ve been introduced in the context of a controlled artificial environment. These are the conversations that I wish I’d been able to practice before I had to have them on the fly. Two years ago, my pup was on a walk with a friend down a quiet country road nearby. It was a Saturday evening, but the days were long and I was home getting ready to do some work. I got a frantic call from the friend: a deer had bounded out of the bushes, the dog took chase, and though the deer cleared the barbed wire fence, the dog ran into it face-first. Somehow, she’d only managed to cut herself on her tongue, but the laceration was deep and wouldn’t stop bleeding. No Classroom Language class had ever prepared me beyond the general names of animals. I was suddenly thrust into a crisis with none of the right vocabulary, and I had to think fast. 

Do you know those people who perform really well under pressure? Mothers that hulk out and lift cars or pilot buses with the clarity or strength of someone who has been doing it for years? That’s not me. My reaction to stressful situations is similar to that of a fainting goat. Suddenly, I was frantically trying to figure out how to identify which veterinary practices could see us on a Saturday evening, how to describe a tongue laceration, and then package a profusely bleeding golden retriever into the car and drive safely to the clinic, all while trying not to bleat and fall over in a caprid stupor. Any pet owner planning to settle into a culture where your language is not the dominant one would do well to have rehearsed just such a scenario. 

Pressure comes with the territory when you’re working to integrate into a new culture, but there are things you can do to ease that pressure. One of those things is to ensure that your language education requires you to speak and listen, rather than just memorize, write, and swipe. If you don’t, your language may always remain trapped in the classroom. Break it out, so that it can follow you into the real world.