Conversation

One thing I greatly appreciate about the school I work for is its emphasis on communication. I've seen too many schools, including many in the United States, where foreign language classes spend more time teaching about the language than teaching the language. Raise your hand if you've sat through years of Spanish or German class memorizing verb conjugations and masculine/feminine endings but still can't carry on a decent conversation with a native speaker because you don't have enough experience putting all that grammar to use.

So I was thrilled when the director of our new school instructed us to get the students speaking as much as possible in class. Yes, we teach them grammar, but it's useless unless the students are able to understand it in a variety of contexts and use it to express themselves.

To that end, we spend a lot of time in class simply talking. Conversations are often inspired by the topics in our textbook, and I try to keep it somewhere in that realm just to be sure that target vocabulary has opportunity to come up. But you also learn a lot about people when you just sit and talk.

One of my classes is very pessimistic, as I tell them every day. We've been learning to express predictions about the future, which leads to conversations like this:

Me: "Do you think humans will be extinct someday?"
Student: "I hope so."

or
Me: "What might cause the birth rate to decrease?"
Student: "Well, women get ugly after they have a baby."

At least they find their own cynicism hilarious, and people could easily mistake our classroom for a comedy club with as much as they crack each other up. However, they're still at a pre-intermediate level, which means their ability to express themselves is limited. This also induces snickers, when people utter such odd sentences as, "Next week I will cut a cow." (He meant that he will sacrifice a cow, as part of a religious festival which I'll write more about later.)

I'm also getting a more rounded view of the entire country, since many people in Ankara came from other places, and inevitably view their hometown as vastly superior to the humdrum business-oriented gloom of the capital city. But it means I'm getting lots of lessons in geography and what to do in various regions of the country if I ever get time to travel.

So basically, grammar is the necessary evil that allows us to get to the fun stuff of communicating and getting to know people. Work feels much less like work when it's simply facilitating conversation. In fact, I'd say that getting people to talk to each other is a pretty cool job.