Arriving in London
Moving to London at the age of 13 was a leap of faith on my parents’ part. My younger sister and I started mainstream school straight away, and sadly, we soon found that the weekly English lessons we took whilst back in our country had not been enough. With a foundation in vocabulary consisting of ‘cat’ and ‘dog’ and ‘Whatchy-timyiseaty?’, we were badly equipped to succeed in school and even worse unable to socialise, make new friends and enter adolescence with confidence and a sense of independence. However, this is not a sob story. Our malleable young brains were about to soak up so much culture, language and information that our progress in learning English was palpable daily. All that singing along with the Beatles, reading the menu at our local kebab shop and information plaques at the British museum, watching soap operas on BBC1 and shaking our heads to questions we did not understand murmuring ‘I don’t know...’ were a big part of our process to learn, a process through which in the end we became ‘kinda English’.
What the Experts say
So as it can be guessed, I am a big fan of learning outside the conventional parameters of the classroom, away from the textbooks and the forced memorisation in front of a blackboard. There are some numbers to back up my leaning towards a more holistic approach to learning in a research done by mindServegroup in 2005. The Learning Triangle points to two of the most efficient ways to retain information: Immediate Use and Practise by Doing. These are both inherent to what we are talking about here - experiential learning.
The Learning Triangle: National Training Laboratories © mindServegroup 2005
LOTC (Learning Outside the Classroom), a registered UK charity engaged with the promotion of experiential learning, places language fieldwork visits abroad amongst what it lists as ‘out-of-classroom places’.
‘These (experiential learning activities), often the most memorable learning experiences, help us to make sense of the world around us by making links between feelings and learning. They stay with us into adulthood and affect our behaviour, lifestyle and work. They influence our values and the decisions we make. They allow us to transfer learning experienced outside to the classroom and vice versa.’
The topic of finding inspiration outside the conventional classroom is of such importance that it has found a voice even in politics. In the British parliament, a select committee led by the politician Barry Sheerman, who was the Chair of the Children, Schools and Families Committee until 2010, came forward with a report titled ‘Education outside the Classroom’. In it, the committee defended that ‘Outdoor learning supports academic achievement (...) as well as the development of ‘soft’ skills and social skills’.
Memory and Motivation in language learning
This shift from ‘memorising’ to ‘memorable’ is key here, especially when applied to English being learned in English-speaking countries; the excitement of being abroad helps you remember what you learnt since your time spent learning was memorable. Memory plays such an essential part in language learning, and it is the ‘memorable’ which we should be focusing on. The LOTC Manifesto goes on to highlight the six main ‘pathways to learning’: seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling and doing. When it comes to studying English, only an immersive experience could possibly offer a way along all these pathways. With all your senses and curiosity activated, the motivation to learn the language comes naturally. Motivation is key to developing skills and gaining knowledge, and what greater motivation to do so than to want to belong or understand where you are.
When learning English in an English-speaking environment, children quickly realise that the main use of English is in communicating with their peers and the society around them. In an article for Forbes Magazine Katharine B. Nielson, the chief education officer at Voxy,affirms that what language students need is ‘the chance to use language the way it was intended, as a tool for communication, not as a complex set of rules to master.’ As a radical approach to language learning, she even suggests dispersing the discipline into other subjects: arts, music, science. The language thereby becomes a vehicle through which to communicate about the world around us.
‘Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.’
Benjamin Franklin
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