Finding my voice

As someone who has sung pretty consistently in a choir of some form for the past 5 years, finding a new choir to sing in during my time in Strasbourg was fairly high up on my list of things to do here. It was also one of the things I often mentioned to tutors during the conversations about how best to find and interact with native speakers in order to improve our language abilities on the Year Abroad. As many who have done a Year Abroad will tell you, finding social groups with native speakers, especially when you’re not an exchange student, can be pretty difficult, and yet it’s one of the things that Oxford drills into you as being an important, nay crucial, part of the Year Abroad.

In actual fact, trying to find and break into those social groups is a lot easier said than done. From my experience, this is even harder in France, but whether that’s a cultural problem or just something I’m more aware of due to my longer stay in France, I don’t know. However, one of the first questions I seem to get asked about the Year Abroad from other linguists who are on their own Years Abroad or linguists who have done their Year before, is whether I have any native speaker friends or not. Thankfully I am able to reply with a yes, of sorts, in that I’ve managed to get into one social circle with a few French friends, so I do get that practice from time to time, but it’s nothing like the constant stream of interaction in a foreign language that your university tutors might have you believe.

My experience of having found French social circles harder to get into is somewhat reflected in the fact that it took me until January to find a choir to sing in here, and even then I was introduced to the choir through Liz, my friend and fellow assistant in Strasbourg. Most of the choirs I originally found and contacted were unwilling to accept a new member who would be starting late in the academic year and who would be leaving before the end of the academic year.

The choir I’m now part of, L’Arrache-Chœur, is based in Strasbourg and has a considerable proportion of French native speakers, along with a cluster of German speakers, which helps me get a bit of practice in that department too from time to time. Unlike The Oxford Singers, the choir that I’ve been part of in Oxford since I started studying there, and their repertoire of more popular music, my new choir tends to do more classical music of varying periods, right from Baroque to modern experimental works. It’s been a nice way of combining the singing I’ve been doing for the past few years with the more classical and formal music training and experience I’ve had for most of my life, and it’s my first time singing a lot of this sort of repertoire.

But along with getting back into singing, I’ve been feeling like I’m starting to find my voice again. As a reader of this blog, you are probably aware of my silence here that lasted several months, and in general I’d been writing very little during that time. In a more literal sense, I also wasn’t using my physical voice that much either. Although I do sing to myself around my little apartment fairly often, I’ve learnt to avoid belting musical theatre, as I am often prone to do, because hearty and heartfelt renditions of And I Am Telling You from the musical Dreamgirls, amongst other songs, have lead to my neighbours knocking on my door and asking me to keep it down. However, this is coming from the neighbours who have also asked me to be quieter when on Skype, so I’m not quite sure where their noise threshold lies…

While I’m still not belting out such soulful dramatic works, I do at least have a space where I can be loud now and where I can exercise and use my voice with more variety than I would otherwise. I’ve also found a musical partner in crime in Liz, who happens to live in an otherwise unoccupied apartment building, so we’re planning an evening of singing as loud as we want for when her flatmates aren’t around.

Clocking out at the end of the day

Recently I’ve been becoming more aware of the role of mobile phones and similar technology in our lives, especially when it comes to socialising, both when using and merely in the presence of these devices. It’s something I think we’re all becoming more aware of, whether it’s thanks to the latest viral video to draw our attention to the potential problems of modern technology or just because of something we did or didn’t do as a result of our phones.

I think working in France has also had its impact on my thinking in this regard. Home to the 35 hour working week, France is a place where the line between work and non-work related activities is more distinct than in other countries like the UK. Many people in all sorts of fields of work in the UK seem to be in a constant state of communicability, ready to respond to a call or a message that may strike at any moment. I, for one, used to take pride in my constant availability for contact through my phone, albeit for personal as well as professional reasons, but that’s started to change over the past few months. Where I once would’ve assured people that I was only ever a phone call away, I’ve now felt myself moving towards a point where I can promise a maximum response time of a couple of days at most, but I’m not on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Although the teaching work I do at the school is not freelance in any way, there are occasional parallels, and one of those seems to be in the way that I interact with others professionally. After I realised just how ingrained the concept of working and non-working hours and availability is in some people here, I quickly learnt not to expect a response via email or text from some of my colleagues outside of the traditional 9-5 slot. Admittedly, the hours of French schools are 8am-6pm, so this is somewhat extended, but by the same token, I have also learnt not to expect anyone’s availability for all of that time on every single working day.

As a result, I now make the effort to not respond or deal with work matters outside of that time frame. In doing so, I realise I have the privilege of having relatively few concrete hours of working every week, the result of my 12 hour weekly contract, which allows me to have the time to contact others for work purposes easily during those generally accepted working hours. Of course I spend time above and beyond the 12 hours a week planning and preparing for my lessons, but the total is still far less than most other people in paid employment in other countries all around the world. I certainly recognise how fortunate I am to be able to deal with my professional affairs in this manner, rather than getting in from a long day at work, only to have to spend more time working for something else.

But in limiting myself in the time I choose to spend contacting others in a professional context, I carve out that time in my schedule for me too. In refusing to address work-related concerns out of ‘office hours’ unless absolutely necessary, I give myself that mental space from work that we often lack and that helps me to unwind and relax a little. Naturally there are times when I or other teachers need to get in contact or work on things the night beforehand, but by focusing on those things as much as possible during the day before, I concentrate more on doing things during the day to allow me to take the evenings for myself.

However, I also feel there’s something to be said for flexibility, at least on a personal level. There are frequent occasions when I take time out during the day to do things for me, whether that be meeting a friend for coffee and pâtisserie or doing something less productive, but I try and counteract that by balancing out my time in the evenings when I would otherwise have been taking the time for myself. Usually the things I end up doing in the evenings in these circumstances are tasks such as lesson planning and researching or coming up with ideas for teaching: in other words, things that don’t require me to have regular contact with others. Sometimes I’ll send an email, or less often a text, regarding something for the following day, but my assumption is now very much that the message is there for them to read in the morning, rather than impatiently awaiting a rapid response, and in so doing, I’ve come to set the same expectations and assumptions for myself. Just as you wouldn’t expect an immediate response to a personal request during working hours, I’m learning not to expect an equally swift reply to a professional question outside of that time.

Once more unto the beach

Strasbourg, while a wonderful city, does come with its disadvantages. Due to its position on the German border, and merely a few hours’ away from Luxembourg and Switzerland too, it’s well-located in that sense and fairly ideal if you like skiing. However, when it comes to sun worshippers whose ideal holiday is one where sunglasses are worn for the sun rather that snow glare, it’s not quite as ideally situated. The nearest coastline is around 600km away at Calais, so even if you’re looking for a nearby practical beach location, the prospects are pretty grim.

Now while I didn’t actually get to go to the beach when I was in Bordeaux last weekend, I did get to glimpse some much needed sun and top up on my Vitamin D for the next 3 months. While we may not have snow like C. S. Lewis’ Narnia, I can most definitely relate to the idea of an eternal winter. Sadly I’m not exaggerating when I say that I saw direct sunlight in Strasbourg twice in the month or so before I went back to the UK for Christmas. People in the UK complain about the weather, and while it does rain rather a lot, it’s also sunny, whereas Alsace seems to be perpetually grey at this time of the year.

And so I set off for Bordeaux, going there not only in hope of seeing of some literal sun there, but also in the metaphorical sense of getting to see Tess and some of my other friends from Oxford for a weekend.

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In order to make the most of my time in Bordeaux and so that I could take the cheapest and simplest option of getting there, I left Strasbourg at 07:46 on Saturday on a train that would take just under 7 hours to cover the 1000km or so of French railway lines that link Strasbourg and Bordeaux. Think of it as a long-haul flight, except a train journey and a domestic one at that.

Thankfully I’d managed to find one of the few direct trains from Strasbourg to Bordeaux, so that meant I didn’t have to bother with changing at any point, which would most likely have been Paris. Given that I’d booked the tickets a while ago, I was glad to have made that decision when just a few days before I went to Bordeaux, the terrorist attack at the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris and the subsequent attacks elsewhere took place. If nothing else, I later realised that if I had opted to take two trains instead, I would’ve had to change train stations in Paris, and two stations in question happened to be just on either side of the giant solidarity rally that was taking place on the Sunday. I wouldn’t have fancied my odds, trying to make my way through the vast crowds with a rucksack and a small suitcase…

My train journey there and back mainly consisted of lesson planning (ah, the joys of being a teaching assistant!), watching programmes on BBC iPlayer (I’d downloaded them. What, you thought I’d have internet on a French train? Ha! Don’t be ridiculous…), reading, and writing. The latter ended up in resulting me talking to the person I was sitting next to (I know, talking to another human being on public transport. Oh, how my British heart quivers at the very thought!). She’d seen I was writing a considerable amount in English (well, I never pretended these blog posts would be short. I am nothing if not loquacious) and so paused what she was watching to ask me if I was indeed writing English, and then where I was from. We ended up chatting for a good half an hour or so, and it turned out that she was a Chemistry student at the University of Strasbourg, so we added each other on Facebook, before she then got off the train less than an hour into the journey at her stop. I later realised that this really had been a chance encounter, as I was in fact sitting in the wrong seat (French trains have an odd seat numbering system, whereby each seat has two numbers that switch, so that the seat numbering always starts at the front of the train after the direction of travel).

Having found some cheap flights from the UK at the beginning of January, Tess had invited a load of our friends from Oxford to go and visit her in Bordeaux on that weekend, hence why I was also going then. However, Tess works a pretty full day on a Friday and so the combination of that plus me having lessons first thing on a Monday morning meant that I had to get the last train back on the Sunday, so all in all, I only got to spend a little over 24 hours in Bordeaux.

Once I’d arrived in Bordeaux after what had felt like rather a long time (I stopped counting down the hours after I got into Hour 3 of the journey), I parted from my fellow passengers, exchanging the single nod of solidarity with the others who had been there with me from the beginning, I found myself a tram and headed into the centre of the city where I’d arranged to meet Tess. Much to my disappointment, it started to drizzle, so I huddled under my umbrella whilst waiting underneath one of the city’s many grand portes for Tess to appear.

One of the city’s portes.

Reunited at last, we headed back to Tess’ flat, where we proceeded to enjoy a good cuppa and have a grand old natter and a catch up for a while. The rain eventually eased off, so we headed out into the city so I could get a look around at some of the major sights in the centre, and so Tess could pick up a few bits she needed from the supermarket.

There were signs and post-it notes up everywhere in response to the Charlie Hebdo attack.

As a language learner and now teacher, this one particularly spoke to me.

Tess looking very chic with her French beret and middle-distance stare.

As the Oxford lot were getting in at about 7:30pm and the airport was a fair way outside of the city centre, Tess and I hopped on a bus and headed over to meet them at the airport, chauffeur-style sign whilst waiting in Arrivals and all. Once we’d found them, we jumped back on the bus and went back to Tess’ via their hotel so that they could check in and drop off their bags. For the sake of speed and convenience, and to avoid trying to figure out another way to feed 8 guests plus her friends in Bordeaux, Tess had decided to order in takeaway pizza for dinner. Given that we had a few vegetarians and even a vegan or two amongst the party, this proved more complicated than it might otherwise have been, but everything worked out well. Although takeaway pizza may not sound the most glamorous of welcome meals, the Year Abroad had clearly had an impact on Tess, and the oft tipsy organiser of a college bop’s charity predrinks had blossomed into a prepared and welcoming hostess, having bought in beer and wine in advance, along with a variety of nibbles served in ceramic bowls to accompany our dinner. (To those of you who know Tess, fear not: I still ended up looking after her phone later in the evening, as I’ve become accustomed to doing.)

Much to Tess’ horror, it was only the second time I’d had red wine to drink of an evening since arriving in France back in September. Given that I’m in Alsace, a wine region primarily known for its lighter, floral-noted white wines, I wouldn’t say that it’s that surprising. Nevertheless, I took the opportunity to avail myself of several glasses of Bordeaux red wine. Well, when in Rome…

In addition to chatting to various friends from Oxford, I enjoyed getting to meet some of Tess’ friends in Bordeaux, most of whom were assistants too. Of course, this led to the occasionally slightly awkward explanation of the fact that I was a friend of Tess’ from Oxford, but I was actually working as a teaching assistant in Strasbourg, but it meant that we got to swap stories and see how things are done in other parts of France. After she’d tricked me into believing that it was considered customary in France to stop what you’re doing and stand up every time someone new enters a room, I got on rather well with Lucie, one of Tess’ closest friends in Bordeaux and about whom I’d already heard some stories of their shared antics.

As the evening drew on, we ended up heading out to a cocktail bar in the city, where we met up with more of Tess’ friends, and I soon got chatting with them in French, an endeavour made perhaps more interesting by the unfamiliar accents and loud music in the background. When the bar closed at about 2am, the group of us went over to one of Tess’ friends flats for a bit. Given that by this point, most of Tess’ assistant friends in Bordeaux had gone home or elsewhere, we were left with the Oxford group and then some of Tess’ French friends, making communication between the two groups a little difficult linguistically at times, but we managed well enough. At one point, a bottle of rather powerful homemade schnapps was produced and passed around, and we chatted and listened to music for a while longer, before heading off after about an hour there. It had been a long day of travelling for a lot of us, so we sent most of the Oxford lot off in the direction of their hotel before heading back to Tess’ apartment. It was just after 3am by the time we got in, which despite the long day’s travelling was actually my latest night of the Year Abroad so far… I’m a wild one, me.

After being woken up by bright sunshine coming in through the window, a phenomenon I am very much unfamiliar with in my shuttered north-facing Alsatian apartment, I got up and went to the nearby supermarket to buy my dinner for the train journey back later, as well as some pain au chocolat for breakfast. We had a rather late breakfast, before meeting up with the others in the city centre. Tess gave us a brief walking tour of the city, albeit a longer and more detailed one that the highlights version I’d received yesterday, and also a sunnier one as the celestial orb had finally decided to make an appearance.

Seriously, look at the difference in the weather over the two days.

This is the same tower.

Part of our walk took us past the Place des Quinconces, the area where the Bordeaux solidarity rally for the Charlie Hebdo terror attacks was taking place, so we saw the masses of people beginning to congregate there in preparation as we walked past on our way towards one of the city’s parks.

The beginnings of the rally.

Look at these cool cats.

Sadly, I didn’t get to spend too long enjoying the sunshine in the park, as by that point it was getting close to when my train was due to leave, so I said my goodbyes there and hurried back to Tess’ to collect my bags. In reality, this was more of a poor imitation of an action film, whereby I had to dart through the crowds coming towards me to get to Tess’ apartment on the other side of them. Thankfully the modern age of technology and smartphones meant that I could just head for the quietest streets I could see and not get horrendously lost in the unfamiliar city.

The hurrying became distinctly less action-film, and rather more unflattering romcom, when I got to the tram stop to find out that the trams weren’t running in the direction I needed because of the rally happening near a stop further up the line. Having failed to think of this in advance and leave sufficient time to walk calmly to the train station, I ended up running, wearing more layers than frankly was necessary anyway, given the sun’s noticeable presence, and trailing my wheeled suitcase behind me. Thankfully I made it to the train station on time, having even had enough time, or perhaps more appropriately breath, to help a couple who were also trying to find the train station after the trams had let them down too. After alternating between powerwalking and just flat out running along the streets of Bordeaux, following the tram tracks that I knew would lead me to the train station, I got there and found my seat on the train with a few minutes to spare. Of course at this point, Sod decided to get involved, and the train didn’t actually set off until about 15 minutes after the advertised time of departure, but regardless, I made it. I would like to take this opportunity to apologise to the people sitting in the nearby vicinity on that train on Sunday afternoon, being forced to put up with panting, sweaty hot mess that flung itself most unceremoniously onto the train and proceeded to remove as many items of clothing as it socially acceptable. Seeing the large monument where the rally was congregated as the train headed out of the city and realising that it was about 2.5km away from the train station, I nearly wept at the realisation, but by that point I didn’t think I could spare the moisture.

I spent part of the journey back reading further about the response in France and worldwide to the Charlie Hebdo attacks. I’d already noticed the aftermath to some degree: the four Tricolore flags I see on my 10 minute walk to work everyday had been at half mast from the Thursday until the Monday after the attacks, and as I live in the Jewish neighbourhood of Strasbourg, there have been armed soldiers patrolling the main areas nearby. It did feel a little bit closer though when I looked up from my screen to see that we had stopped at a station just outside Paris on the way back to Strasbourg though.

English as a Second Language, or should that be third, fourth, etc.?

This is another teaching-related post, but not one relating various anecdotes and other hopefully amusing tidbits from my life as an English assistant. Instead this is just some musings on the ups and downs of being a language teacher, and specifically one in a school like my main one.

I’ve probably mentioned this before somewhere on this blog, but just as a reminder: my main school, the lycée (15-18 year olds) where I work 9 of my 12 hours a week, is an international school. It’s also more than that, in so far as there is still a relatively high number of native French speakers who are students from the area, by which I mean all over Alsace. The reason for this, as far as I can gather, is that it’s known for being a pretty good school in its own right. International students aside (I’ll explain that side of things shortly), to get into the school, there is an interview process and you have to have good grades to even be considered for an interview. I’ve already been approached by two fellow English assistants with question about the school, because they were tutoring younger collège students who were considering applying to my school for the following academic year, and the assistants I spoke two were asking about the school and the application process etc. Bearing in mind that neither of these assistants work in schools in the centre of Strasbourg where mine is, and you start to realise why some of the kids I teach have up to an hour’s train journey as part of their daily commute to school. It’s a school with a good reputation and people are willing to put up with a lot to go there.

On the international side of things, any student in the area whose nationality is not French or who has a foreign passport or non-French parents is eligible to go to the school. Don’t quote me on any of this, as the little information I have on the subject of admissions to the school is based off of a few hurried corridor conversations with other teachers, and I am far from being an expert on the inner workings of the school’s administrative processes.

The result of these mixed admissions is that I have a much larger variety than I had first expected in terms of the pupils’ language learning ability and history. Being in Alsace and very close to the German border at that, I had expected to be teaching a lot of kids who also spoke German to some extent. That’s still the case, because the kids who’ve lived their whole lives in Alsace started learning German fairly early on in primary school, so they’re pretty solid in that as their second language. On top of that, I have various students who are either in fact German or who grew up in Germany, or who at least have German parents and so speak German at home to a considerably high standard.

This, however, has implications for me as an English teacher. Thankfully I speak German to the same extent that I do French, and so whenever students have vocabulary difficulties, I can give them the English word even if they use German instead of French or, as occasionally happens, they get confused and use the German word thinking it’s English. This also means that for the vast majority of my students, English is their third language at best. I say at best, because as I found out with one of my small group conversation classes this afternoon, 5 out of the 6 students were learning English as their fourth language, and all of them were international students. Come to think of it, I can count the number of students I teach who started learning English as their first or second language on one hand. There are some who have worked at their English to the point where it is the second most proficient language after their mother tongue, but that’s almost always the result of dedication and hard work, rather than just having started learning it earlier.

I’ve been able to say to some of my classes, those with a higher proportion of pupils from Alsace, Germany or the nearby areas, that if they need to know a word they can say it in either of the languages they already know or can even guess at it from either of those languages. Yet with the international students, making links to their existing linguistic knowledge becomes a lot harder, not just because I don’t speak Russian or Armenian, but also because there are more differences between those languages and English than there are between English and French or German.

The other major issue this poses for me as a teacher is finding enthusiasm or motivation with the kids. Natural ability is something that I usually don’t have to worry about, as these kids, by and large, are good at learning languages, if only by necessity, the result of their life so far and their lifestyle. Of course there are still some whose brains are more inclined towards languages than others, just like in the UK. How many people do you know who say that they’d love to be good at languages, but that their brains just aren’t wired that way? On the whole though, the biggest challenge I face isn’t lack of natural ability, it’s lack of dedication and hard work.

I say natural ability, because I still have some students whose English is pretty poor. For a lot of them, it’s the result of fragmented schooling, changing schools ever couple of years as they move from country to country, or at least from school to school within a given area as their parents’ jobs keep the family moving. There are some who are just less academic and less gifted at languages, as you would expect in most schools, but in this case that’s the exception.

Even though English is continually held in high regard as the international language, what may seem like an important motivation for learning the language takes a back seat with some of these kids. When they’ve got one language for speaking to their family in, another for being at school and spending time in the city, and another one for talking to their friends from the same country or even area of the world, an international business language that they’ll use less often doesn’t retain the same appeal and opportunities for using it.

For the international students in particular, they face the added challenge in English lessons of learning one foreign language through another, and for those who have only recently moved to France and started learning French, that proves quite a challenge. When the bridge between what you know and what you’re trying to learn is still under construction, the far bank can seem a long way away.

As a result, a lot of these kids tend to withdraw into their shells and stay clumped together in friendship groups primarily characterised by nationality. As anyone who’s been on an international course may well have witnessed before, people tend to clump together according to nationality or common languages at the very least. When I was in Vienna last summer on my German language course, the group of Russian women became rather infamous for always sticking together, and branching out first to other Russian or Slavic language speakers.

So to those who say that I am lucky in my school and that my job is a very good one, my answer is this: yes, I am fortunate in being placed at the international school as my main school. On the whole, I don’t face the problems associated with low-income areas and demographics, and most of my pupils have a reasonably high standard of living. I don’t have to worry about violence or racial conflicts in the classroom. But I face different challenges instead: the issue of motivating these kids to do something other than sit in silence or whisper in their first languages to each other, the difficulty of getting them to respond and speak in good English, and the challenge of even making myself understood when it comes to giving basic information or instructions. That being said, those problems are in a much less worrying league for me as an individual working in the school than the ones I mentioned earlier. But as a teacher, they still make my job hard at times and the lessons are often far from easy.