We've moved!

Good-bye Madagascar, hello KUWAIT.  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the reason that there has been radio silence on this blog for the past few months is because...we were moving!  (And then because I just couldn't get my butt in gear quickly enough to start blogging again).

Kuwait is a tiny country on the Arabian peninsula, nestled between Saudi Arabia and Iraq (guess we won't be taking any long car trips while we're here...).

Highlights and lowlights of moving here:

1.) The reconnaissance trip from Madagascar involved taking THREE airplanes:  Antananarivo to Mauritius, Mauritius to Dubai and Dubai to Kuwait.  With a 2 year old (and a 6-year old, but traveling long distances is about as old hat for her as riding her bicycle around the block three or four times).

2.) Flying Emirates.  Need I say more?

3.) The Emirates Lounge at Dubai International Airport, including this enclosed glass kiddy-space.

3.) Visiting a lot of potential places to live, like this swank villa:

And then deciding to take a three-bedroom apartment.

4.) The heat!  In summer, it's 46 degrees Celsius in the shade!  It's gotten colder since then.  We're now freezing cold when we step outside in the morning and it's only 25 degrees.  Of course, in shopping malls, it's still around minus 10 degrees Celcius with the air conditioning.

5.) Checking out schools - the Lycée Français de Koweït, the American School of Kuwait and the American International School of Kuwait, among others.  The Bambina had to take a test for both American schools.   I was a little worried because she had very little experience reading in English and had never written a thing in English during her entire school existence thus far, having always been educated in French up to now, but she passed the tests, no problem (apparently, she could read at her grade level in English.  Who knew??).  Phew!

The lycée français did not impress us at all and the Bambina isn't going there.  It was so obvious by talking to the principals and even just looking at their website that they are content with their "captive market" of francophone families and their school will therefore remain "good enough" (read mediocre) but not great.

6.) Staying at the Marina Hotel for three weeks while finding a place to live.  When we finally moved out of it and into our apartment, the Bambino, poor boy, kept asking to go back "home".  He missed having all of us sleep in one room and a swimming pool just outside the sliding door.

7.) The pollution here: worse than in Madagascar.  Think Beijing.  Or Jakarta.  The beach here looks ok but there is sewage leaking into the Arabian Gulf and besides being disgusting to swim in, it really does smell bad sometimes.  So we settle for the pool at a club.

More on life in Kuwait coming up in later posts.

English class at the French school

I've already posted once about the Bambina's English class at school.  She is in "CP" (first grade) at the French primary school here in Antananarivo and her class has "anglais" twice a week - English for French kids.

I stated in my previous post that I believed that this class would be, at best, a complete waste of time for the Bambina and at worst, harmful to the Bambina's French-English bilingualism.

So now I'm reporting back.  The times that the Bambina has talked about her English class at school, she has said that it is very very boring.   That was to be expected. But she has also said that the teacher makes mistakes.  Last week, she said that the teacher, a Malagasy who almost certainly learnt to speak English at a French school, is teaching the students the parts of the body in English.  In doing so, she points to her head and says "ED".  "Repetez, les enfants : ED".

So the teacher is telling the children that the word for "tête" in English is "ed".  Not "head" - "ed".  And she is getting the children to repeat this word over and over, thereby engraining this hideously incorrect pronunciation into each child's brain.

Ever wonder why the French speak English so poorly?  Now we know.

But not only does this teacher drop her "h's" when she shouldn't, she adds one when there isn't any.  The Bambina has an Australian classmate, Ella.  The English teacher calls her.... you guessed it... "Hella".  What the hell?

All of which leads me to conclude that these English lessons aren't just harmful for my little Bambina's bilingual capacities.  They're not doing the other kids any good either.  The children are learning some English, yes, but bad English.  English that later on will cause listeners to think, "this person doesn't speak English very well."

Any TEFL teachers out there?

Since January, I've been teaching English in our home to French and Malagasy people. I've also been teaching English to a group of grade 10 students at the Lycée Français here in Tananarive.

This is the first time I've tried teaching since I obtained my Certificate for English Language Teaching to Adults from Cambridge University (CELTA) at International House in Rome, back in 2008 (I got pregnant after that and no one would hire me, and then I had the baby and we moved to Madagascar, so it took me a while to get back into teaching).

Some observations:

1. ) I try to use the communicative approach but students really resist this method. They want me to stand up in front of the class and just talk and explain to them. They don't want to try to speak the language themselves. I find it especially a challenge to use this approach when students share a common language (usually French, in my students' case) because as soon as you tell them to talk about something in pairs or to the class, they start off in their common language! Grrrr.  What's more, since they know that I speak French, they often will try to speak to me in French instead of trying to say it in English.  Grrr.

2.) The teenagers at the lycée have a decent to good speaking level.  In many cases, their English is better than their parents' English. Now, I am dealing with the more advanced students but nonetheless I am impressed when I think back to my level of French back in grade 10.  One of my students has read the Twilight series three times, in English. 

On the other hand, their written English is not so good. Their regular English teachers also use the communicative approach for teaching, so maybe the poor writing skills is evidence that this approach is good for learning to speak but not for learning to write.

3.) The present perfect tense is perhaps the hardest grammatical concept in English to learn.  Even my teenagers at the lycée don't seem to fully "get it" and I am becoming persuaded that unless you have grown up with English or have moved to an English-speaking country for good (see, I've just used it twice, no make that three times!), you will never fully "get it" as a non-native speaker (unless you're Spanish-speaking, 'cause apparently Spanish has the same thing).   

Actually, there is one thing harder than understanding the present perfect - undertanding when to use the present perfect tense (e.g. I've gone) and when to use the present perfect continuous (e.g., I've been going).  It might seem obvious to you as a native speaker but to a non-native speaker who hasn't been immersed in English and who is learning the concept as part of an English lesson, this is tedious and complicated stuff.

4. ) I'm not in the right market. I have been trained to teach adults. In fact, adults don't care too much about their level of English anymore. But they really really really care about their kids being able to speak English fluently. I've been asked again and again and again to start a class for kids but the thing is,

• teaching children is not the same as teaching adults, and I haven't been trained to teach kids;

• teaching children would mean that I would have to give lessons when those children, and therefore my children, are not in school, meaning when my own daughter was home and I had things to do with her; and

• I honestly don't think that language lessons are that much use to a child under seven years of age. As small children have minds of sponges, they get much more from the immersion approach, not the lesson approach, and the immersion approach requires more than one or two hours per weeks with a "teacher" for the child to get anything out of it.  Proof: Dutch people my age speak pretty good English, yet they only started learning it formally when they were around eleven or twelve years of age.  Their advantage comes not from taking lessons when they were only five years old but rather from watching television shows and movies in their original language version (no dubbing!).

But I will be the first to admit that I could make much more money out of teaching English if I taught children!

Any other TEFL teachers out there?  I would love to hear what you think and how your experiences compare with mine.