How languages changed my life:
I volunteer for the Assocation of Language Learning (ALL) and ALL North East, having moved to the North-East to do my teacher training (I never left).
Languages, life, people
My parents taught me to read before I went to school and I soon became an avid consumer of the books (any books) I found around the house. One of these gave me my first encounter with a language not English, in the West Midlands village where we lived; it was at the back of a Daily Express annual where the final spread, for some intriguing reason I still don’t understand, consisted of illustrations, lyrics and music for the song Au clair de la lune in French. I was amazed; why couldn’t I make sense of these words?
My mother had been good at French at school and knew the song, so she explained what it was and sang it for me. Now I was entranced; it felt like being let into a great secret – that you could make entirely different sounds with your mouth and only some people would understand them. I remember dragging my fingers along the wall on the way home from school, making up words in my mouth that sounded like what I remembered of those sounds, and then asking for another performance when I got in.
So that memory is about a secret connection with my Mum, and lots of other memories of how languages have touched my life are also about people; language is a special trait that lets us share so much that is important, creative and personal and a genuine form of ‘cultural capital’.
A legacy of languages
As a teacher in Durham, those people were my pupils in a newly formed comprehensive school where we were charged to develop the department by engaging and enthusing them through as many routes as possible (a challenge that continues to be my prime objective even now that I am not in the classroom).
It is heart-warming to think back to all of those ex-pupils who have built lives, families and careers in other countries or using other languages, including, at last count, a good two dozen who became language teachers themselves. We must have been doing something right.
Those were the years too when I met other people – other language teachers – from around the whole region – what a revelation! We worked together on enjoyable projects like the North-East Festival of Languages (the grandparent of the current Express Yourself: North East Festival of Languages) where hundreds and hundreds of school pupils, older students, families and community members would gather to have a good time performing and playing around with languages.
Making connections – that last
Professional sharing of ideas, enthusiasms and effort with others became an important part of my life then, and it still is.
Many of those people are still close friends, all because of languages.
More recently, involvement through ALL in Erasmus+ projects has introduced me to new people in other countries and to the amazing, almost breathtaking, surprise of meeting a teacher say from Sweden or from Tenerife with whom my ideas click into place straight away, as though we had been talking about things for years!
Finally, of course, in relation to languages, the other people I have to mention are those in ‘my’ French family. A friendship of over 50 years is a great gift in life, especially one where two families almost merge into one, and people feel at home together on either side of our little Channel. I have now known five generations in that family. Languages really are for life.
Steven Fawkes
- Association of Language Learning and Association of Language Learning North East
- Member of Newcastle City of Languages working group
