My English Students

As I quickly discovered, teaching can produce all kinds of interesting experiences. I primarily taught individuals studying English as well as group classes of up to five people. I generally worked with the same students on a regular basis over a number of weeks or months so I got to know them pretty well. I had every type of student: chatty, shy, beginners, advanced speakers, children, adults, lawyers, company directors, retired people... the list goes on. I had such a range of fantastic students, people I was genuinely happy to see each lesson: those I could chat with like I would a friend and those who had such interesting stories to tell that I felt I got just as much out of the lessons as they did. I also had the students that I was less excited to teach but, over time, even some of them grew on me!

Pascal

Pascal was a man in his fifties who always arrived at the school on a motorbike. He had a very basic level of English but he was extremely good at expressing himself nonetheless. During my first lesson with Pascal he told me all about his family - his daughters and his husband. When he told me about his husband I wondered if he meant wife but I wasn't going to question it - a husband was perfectly plausible too, though on the surface he fitted the profile of a stereotypical straight man. I let him go on and asked him some more questions about his husband. We chatted away for an hour and towards the end, he couldn't think of how to say a sentence so he switched to French: "ma femme"... my wife. Turns out he did mean wife all along but how was I to know?

In my second lesson with Pascal he told me that his motorbike club owned a bar and he would be working there that evening. There was a festival going on in town so he invited everyone along and gave us all free drinks. His English was really quite good after a few beers! When I saw him again in class the next it was remarkable how broken his English was in comparison.

Lina

Lina was one of my loveliest students, always smiling, always happy to be there and basically just a delight every week. On her information sheet she was noted as a beginner so I went in expecting her English to be limited and was pleasantly surprised that she spoke easily and with amazingly few mistakes. It seemed that she simply picked up everything she was taught immediately and remembered how to apply it without a problem.

She told me about her children, especially her daughter who was struggling in school, and told me that she too had not been good at school and wasn't good at learning in academic settings. I told her how impressed I was by the rate at which she was picking up English but she still seemed to think she made an unacceptable amount of mistakes.

We did have a bit of trouble when she told me about her husband's work as a chef and the regional speciality that he made in his restaurant - a dish called Axoa which involves veal. She didn't know the word for veal in English and I have never eaten meat so I'm not great at knowing the names of all the different dishes. I asked her to describe the animal it came from and as it turned out she didn't have such a great knowledge of meat either: "smallish animal, brown in colour, I think..." I started guessing: "rabbit, deer, cow, sheep..." Both of us were stumped. I asked her for the name in French, "veau" - "ah", I said, "maybe it's veal, it sounds similar". But what animal does veal come from? Neither of us were sure. "I think it's a young cow" I said, but she was convinced it wasn't a cow. Eventually we had to google it to find out!

By chance I met Lina again one weekend, several weeks after she had finished her course. I got to meet her children who I had heard so much about and finally put faces to the names which was really nice.

Joël

Joël started out as a slightly frustrating student. The problem with some older learners is that they want to know why everything is the way it is instead of just accepting it. Joël really started from zero with English and my first class with him was a group class where we were practising some shopping role-play. One of the items on the list was a loaf of bread. The concept of a loaf just was not getting through to him. I tried to explain that it really wasn't that important, essentially it was just bread... like a whole bread... but he would not let the word loaf go - it's not a concept that really exists in French. After a good ten minutes of me and the other students trying to describe the meaning of loaf, he agreed to move on.

Similarly, in another of our early lessons, we were learning how to describe people. The question was "what do they look like?". He really fixated on the word "like" and could not understand how this question was asking for the physical appearance of someone rather than their hobbies. We had to have a lengthy discussion on the various potential uses of "like" and how "to look like" is not at all the same as "to like". I learnt to adapt my questions to take out words that I knew would cause confusion that he would fixate on in an unproductive way.

Thankfully after a couple of months of language learning Joël made a breakthrough and something clicked as he realised languages can't always be directly translated and not every concept in French works the same way in English. He wasn't happy about it - there was a lot of exasperated sighing but he got on with it after that!

Joël, despite his struggles with English, was always cheery and loved to make jokes. He was one of my students who progressed the most during his course and by the time I left he had gone from someone who could barely respond to "how are you" to someone with whom I could have an in-depth conversation on almost anything. He went on to apply for jobs requiring English as a second language.

Before he got there though, we did have one rather alarming conversation where I asked him what his hobbies were, what he liked to do in his spare time. He responded confidently, "I like hitting". Wow, I thought, ok, "and what exactly are we hitting here?". "Lots of things", he replied, "fish, steak, vegetables, pizza". I thought for a moment and then I clicked: "ah you mean you like eating?!" "Yes, exactly, hitting", he told me enthusiastically. We had a little chat about pronunciation after that!

Romain

Romain was probably the best at English of everyone I taught. One of the best things about my job was that I got to speak to people that I would otherwise probably never come into contact with, let alone have hours of one-to-one discussion with. Romain was definitely one of those people. He was the director of a French flour company and I first met him just as wheat prices took off so he was often a little stressed when he arrived at class. He gave the impression of being a very busy and important person with a lot of knowledge of the world so I always found it a bit strange that I was the teacher in this situation. We talked quite a bit about economics during our classes which was great for me because I always learnt a lot!

Aside from his work he also had a fascinating personal life and was a good storyteller so I enjoyed chatting with him. He said in school he had picked up Spanish with no problem at all and was basically fluent just from school classes and holidays in Spain. Unfortunately he hadn't had the same experience with English, much to his disappointment. When he was 18 he went to Texas for his last year of school. He arrived speaking minimal English but understood everything after a month - pretty impressive if you ask me, even if it didn't come as easily to him as Spanish. He told me he dated a girl from Venezuela while he was there but after a year he left Texas and they went their separate ways. They didn't speak for 17 years until some other friends from Texas got married and they were both invited to the wedding. They reunited in America after 17 years and eight days later got engaged. Today they are still happily married, their daughter is just starting school and he is confident that she will be trilingual by the age of 6. I have no doubt that he is right.

Blandine

Blandine was certainly one of my most challenging students. She always refused to touch anything - including paper and pens - due to the covid risk. This would have been fine if she had brought her own but she didn't so as a result the activities we could do with her were a bit limited and she couldn't write down new vocabulary as we went. She also seemed quite determined not to speak any English. She would talk away in French, not seeming to realise that the point of my questions was not to find out all about her life but simply to practice speaking in English. On top of that, the questions I could actually ask her were rather restricted - "I don't like animals, I don't have a favourite colour, I don't do sport, I don't like talking about my family, I don't have any friends, I don't watch TV". I often felt slightly at a loss in lessons with her and they were some of the longest hours of the job.

However, even with Blandine, I felt like I made a break through as her course came to a close. I began to work out what she liked and didn't like in her lessons and I tried to tailor it to her. She always wanted direct English-French translations which I didn't use with most of my students but for her I made vocabulary sheets and that made her happy. I found listening exercises which she really enjoyed, far more than me talking to her, and I eventually found topics of conversation that she was willing to speak on - nutrition, education and the gym. In the end she proved that she could in fact speak in English if she really wanted to and we were able to make good progress.

Coralie

Coralie was one of my youngest students at 15 years old. She lived on a farm in the middle of nowhere and boy did she have a lot to say. She would come in and talk for an hour with me trying to squeeze in a few corrections whenever she paused for breath. She was really good fun and the things she came out with always made me laugh. Lessons with her were definitely something to look forward to. She was also incredibly talented and she would show me her artwork, tell me about the latest books she's been reading - she was a big fan of Jane Austen - or tell me about the maths she was studying just for fun. She had so many interests, so much motivation and so many thoughts on everything - I would love to see where life takes her in the future.