HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT ABOUT BEING DEAF OR MUTE?

The Slovak experience…

     The ability of speaking and listening give us some kind of freedom, you can express ideas, feelings, emotions. When I have had diseases where I lose part my hearing or in which I cannot articulate sounds, I have felt impotence, loneliness and sadness, no matter if I understand the language I am exposed to. (At this point I have to clarify that my first language is Spanish and I am having a deeper study of English).

     I am an English school teacher and long time ago two of my students belonged to a Chami ethnical culture and they used to talk in their language, but when they did that, I just walked away; I did not want to act like an ignorant in front of them. For some reason I felt ashamed and frustrated because even with all my studies and language awareness, I could not understand a single word. 

     Recently, I have a little close encounter to the Slovak language, something very excited and ¨terrifying¨. If I have experienced these kind of feelings even knowing my language and having some notions about others, imagine how I felt when my S.L.A professor invited Silvia, the Slovak teacher to give us a 45-minute-class. It made me reflect on how our students feel when we attack them with our English language questions.

     The class before, Professor asked us to look for some useful expressions in Slovak and pay special attention on professions. I think we all had fun that day, everybody in class was saying ¨ahoj: hello in Slovak¨, classmates laughed, repeated and practiced with the help of the internet; at the end of the class, the professor announced that we had fifteen days to get some Slovak notions until Silvia arrived in the class. But the day she came into the classroom and started speaking Slovak like a never ending story, our smiling faces disappeared for a little while and disappointed faces came out.

     I looked everybody around, they were like asking to themselves ¨What?¨ ¨is anybody out there who could help me?¨. Personally I felt deaf, mute, dumb, ridiculous and even more, when Silvia picked me up to perform an activity that I did not how I guessed what I had to do. To be honest I did not have any clue about she was saying to me. In that moment I would have wanted Silvia had repeated and used much more non-verbal communication in order to be understood. There were some structured phrases that most of us already knew, but only by practicing with our partners could understand a little bit. I realized how much I do not know about languages, even though I am a language teacher and at the same time a language student.

     If we as language teachers just stop and think how we are managing our classes, how much  useful and practical our activities are, how motivational they are, and the most important how we address students’ emotions and feelings, our language teaching and learners language  performance could be much more better.