WEBVTT

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Good morning. My name's Tim Morley,

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and I'd like to tell you
about this innovative,

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somewhat different way of introducing

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primary school kids to
learning foreign languages.

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Now, a lot of primary schools in the UK

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now have foreign languages
on the curriculum, which is fantastic

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but there's a skills gap:

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we have on the one hand
lots of primary school teachers,

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fantastically effective,
motivated, trained, super,

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but most of whom don't even
speak a foreign language

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let alone have any training
in how to teach one.

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On the other hand, we have lots of

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secondary school
modern foreign language teachers,

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who do a super job with a GCSE class,

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but put them in front of
a group of seven-year-olds

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and they're somewhat
out of the their comfort zone,

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and we can forgive them
for not wanting to get involved.

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So there's this skills gap, and
this project "Springboard to Languages"

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that I've been involved in
for the last few years

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aims to do that by teaching
Esperanto to primary school kids.

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Now, the title of the talk gives you
a flavour of the, shall we say,

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healthy skepticism
on behalf of some of the parents.

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"You're teaching what to my child?"

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"What on earth...?"
"Is that Spanish?" "Why?"

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All perfectly justifiable questions
which I will attempt to answer.

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So, first thing: it's not a course
in how to speak Esperanto.

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The aim of this is not to
send children out into the world

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as fluent Esperanto speakers to use

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in their everyday lives
and in business, and so on.

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That's not the point.

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Most of the children, the vast majority,

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will probably never meet another
Esperanto speaker in their lives.

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That's fine, that's not the point.

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So what is it about?
It's about all of this.

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Key thing: language awareness.

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Esperanto is a very much simpler language

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than any other that I've ever come across

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and I've learnt a few
and I've taught a few.

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It was designed specifically to be
simple and quick and easy to learn

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and it is an order of magnitude
quicker and easier to learn

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than any other language I've seen.

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And so the kids quickly get past the stage

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where they just have to remember stuff,

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and can get onto actually using
the language creatively, which is great.

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It helps to develop all the
mental gymnastics that's involved

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in having two languages in your head

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and switching between the two
and finding equivalences between them.

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All of those skills get developed
with the nice simple language,

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and then all those skills
can be carried on

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to study other languages afterwards.

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It's a successful, inclusive experience.

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"Inclusive" in the sense that,
in any given class,

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a much higher percentage of that class

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will be capable of getting
their heads round Esperanto

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and doing useful things with it than is
often the case with other languages.

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And, I dare say, a successful
inclusive experience.

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Reactions from the kids, and
feedback from teachers, headteachers,

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and from parents,
once they know what's going on,

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and I should say,
academic assessment as well,

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suggest that this is good. It works.

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Let's have a quick look
at Bloom's taxonomy,

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which underpins a lot of
curriculum planning.

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We start at the bottom
and work towards the top.

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There's a danger with primary school
language teaching

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of getting stuck at the bottom.

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It involves lots of remembering,
lots of memorising

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of conjugations,
of masculine and feminine nouns,

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of spelling, of pronunciation —

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there's lots of memorisation
that needs to be done

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before you can get on to
the higher order skills.

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In many language classrooms
in primary schools,

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where we're trying to teach
French or Spanish or Mandarin

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we kind of get stuck at the bottom,

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and we never get on to the creative stuff,

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and there's a danger that children
will lose interest before then.

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Esperanto minimises the memorisation
that's necessary

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and we quickly get up to the higher order,

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more interesting and exciting skills.

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English literacy — learning Esperanto
helps kids with their English literacy.

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I've seen 5-year-olds who were struggling
to read and write in English,

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but who discovered that
they were capable of reading

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by reading Esperanto.
It was so much easier,

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and that gave them the confidence boost
that they needed

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to get on with the English.

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I've seen 9-year-old kids,
when faced with the task

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"Circle the adjective in this sentence,"

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the first thing they do is to translate

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the sentence into Esperanto in their head,

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because adjectives are much easier
to spot in Esperanto.

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So it's helping with their
first language literacy too.

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And even numeracy,
the way numbers are verbalised

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in Esperanto helps to clarify
how the number is put together.

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And when you're 5 and you're learning
about adding up

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and tens and units, it's really helpful.

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I've got a few examples of that
in a moment.

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So Esperanto brings all of this
to the classroom.

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Almost as a side-effect, it can also bring

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contact with foreign cultures

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— obviously a major motivator for
learning foreign languages —

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and I've been in classrooms and
taken part in videoconferences

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between British classrooms

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and classrooms in Slovenia,
in Hungary, in Germany.

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There are a number of Comenius projects —

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Comenius is the name of the grants given

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by the European Commission
to primary schools

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to establish links with
other schools across Europe —

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there have been a number of
Comenius projects

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where Esperanto is used
as an inter-language

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between the children, and the adults too.

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So Esperanto brings all of this
to the classroom.

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Now, an analogy.
How not to get there.

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This guy is a bassoon player.

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He gets an enormous amount of pleasure
from playing his bassoon,

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maybe even earns a living from it.

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I would suggest that if
you wanted your child

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to become a professional bassoon player,

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the best way to get there is not

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to give a bassoon to a 7-year-old.

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"There you go, Johnny, play us a tune!"

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It's not going to work.

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It's a big, cumbersome instrument
even with adult hands.

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With children's hands,
it's really really hard to play.

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There's lots to memorise,
there are lots of fingerings to remember,

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the reed is really hard to get
even a squeak out of,

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never mind a proper note
that you'd want to listen to.

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And so, if you were to do that,
6 or 12 months down the line,

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the result would be, "I don't like this,"

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"I can't do it." "I'm no good at music."

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"I don't want to do music."

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So of course, that's not what we do.
We start simple.

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Quick show of hands: who learnt
the recorder in primary school?

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I certainly did.

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Yes, that's just about everybody.

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Who still plays the recorder,
for pleasure or in a band?

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Oh, one or two, super.
More than I expected!

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A few people carry it on,
but the vast majority of us don't.

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So is this some massive failure
of primary school policy?

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Why did we all learn the recorder?
That's not a useful life skill.

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Of course, that's not the point.

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By learning the recorder,
we learn about music.

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We learn major keys and minor keys.

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We start to read music.

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You learn about rhythm
and time signatures,

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keeping time with others, and harmonies.

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All of that musical knowledge goes in
through the simple instrument

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and then it can be applied to the bassoon

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or the pipe organ or
whatever you want to play.

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So, by analogy, French in the classroom
is a bassoon.

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Spanish in the classroom is a bassoon.

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Chinese is an extra large bassoon
with added tones!

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(Laughter)

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Esperanto is a recorder.
That's what it's all about.

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Now, just before I go on,
I just want to say:

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I can't be doing with presentations
where they put up a wall of text

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and then stand here and read it to you.

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That's not a presentation,
that's a report being read out loud

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and it quickly gets dull.

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Having said that,
I am about to put up a wall of text,

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and I am about to read it to you.

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Bear with me, there's only one of these.

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It's a quick snippet from a report

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by the University of Manchester's
School of Education

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who've been evaluating the
Springboard to Languages project

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and in this part
they're writing about School A,

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where kids at the time had about
18 months of Esperanto,

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and School B where they'd had
French for two years,

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and they'd just started the Esperanto.

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They did a French test, and this happened.

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"Does Springboard help
to learn other languages?"

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"Pupils were invited to decode
the French sentence:

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(French) "Elephant's ears are very large

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and the nose is very long."

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And they observed: "The only children

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to successfully translate
the whole sentence

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were, interestingly, from school A -

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the kids learning Esperanto,
who've never had a French lesson

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in their lives -

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"These two children used
interesting metalinguistic

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decoding strategies -
cognates, punctuation, context.

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In other words, the language skills that
they'd picked up through Esperanto.

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"School B children, who had been
learning French since Year 1,

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performed only marginally better
than School A children

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in a test of French."

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So the skills that the kids
had got from Esperanto

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helped them to almost catch up
in a French test

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with kids who had been learning French.

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So, what's so special about Esperanto?

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Why is it so good at this?

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I'll give you a few quick examples.

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Here, at the top, we've got the numbers:

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(Esperanto): one, two three, four, five,

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six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

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That much, you have to memorise, OK.

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But once you've memorised that,

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you've got everything you need
to get all the way to 99.

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There's nothing else to learn;
afterwards we just apply it.

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11, 12, 13 is just
"dek unu", "dek du", "dek tri"

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literally "ten one",
"ten two", "ten three"

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until you get to "dudek",
literally "two tens".

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And then it's "dudek unu",
"dudek du" and so on

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all the way up to 99.

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So, for children who are learning
about hundreds, tens and units,

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actually they translate
the number into Esperanto,

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I've seen this happen in the classroom,

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"so... 27... dudek sep...
so 'dudek' is 'two tens'

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so that's a '2' in the 'tens' column

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and a '7' in the 'units' column..."

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So by translating the number
into Esperanto

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it clarifies what's going on,
what that '2' in '27' actually means.

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It's "dudek", it's two tens.

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At the bottom there, "sesdek tri"
... anybody?

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"73!" Uh, it's 63, but
thank you for the effort!

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And again, this illustrates
the minimisation

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of things to memorise —

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when you learn "patro", "father",
you can derive "patrino"

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— "-ino" means
"female or feminine equivalent" —

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so "patrino" is the word for "mother".

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There's no separate word to learn.

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"Instruisto" is a teacher,
and if the teacher

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happens to be female
and you want to refer to that,

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you can call her an "instruistino".

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You use the same "-ino"
to mark anything as female.

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"Hundo", any German speakers
will recognise as "a dog";

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"hundido" is "a puppy".
"-ido" is the young, the offspring.

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So from "kato"
we can derive "katido", "a kitten",

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and "kuniklo",
any Latin or Italian speakers will know

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is "a rabbit",
and "kuniklido" is a baby rabbit.

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Now, I've been speaking French
for 25 years,

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I've lived in France, and my family
is bilingual English/French,

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and I can't immediately recall
the French word

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for "a baby rabbit".

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I know the word for a rabbit,
but not for a baby one.

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I can't remember the word,
but in Esperanto, it's just obvious.

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I can't not know that word!
It's just obvious, it's there.

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Now, "kontenta" means "happy",

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and "malkontenta" —
"mal-" gives you the opposite,

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so it's "unhappy".

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Same with "granda" for "big",
and "malgranda"

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is the normal Esperanto word for "small".

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There's no separate word to learn.

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There's always a "buy-one-get-one-free"
on adjectives in Esperanto. (Laughter)

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We've literally halved the number
of words to memorise

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with the single prefix "mal-".

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So, this is just one little corner
of the language,

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but these principles extend
throughout the whole thing.

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I've found that learning French
and other languages

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is an additive process —
I find a new word,

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I learn how to pronounce it,
how to spell it,

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what it means, and I've added
one word to my arsenal.

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Learning Esperanto is multiplicative.

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Every time I add a new word,
it recombines and multiplies

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with everything I've got already,

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so I don't just get one word,

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I get a whole new frontier
of expressive capacity.

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And this applies just as much
in the classroom with children,

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and so we quickly get to the stage
where they can

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creatively use the language,
rather than just

00:13:02.382 --> 00:13:05.233
repeating vocabulary
and memorised sentences.

00:13:05.233 --> 00:13:08.200
Far more interesting stuff.

00:13:08.200 --> 00:13:10.597
Here's a case in point: I got heckled

00:13:10.597 --> 00:13:14.265
by an 8-year-old,
in grammatically perfect Esperanto,

00:13:14.265 --> 00:13:17.314
about 3 months into a course.

00:13:17.314 --> 00:13:20.547
We were doing an activity
where I give an instruction,

00:13:20.547 --> 00:13:24.450
the children follow the instruction,
and tell me what they're doing.

00:13:24.450 --> 00:13:27.282
So I give an imperative verb,
and they use a present tense verb.

00:13:27.282 --> 00:13:32.598
So I say "Staru!" and they all stand up
and say, "Mi staras!"

00:13:32.921 --> 00:13:36.664
I say "Sidu!" and they sit down
and say, "Mi sidas!"

00:13:36.664 --> 00:13:40.952
I say "Saltu!" and
they go "Mi saltas! Mi saltas!"

00:13:40.952 --> 00:13:43.302
So I said, "OK, silentu!"

00:13:43.302 --> 00:13:46.117
And the whole class said, "Mi silentas!"

00:13:46.117 --> 00:13:51.751
apart from little Johnny who shouted out,
"Mi ne silentas!"

00:13:51.751 --> 00:13:54.324
But now I've got a dilemma:

00:13:54.324 --> 00:13:57.519
do I tell him off,
or do I give him a gold star?

00:13:57.519 --> 00:14:00.187
Because he has just made
the whole class laugh

00:14:00.187 --> 00:14:03.135
with a grammatically perfect utterance
in the target language.

00:14:03.135 --> 00:14:04.490
From a language teacher's point of view,

00:14:04.490 --> 00:14:07.919
that's a dream come true.
That's what we're aiming at!

00:14:07.919 --> 00:14:12.485
So I put on my best "mock annoyed" face
and said: "Vi! Silentu!"

00:14:12.485 --> 00:14:14.884
and he said, "OK, mi silentas!"

00:14:14.884 --> 00:14:20.802
But that has never happened
in any of my French lessons.

00:14:20.802 --> 00:14:23.686
Now that's not because I don't
enjoy teaching French — I do.

00:14:23.686 --> 00:14:27.569
And it's not because the kids don't
enjoy learning it — I believe they do.

00:14:27.569 --> 00:14:32.187
It's just that there's so much
that needs memorising

00:14:32.187 --> 00:14:35.852
and practising before that can
even become possible in French

00:14:35.852 --> 00:14:37.836
— or Spanish, or German,
or other languages —

00:14:37.836 --> 00:14:41.620
that it doesn't happen
until years down the line,

00:14:41.620 --> 00:14:45.245
and by that stage, unfortunately,
lots of kids have lost interest

00:14:45.245 --> 00:14:48.635
and have got the impression that
they're no good at languages

00:14:48.635 --> 00:14:50.119
because they can't say anything.

00:14:50.119 --> 00:14:52.169
It's not their fault,
and it's not the teacher's fault,

00:14:52.169 --> 00:14:56.086
it's just really really hard
to get to the stage

00:14:56.086 --> 00:14:58.597
where you can creatively
use a new language.

00:14:58.597 --> 00:15:01.056
Esperanto shortcuts
an enormous amount of that

00:15:01.056 --> 00:15:04.258
and allows kids to get there
and get the experience

00:15:04.258 --> 00:15:06.324
of having another language
and being able to do

00:15:06.324 --> 00:15:08.395
useful, fun things with it.

00:15:08.395 --> 00:15:11.737
And that's why we do it.

00:15:11.737 --> 00:15:15.772
So: Esperanto? In curriculum time?
In state schools?

00:15:15.772 --> 00:15:18.668
Yeah, really! It's happening as we speak,

00:15:18.668 --> 00:15:21.919
with lessons delivered by
Esperanto specialists like me,

00:15:21.919 --> 00:15:27.185
but also, critically, by class teachers
with no prior knowledge of Esperanto,

00:15:27.185 --> 00:15:30.236
who can also pick up the language
remarkably quickly

00:15:30.236 --> 00:15:34.590
and go ahead and teach it,
so it eliminates

00:15:34.590 --> 00:15:36.235
the staffing issue at a stroke.

00:15:36.235 --> 00:15:38.989
I was slightly embarrassed
the first time I discovered this,

00:15:38.989 --> 00:15:42.185
but a class who'd been studying for a year
with their class teacher

00:15:42.185 --> 00:15:45.097
whom I had taught
a minimum of Esperanto to,

00:15:45.097 --> 00:15:47.852
the kids actually spoke
far better Esperanto

00:15:47.852 --> 00:15:49.705
than the ones that
I'd been teaching for a year.

00:15:49.705 --> 00:15:51.868
So what's going on here?

00:15:51.868 --> 00:15:57.202
Actually, it's obvious: I only go
into the school for 45 minutes a week.

00:15:57.202 --> 00:15:59.986
I do as much as I can in that time,
but that's it.

00:15:59.986 --> 00:16:01.835
The class teacher is with them
all the time,

00:16:01.835 --> 00:16:04.468
so bits of Esperanto get drip-fed
into everything they do.

00:16:04.468 --> 00:16:07.004
It's in the maths classroom,
it's in the English classroom,

00:16:07.004 --> 00:16:09.404
it's in the register,
it's all the time.

00:16:09.404 --> 00:16:13.360
And so those kids got
a huge amount more out of it

00:16:13.360 --> 00:16:17.868
once the class teacher had taken over

00:16:17.868 --> 00:16:21.047
than their predecessors had done from me.

00:16:21.047 --> 00:16:24.599
So that's what we do.
It works phenomenally well,

00:16:24.599 --> 00:16:28.625
and I'm pleased and proud
to be part of it. Thank you.

00:16:28.625 --> 00:16:30.525
(Applause)