Language Learning; Assumptions and Imagination.

While learning Kope, I am organising my own daily language classes. In these approximately hour long sessions, I use a variety of approaches, but one of my main tools is pictures. I have a collection of old calendars from PNG, as well as series of pictures that make up a story, and sketches of life in PNG. Using these pictures we describe things, ask questions and tell stories. Along the way, I have discovered that my imagination and assumptions work differently to women I am sitting with and learning from.

One picture I intended to use to learn the phrase for ‘The boy is reading’. I got many phrases, but not that one. The boy was lying on the mat, the boy was looking at the camera, the boy was holding the book, the boy was looking at the pictures (of which there were none) and the boy wanted to read, but at no point was the boy reading. I was both frustrated and fascinated by our different assumptions. My teacher thought the boy was too young to read, so would not describe him as reading. He was also clearly looking at the camera, not at the book, so couldn’t be reading.

Reading? From SIL PNG 2014 calendar, June.
Photo by Catherine McGuckin.

Another time, I had been learning the many ways to say ‘go’, depending on who was going and when. I then wanted to switch to saying come, but hit a road block, because whenever I wanted to elicit the phrase for ‘we will come from X’, I was told that we had not gone there. After that I got extra practice with the phrases for going, as first we had to go before we could come. I was being abstract in my approach to language, but they were being much more concrete.

 A tiny picture of a frog chasing a snake
chasing a gecko that was the basis of a
fun story we made up.

I have been using a number of picture books to learn how to tell stories. The first time I gave the book to someone and asked them to tell a story, but they quickly got stuck. The next time I stumbled my way through the book, being corrected every second word, then asked them to tell the story. Most people would tell the story very much how I told it. Only one or two people would add their own colour to the tale. I wonder if this reflects a culture which values being able to remember and retell traditional tales more than it does being able to create new ones.

Pictures are a wonderful tool for language learning, but they still require common assumptions for the learning process to work.