 And I taught English in South Korea, Spain and also in Ireland. So I'm actually going to draw on that experience and my experience is teaching in those environments but also learning those languages, not terribly well, but giving it a go to actually learn those languages and how being a speaker of another language can actually be beneficial for you in the class and how it can help you deal with people problems that your students have regarding grammar and vocabulary and how you can help your students predict those problems. So just first, can I get your hands who can actually speak a language that isn't English and that is Irish. Peter, what do you speak? Spanish. Spanish, very well, isn't it good? Very well, yeah. Somebody else, sorry, can I get a non-span, anyone not speak Spanish? French. French, anybody else? Russian and German. Russian and German, okay, very good. And do you find, just out of curiosity, do you use it in the classroom? Yeah, exactly. Do you use it or French in the classroom? Yeah, a little bit, I don't even have my knowledge to understand why the French students make German mistakes. I often draw parallels. Oh, that's just like in German, that's what it's like. Do you use it, is it the same as in English? You'd actually use some German words in the class and actually write and learn German. Good structures, yeah, I would say like this is... I'll just show that. Would you have done that in Spanish, Peter? Yeah, but I wouldn't use this construction, I'd say. So is that similar to how it is in your language? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, actually it is, that's why I'm telling you that thing, and it clips from there. Sometimes they make mistake in English, but then you say, well, in German it's just exactly the same. And they're like, oh, that's true. Yeah, you're great, you get a eureka moment there. Or if you say, well, you say it like this, we say it like this. And you think, okay, yeah, I wish somebody explained that to me before. So anyway, there's a ton of languages in the world. And if you don't speak, obviously, yes, thankfully, we would have a job. And if you don't speak one that's not English, then you will have a problem communicating with somebody who doesn't speak your language. So obviously being able to communicate with people is extremely important. It's what we know makes us different from animals. And it's obviously essential both to our jobs and to our ability to communicate. So the first thing is that some languages have things that are universal, right? There are things that exist in every single language regardless of if it's Latin or if it's Sanskrit origin or any kind of origin. Some languages have the exact same things. All languages are subjects. All languages are verbs. All languages have some way of expressing cause and effect. All languages deal with motion and trajectory and path in some kind of way. All languages talk about the manner in which you do something quickly, slowly, something like that, or if you jump, swim as opposed to walk or flight. And every language has some way of hypothesizing, imagining, some level of abstraction and metaphor. So two things that I'm going to focus on are this one, motion, path and manner. And I'm going to do that by drawing on, by making comparison between English and Spanish. So hopefully by the end of my talk I will have convinced you if you don't speak another language that it is actually really beneficial for you to learn the fundamentals of another language and how that can actually form part of a very useful, robust curriculum, a CPD. It's continuous professional development. So those are, that's what I'd like, what I would like to get this language learning as a teacher is a very good thing. So what I'd like to do is first just think of a very, a class, an elementary level class. And imagine your students are reading the textbook and they encounter lines such as, the teacher walked out of the classroom. Now that seems quite simple. Quite seems like something that's very manageable even for an elementary level student. So let's just look at the different components in the sentence. The teacher, one of the first things they probably learned, it's basic now. Walk, very basic verb. Again, begin a level, then certainly learn that word. Out of, again out, it's an adverb. It's also preposition, but here it's functioning as an adverb and it's very, it's again very common. They'll get that in a beginner level and it shows path and trajectory in the classroom. Another very basic noun. So if you're a teacher, a wager, the most difficult thing about teaching that sentence will be the grammar, either the word order or the form of the past symbol. If you were to look at it and say, okay, what are the students going to have issue with here? And so I just want to look at that sentence a little bit closer again and actually draw your attention to an issue, something that really isn't dealt with very much in, certainly in the text of books. And certainly when I did my self-decoration, it wasn't, it's not the curriculum you might be able to correct me here, Julie. But let's just look at what we have. Look at the verb, walked. So what does that verb give us? The verb gives us the manner in which something is done. Right? Now look at the adverb, out. Out conveys path. It conveys trajectory. So you can, the teacher can walk up, down, in, out, over, across, under, around. In this case we have path, we have out. So let's just imagine how we would say that in Spanish and you might correct my poor Spanish here if this is correct. So you have the Spanish for this el profesor salera clase. And what you have here is the verb. So this is, the Spanish follows the same. It's a subject verb object language. We have the, we have the subject and then we have the verb. But the verb doesn't give us manner the way it gives us manner in English. The verb will give us, the verb, the verb es salera and it gives us, the verb is to exit. So what you get is the teacher exited the class and you get no mention at all of, I don't know if you can see that. Sorry, no indication of manner. The teacher walked, run, jump, skip, dance. We don't know. So that's, it's a very important difference. And we'll see why here. So imagine another situation. Okay, you have a bird. A bird, that's a gif, it's supposed to be flapping and it's not. So in English we would say something. Imagine you say the bird flew down from out of the hole in the tree. We can imagine, if you said that in English exactly, you can imagine, you can imagine what that, that's an easy enough thing to imagine. But for a Spanish speaker, it's almost impossible to, to just, not really possible, but to actually translate that, it's very, very different. Spanish person would say something like, they would focus on first the exit. The bird exited the tree and descended. The bird exited the tree and fell or went down. Okay, and let's just look at those two sentences again. So the bird flew down from out of a hole in the tree, and the bird exited the tree and descended. But we've not mentioned a fly. Now why don't we have a mention of fly? Well, you don't think, well, why, why would you mention fly? What else is a bird going to do, a bird fly? The bird isn't going to, it's going to drive out of the tree. What else is a, is a teacher going to do? A teacher's walk out of rooms. Run, run, yeah. Run crying as well. So birds fly and humans walk, and so it really kind of shows us how superfluous some of the language is in English. Why would you say the bird flew down? Obviously birds fly down, people walk out. And so this is one of the things that Latin people, students whose languages are derived from Latin and have a problem. Portuguese, Italians, Spanish, sometimes French as well. And you very often, you get production like, oh, I back to my class. Because they're putting the focus on the, on the direction. And for them, well, I, yeah, I walked back. Obviously I walked back. Or I went back. Obviously that's for them. It's not, it's not necessary to give you that information. It should be coded already. It's up to the listener to, to determine that, or just to assume that it was fly or it was walk. So, what's the point? Is that allowed for people in the school? So let's just have a look at some example sentences in English. You would say the girl ran home. And in Spanish, it would basically have a one-to-one mapping of the exact same information. You would say the girl ran fast. And in Spanish again, you basically have a one-to-one mapping of the same information. Syntactically, semantically, same thing. The girl ran in a race, same thing. So we, you can see, okay, this is the verb to run. This is the verb to run, verb to run. And this is, so it's useful to know because this is, and so this is much easier for students to get. Because all we're talking about here is manner. But the problem arises is when you have motion path and manner together in the same sentence. Now it's a different kind of fish. Now it's more complex. And Spanish speakers will produce something different. For example, imagine you say the girl ran and the girl ran up the stairs. And now we have run, which is our manner. Up is the direction, is the trajectory. A Spanish speaker would say something like this. Now what do we have? Now the up is represented in the verb. And that gives us the path. The manner, the run, is represented by a particle that comes later on in the sentence. And that gives us the manner. And so this is, this is something that you will see again, time and time and time again when you represent motion and manner in Spanish sentences. And you will, if you really listen to your, you're presenting in Portuguese Spanish students, they will say this thing. I went out running. I came in, I went out running, I came in running. Am I okay for time? So if you look, what all these words have in common? It's all to do with walking, right? Now can I know what's the difference between say, to saunter and to stroll? Saunter is sassy. Saunter is sassy. You have, okay, I just, I just did something good. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. What about to trounce and to trudge? If you trounced across a field and you trouched across a field. Trounced across a field. Trounced across a field. So this is awfully problematic as well because this is where English is so weird, right? This is where English, why do we have so many words that code for just a tiny little difference in the matter? But we, like, you know, there are still quite common. This is still the way, like you trance, you know, you're annoyed, like you storm out, you trance in, you trance through the town or whatever. So, you call it trance through the town. Leo's trance through town. So, a Spanish speaker would just say, would you say, I went, you know, with big steps, or if you sauntered into the room they would say, I entered the room confidently. Or I entered the room having, feeling good after having completed something difficult or something like that. There will be, there will be some sort of a compliment or a verb pattern or something like that might be a particle that codes for that. And that's something it's good to keep that in mind, right? It's really useful information in the class if you know that. So what I want to get at is don't be afraid of students L1 production in the class. I think it's, you should kind of, yeah, don't be afraid of it. I think you should enhance it. And just exactly like what Peter was saying, the question I always ask my students is, okay, how do you say that in your language? Especially if it is something that relates into, like these things that are the linguistic universes, cause and effect, imagining, hypothesizing metaphors. It's naturally for us to say, I got into trouble or I fell in love or something like that. But why do you think about it for a second? Why do you fall and why is it in? Why don't you fall in love? And other languages might not share those metaphors but we just think that they're natural. Yeah, of course you fall in love. Of course you get over a breakup. Why don't you, or you get over a cold? Why not just get around a cold? I'm having trouble getting around this cold for us to see things are natural, but it might be represented that way in a student's language. So particularly with metaphors and things of directed motion, it's always useful to get some feedback from the students as to why they say those things. So basically, is that what I'm doing? It's skeptical. So basically, no, definitely not. Obviously not. But we do get training. Right? Colour? Wow. Professional development. There you go. What we have is that we get trained. Okay, so part of our robust CPD curriculum should be some sort of training in the fundamentals of the most widely spoken languages, or at least the language profile of most of the students that come to our schools. And really, for languages that are from the same language family, so Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, will have the same issues. And once you're armed with that information, it really gives you a predictive tool. You can give much more on-the-spot, individualistic feedback to your students. If you know that in Japanese and Korean, it's not common to... You don't have to express the subject or the object unless it's absolutely necessary. And if you notice that your Japanese and Korean students are dropping subjects, dropping objects, you could just... You don't have to say it in front of the whole class in case some students feel that you're being... you're giving preferential treatment to some of the students, but you could just take them aside or just give them some one-to-one feedback and say, this is the way your language is like this, English is like this. And again, you might have some of those Eureka moments where it's, okay, great. And it also encourages students to be more mindful. It does. One of the things I'm constantly at my students is to try to observe, but don't just open your mouth and say a lot of words. You know, just don't... just think about what you're saying. Think about... Think about what are the mistakes you constantly make? What is this situation? Are you talking... Are you representing something that's happening in the present, the past, the future, whatever it is? And try to be mindful about their production. It makes... I think it makes you a better teacher and it actually makes you a bit more empathetic. It really does. I would absolutely put my hand up to my own shame. I am one of those teachers that once has made fun of their students in the staff room for saying something silly. The only one. You have neither me nor you. But it does make you a bit more empathetic. It does make you... When you're in that position of having to... being forced to understand those rules, you may be less likely to go to the classroom and then say, you know, to be... to... To be a bit more understanding is students don't automatically get something. They don't automatically get defining relative clauses of the third condition. You might say, well, okay, it's actually kind of hard because I've been on the receiving end of the instruction.