I have never felt that talented when it comes to learning language. I took Spanish in Middle School, and then in High School for a year and a half, before I switched to Latin which I took for two years. I never progressed beyond a point of feeling like a beginner, and I always struggled to memorize vocabulary. I have no problem remembering all kinds of random things in English, but when it comes to words in foreign languages I struggle. So, it is interesting to not only be working on learning more Swahili, but also trying to teach English to students who have an even more limited English vocabulary than my Swahili vocabulary.
This semester I have begun teaching Form I English (the rough equivalent of High School freshman). While they all technically took English as a subject class in primary school, most of them had English teachers that did not actually teach them any English. So, most of my Form I students have come into Secondary School (where English is the medium of instruction) with next to no English knowledge. To make up for the extremely poor or non-existent English classes that the students were supposed to take in Primary school, these Form I students begin with a six week “Baseline” crash course in Swahili. I am teaching this course.
I was really excited to teach this course, because I thought that it would give me an opportunity to teach students at an appropriate level. Many of my students last quarter in Form II, III, and IV, had such a limited knowledge of English (as a result of limited and, or, poor instruction) that they really needed to be working on the basics, even though the syllabus called for more advanced instruction. So, I thought that starting at the beginning would be a fantastic way to help these students get ahead of the game, and enable them to be successful in a school system where every exam they take (save the Swahili subject) will be in English.
I came into it expecting it to be difficult, but I didn’t anticipate just how difficult. In school, despite my struggles learning vocabulary, I was always able to muddle through grammar, and when I had all the information in front of me I could complete most assignments easily enough. That is not true for most of my students here. Many of them have never been taught how to learn, so it is a struggle teaching anything beyond the basic question and response. While I am slowly making progress, it is an uphill battle, and every day I am reminded how hard it was for me to learn Spanish in High School, and how it must be even harder for my students to learn English.
Even living in a Swahili speaking country I am struggling to continue to develop my Swahili vocabulary. Though I don’t have the benefit of a fantastic teacher to help me along the way (if I can permit myself a bit of self-flattery), most of my interactions outside of school take place in Swahili. My survival Swahili is fantastic, but bridging the gap between my functional Swahili, and being genuinely conversational is truly difficult, especially when I spend a large portion of every day speaking English in school. In the end, it’s a vocabulary problem, not all that dissimilar from the ones that my Tanzanian students are dealing with. In fact, when I consider the English ability of some of my more advanced Form IV students, I cannot help but to be amazed, for they almost never have the opportunity to speak in English, and much of their “English only instruction” is in Swahili, yet they are able to carry on a conversation with me that I am nowhere being able to carry out with them in Swahili.