Springboard to Languages: Tim Morley at TEDxGranta

Previously a computer programmer, Tim Morley is now a teacher of English and French. He is pioneering an innovative programme for introducing young children to foreign language awareness using the constructed language of Esperanto.

Good morning. My name's Tim Morley,

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

somewhat different way of introducing

primary school kids to
learning foreign languages.

Now, a lot of primary schools in the UK

now have foreign languages
on the curriculum, which is fantastic

but there's a skills gap:

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

fantastically effective,
motivated, trained, super,

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

let alone have any training
in how to teach one.

On the other hand, we have lots of

secondary school
modern foreign language teachers,

who do a super job with a GCSE class,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

healthy skepticism
on behalf of some of the parents.

"You're teaching what to my child?"

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

All perfectly justifiable questions
which I will attempt to answer.

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

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

as fluent Esperanto speakers to use

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

That's not the point.

Most of the children, the vast majority,

will probably never meet another
Esperanto speaker in their lives.

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

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

Key thing: language awareness.

Esperanto is a very much simpler language

than any other that I've ever come across

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

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

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

than any other language I've seen.

And so the kids quickly get past the stage

where they just have to remember stuff,

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

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

in having two languages in your head

and switching between the two
and finding equivalences between them.

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

and then all those skills
can be carried on

to study other languages afterwards.

It's a successful, inclusive experience.

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

a much higher percentage of that class

will be capable of getting
their heads round Esperanto

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

And, I dare say, a successful
inclusive experience.

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

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

and I should say,
academic assessment as well,

suggest that this is good. It works.

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

which underpins a lot of
curriculum planning.

We start at the bottom
and work towards the top.

There's a danger with primary school
language teaching

of getting stuck at the bottom.

It involves lots of remembering,
lots of memorising

of conjugations,
of masculine and feminine nouns,

of spelling, of pronunciation —

there's lots of memorisation
that needs to be done

before you can get on to
the higher order skills.

In many language classrooms
in primary schools,

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

we kind of get stuck at the bottom,

and we never get on to the creative stuff,

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

Esperanto minimises the memorisation
that's necessary

and we quickly get up to the higher order,

more interesting and exciting skills.

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

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

but who discovered that
they were capable of reading

by reading Esperanto.
It was so much easier,

and that gave them the confidence boost
that they needed

to get on with the English.

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

"Circle the adjective in this sentence,"

the first thing they do is to translate

the sentence into Esperanto in their head,

because adjectives are much easier
to spot in Esperanto.

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

And even numeracy,
the way numbers are verbalised

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

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

and tens and units, it's really helpful.

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

So Esperanto brings all of this
to the classroom.

Almost as a side-effect, it can also bring

contact with foreign cultures

— obviously a major motivator for
learning foreign languages —

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

between British classrooms

and classrooms in Slovenia,
in Hungary, in Germany.

There are a number of Comenius projects —

Comenius is the name of the grants given

by the European Commission
to primary schools

to establish links with
other schools across Europe —

there have been a number of
Comenius projects

where Esperanto is used
as an inter-language

between the children, and the adults too.

So Esperanto brings all of this
to the classroom.

Now, an analogy.
How not to get there.

This guy is a bassoon player.

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

maybe even earns a living from it.

I would suggest that if
you wanted your child

to become a professional bassoon player,

the best way to get there is not

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

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

It's not going to work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I don't want to do music."

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

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

I certainly did.

Yes, that's just about everybody.

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

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

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

So is this some massive failure
of primary school policy?

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

Of course, that's not the point.

By learning the recorder,
we learn about music.

We learn major keys and minor keys.

We start to read music.

You learn about rhythm
and time signatures,

keeping time with others, and harmonies.

All of that musical knowledge goes in
through the simple instrument

and then it can be applied to the bassoon

or the pipe organ or
whatever you want to play.

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

Spanish in the classroom is a bassoon.

Chinese is an extra large bassoon
with added tones!

(Laughter)

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

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

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

and then stand here and read it to you.

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

and it quickly gets dull.

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

and I am about to read it to you.

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

It's a quick snippet from a report

by the University of Manchester's
School of Education

who've been evaluating the
Springboard to Languages project

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

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

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

and they'd just started the Esperanto.

They did a French test, and this happened.

"Does Springboard help
to learn other languages?"

"Pupils were invited to decode
the French sentence:

(French) "Elephant's ears are very large

and the nose is very long."

And they observed: "The only children

to successfully translate
the whole sentence

were, interestingly, from school A -

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

in their lives -

"These two children used
interesting metalinguistic

decoding strategies -
cognates, punctuation, context.

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

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

performed only marginally better
than School A children

in a test of French."

So the skills that the kids
had got from Esperanto

helped them to almost catch up
in a French test

with kids who had been learning French.

So, what's so special about Esperanto?

Why is it so good at this?

I'll give you a few quick examples.

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

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

six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

That much, you have to memorise, OK.

But once you've memorised that,

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

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

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

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

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

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

all the way up to 99.

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

actually they translate
the number into Esperanto,

I've seen this happen in the classroom,

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

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

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

So by translating the number
into Esperanto

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

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

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

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

And again, this illustrates
the minimisation

of things to memorise —

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

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

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

There's no separate word to learn.

"Instruisto" is a teacher,
and if the teacher

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

you can call her an "instruistino".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and I can't immediately recall
the French word

for "a baby rabbit".

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

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

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

Now, "kontenta" means "happy",

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

so it's "unhappy".

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

is the normal Esperanto word for "small".

There's no separate word to learn.

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

We've literally halved the number
of words to memorise

with the single prefix "mal-".

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

but these principles extend
throughout the whole thing.

I've found that learning French
and other languages

is an additive process —
I find a new word,

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

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

Learning Esperanto is multiplicative.

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

with everything I've got already,

so I don't just get one word,

I get a whole new frontier
of expressive capacity.

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

and so we quickly get to the stage
where they can

creatively use the language,
rather than just

repeating vocabulary
and memorised sentences.

Far more interesting stuff.

Here's a case in point: I got heckled

by an 8-year-old,
in grammatically perfect Esperanto,

about 3 months into a course.

We were doing an activity
where I give an instruction,

the children follow the instruction,
and tell me what they're doing.

So I give an imperative verb,
and they use a present tense verb.

So I say "Staru!" and they all stand up
and say, "Mi staras!"

I say "Sidu!" and they sit down
and say, "Mi sidas!"

I say "Saltu!" and
they go "Mi saltas! Mi saltas!"

So I said, "OK, silentu!"

And the whole class said, "Mi silentas!"

apart from little Johnny who shouted out,
"Mi ne silentas!"

But now I've got a dilemma:

do I tell him off,
or do I give him a gold star?

Because he has just made
the whole class laugh

with a grammatically perfect utterance
in the target language.

From a language teacher's point of view,

that's a dream come true.
That's what we're aiming at!

So I put on my best "mock annoyed" face
and said: "Vi! Silentu!"

and he said, "OK, mi silentas!"

But that has never happened
in any of my French lessons.

Now that's not because I don't
enjoy teaching French — I do.

And it's not because the kids don't
enjoy learning it — I believe they do.

It's just that there's so much
that needs memorising

and practising before that can
even become possible in French

— or Spanish, or German,
or other languages —

that it doesn't happen
until years down the line,

and by that stage, unfortunately,
lots of kids have lost interest

and have got the impression that
they're no good at languages

because they can't say anything.

It's not their fault,
and it's not the teacher's fault,

it's just really really hard
to get to the stage

where you can creatively
use a new language.

Esperanto shortcuts
an enormous amount of that

and allows kids to get there
and get the experience

of having another language
and being able to do

useful, fun things with it.

And that's why we do it.

So: Esperanto? In curriculum time?
In state schools?

Yeah, really! It's happening as we speak,

with lessons delivered by
Esperanto specialists like me,

but also, critically, by class teachers
with no prior knowledge of Esperanto,

who can also pick up the language
remarkably quickly

and go ahead and teach it,
so it eliminates

the staffing issue at a stroke.

I was slightly embarrassed
the first time I discovered this,

but a class who'd been studying for a year
with their class teacher

whom I had taught
a minimum of Esperanto to,

the kids actually spoke
far better Esperanto

than the ones that
I'd been teaching for a year.

So what's going on here?

Actually, it's obvious: I only go
into the school for 45 minutes a week.

I do as much as I can in that time,
but that's it.

The class teacher is with them
all the time,

so bits of Esperanto get drip-fed
into everything they do.

It's in the maths classroom,
it's in the English classroom,

it's in the register,
it's all the time.

And so those kids got
a huge amount more out of it

once the class teacher had taken over

than their predecessors had done from me.

So that's what we do.
It works phenomenally well,

and I'm pleased and proud
to be part of it. Thank you.

(Applause)