Good Practice

Video Transcript

Teacher: When you have been learning your home or mother-language/mother-tongues, were you ever embarrassed by using the language in front of, for example, mainly English speakers? Did you ever feel unenthusiastic about it?

Student: I learnt English when I came here, so I’d been learning Hungarian for four years by the time I got to England, but because after that I went to an English school, my Hungarian never got any better than that of a middle age child – like a child of eight or something. So I wasn't embarrassed about using it in front of other English people if they didn't understand it, but especially around my family, I tended to use English more just because it became easier to me. Even though I learnt Hungarian first, it was just because I used English more, so my Hungarian it didn't get better after a certain stage. My parents wanted me to speak Hungarian but they never pushed me into it because they always knew all the important school stuff had to be in English anyway.

Student: I started learning Chinese before I learnt English because my parents spoke it at home. But then, because I lived in England and most of my friends spoke English rather than Cantonese, I started speaking English at home, and I found that eventually I lost my ability to speak Cantonese fluently.

Student: I feel the opposite to what they’ve just said, where they feel uncomfortable speaking to people in their second language. I feel fine talking French to people in France and my family, but I hate it when people say ‘Oh you're French, say something in French, say something in French’. It’s really really bad; it just makes you want to say ‘no, I’m never going to speak it again’.

Teacher: So you don’t want to be picked out do you?

Student (continued): No

Teacher: OK, anybody else?

Student: I moved over to England and my parents tried to use it as a tool to practice their English, so I wasn't able to practice the Tamil. I understand what they’re saying, but when you think about accent and grammatical issues, it was difficult to learn that as you where being used as a tool at times to improve on their English.

Teacher: There’s been a lot of talk in education recently about the importance of role models to people from different communities, so my question here is: were there role models in your community that where particularly important to you in your educational journey so far – you know, it may be a brother or sister, it might be neighbours, godparents, older pupils, anyone in your community. Would anyone like to contribute on that area?

Student: The main role model for me was of course my family, because both of my parents graduated university, so did most relatives around me. And also it was to do with the Japanese community, they were generally more competitive against each other, so I was not forced, but encouraged to work harder; encouraged to do more work; and encouraged to learn the language more.

Student: Personally there weren’t any role models for me within the Turkish community, especially not that I knew of. And so my family always put an emphasis on that I must be successful, that I must get an education and stuff like that, because they knew that there weren’t any particular role models that I was aware of. So they put emphasis on me working hard, myself.

Teacher: So that you could then be a role model for others?

Student (continued): Yes, exactly.

Student: For me, a bit of a role model was always my mum, because she was the first person in her family to go to university and she came over to England to study, and she’s always told me how useful French was in her job. So she encouraged me to speak French at home and develop that part.

Student: My parents did languages and social sciences at university, so I always knew that I wanted to go to university, so they where sort of role models in that sense. But I also saw that what they did didn’t really lead them to anything, so it kind of drove me away from the languages and more towards science instead. So they were role models but in a slightly different sense.

Student: My language learning’s always been tied to my religion, and I found that the community leader, my Rabbi, in my community, was a very inspiring figure and he’s someone who is very well educated – sort of secularly and also very well educated religiously – and I always found him a role model for keeping up my religious side.

Teacher: So to what extent do you generally feel that the religious tradition of your language means that you associate it with an spiritual side?

Student: When I was young, my parents were very keen to interlink both the religious side and the language side of the Bengali culture with the religion. However as I have grown up, I’ve kind of seen that they are interlinked but they’re also very separate, and I have to approach them in a different way, because a lot of the traditions that people associate with Bengali culture aren’t necessarily the religion and people always confuse the two. So I’m very keen now to approach the spiritual side individually and just on its own rather than interlinking the two.

Student: I always find that, because prayer is in the language of the religion, that gives you more of a reason to learn it and to continue learning it, because being able to understand the prayers better and to be able to make more meaning from what you’re praying is very important. It’s a very good drive to keep trying to understand.
Student: My mother was originally Hindu, and with her religion, she found that it was so much to take in, there were so many aspects about the different gods, and she found it difficult to take religion as a whole and she just got a part of it. So it was kind of more of a social thing for her.