An interesting point emerged in a recent training session on Scots. We all know that not every learner has Scots at his or her disposal: we largely have a mixture of speakers and learners of the language in our classes. This is complicated, of course, by the prevalence of Scottish Standard English, a dialect of both languages and widely spoken by both those who think they are code switching entirely to English as well as those who believe they speak not a word of Scots.
Generally speaking, Scots learners are not disadvantaged in any way by lessons in Scots. Practitioners report recent immigrants to the country or area who cope very well with Scots lessons. The cultural capital to be gained by learning Scots makes them eager to acquire the language and they are no worse off than natives who do not speak the leid at all. Non-speakers do have to work harder to understand content. But that does mean that the learning will be deeper and better processed as a result. And those with Scots as a mither tongue habitually experience this difficulty in lessons in English. The bottom line is Scots and English are sister languages and with a willingness to understand and be understood on the part of the listener and the speaker, communication is easily achieved.
And that brings me to the interesting point I mentioned. Listeners can be willing to understand on different levels. Enter the bright, high achieving learners who professed to understand not a word of the Scots text they were being taught as part of their English exam course. These are not badly-behaved or obstructive pupils. They want to do well and to please the teacher. But having been brought up not to use Scots, they firmly believe that they cannot understand the language when it is used by others.
These learners should be able to understand a text being taught to them at the appropriate level, by a well-informed, highly motivated professional. They have grown up in Scotland, no doubt using ‘wee’ and ‘dreich’ and ‘go to my bed’ like other speakers of Scottish Standard English. But they are not being difficult when they say they cannot understand a word.
The teacher I was discussing this with took the reasonable steps of scaffolding the learning further: offering greater support to the class, so that these learners were not left behind. She realised that if she could teach them to cope with this text, they would be learning valuable lessons about how to learn which would stand them in good stead for the rest of their lives. At the end of the day, we suspected that the pupils would thole the experience without enjoyment and never really engage with the text. They would ‘jump through the hoops’ in order to pass their exams but fail to manage to clear the hurdle of how to decode Scots.
At this point I turned to Modern Languages colleagues. As an English teacher, I am used to helping pupils cope with difficult vocabulary. Read around the word and work out its meaning from the context. ‘Blank’ the word out to make it easier to decide what kind of word you are looking at and what its possible meanings could be. Think about other words like the one you are having difficulty with. Decoding one difficult word in a piece of English text is detective work we English teachers are used to encouraging. But this was more than one word. This was an entire text causing difficulty, something I suspected Modern Language teachers would have more experience in dealing with. After all, in English, if the text is too hard, we find an easier text.
Helpfully, I was answered with the following reading comprehension ‘attacks’:
- Have learners underline the words they do know/can guess/are cognates – do this individually at first, then with a partner – share findings with a partner and translate into English. This, of course, will dispel the belief that ‘I don’t understand a word’. Scots shares too much vocabulary with English for this ever to be the case for anyone with a reasonable facility for English. I would be tempted to put confident speakers together and let less confident learners work together too for this, to avoid the risk of the speaker doing all the work and the learner remaining as disillusioned as ever.
- If text is long, as in this case, give each group a section each to do as above and piece the text together across the class. This makes the learning more co-operative, is more time efficient and means you could give longer or more difficult sections to those more likely to cope, by way of differentiation.
- Type out the text sentence by sentence, photocopy, cut up the sentences and mix them up. Give those out to groups to see if they can put the whole text back together again. Make this task time limited, make it into a competition. This will allow learners to see that they have a sense of the meaning, without necessarily understanding every word.
- Have learners highlight the Scots that means … e.g. ‘fed up’ ( if ‘scunnered’ is in the text). This turns the exercise on its head and will encourage learners to acknowledge what they do know, but were afraid to guess. Depending on the text and the learners, this could be done as a multiple choice, with incorrect alternatives to ‘scunnered’ being offered, as well as the correct answer.
- Have learners translate sentences / words into English. They read them out in random order and you award points for the first person to find and read out the Scots equivalent from the text. Again, the competitive element will make this fun for many learners. And the learners themselves are generating the ‘worksheet’ for time-strapped teachers.
- Ask learners to use the new vocabulary in three or five new sentences, including as much additional Scots as possible in each sentence. This will increase learners’ confidence that they have truly mastered the new words and test the degree to which they have.
Now, why didn’t I think of that? Because I did not approach the problem in the right way. I am an English teacher: how do I help pupils understand English? But they do, apart from the odd word, and my strategies for dealing with that won’t work here. But, you know, we do not always ‘find an easier text’ as I so glibly asserted earlier. My favourite thing to teach in English is and I imagine always will be Shakespeare. And I have successfully taught him to learners from 11 to 18 across all ability levels. That is why the above list sounded so familiar: these are the things I regularly do to help learners access difficult text in English. The only strategies I would add to this are:
- Make sure the learners are familiar with the story and/or characters and/or themes before you begin. Enter my Hamlet finger puppet show or my Merchant of Venice ‘consequences’ introductory extravaganza. If they know what the text should mean and where things are generally headed, they tend not to worry so much about understanding every single word or phrase.
- Use recordings of confident readers wherever possible. I have given up torturing everyone by making adolescents plough through complicated soliloquies without understanding a word of what they are reading or communicating any meaning to the rest of the class. The BBC has done most of the plays infinitely better.
- Use film version(s) to reinforce understanding of/engagement with the text. It is not simply a case of watching the film after you have read the text. It is rarely a case of watching the film before you read the text. But using the film alongside a written text can be very helpful.
Now, bullet points two and three are easier for Shakespeare than for most Scots texts. But that is changing. And it doesn’t make the theory any less correct.
So, teaching Scots is not straightforward. What in life that is worth doing is? Asking ourselves what we do in English in a similar situation, can be helpful. Sharing with colleagues who are more used to dealing with language learners pays dividends too. Perhaps the biggest challenge is in allowing everyone, learners, parents and ourselves, to understand that the difficulties are worth overcoming and that lessons learned can be applied to learning as a whole.
I would be very interested to hear your views.