French Lessons : A Memoir

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Summary: Insight into 2nd Language Acquisition
Review: Alice Kaplan's autobiography provides some insightful data into the factors involved in second-language acquisition. Internal factors such as motivation and external factors such as the environment seem to have an important role within the process of acquiring the target language. Further, Kaplan's story reveals a methodology of instruction that she was exposed to as a child. We then are able to see the success of this approach to language teaching and able to compare it to a methodology that she incorporates later in life when she begins to teach French herself.

The role of motivation appears to play a significant role in Kaplan's acquisition of French. Yet an important question is raised by Lightbown and Spada, "...are learners more highly motivated because they are successful, or are they successful because they are highly motivated?" Kaplan's first years with French begin in the fifth grade where she seems more interested in playing pranks than schoolwork. Four years later the opportunity to study in Switzerland arises and it seems likely that the excitement that accompanied the move was what initially sparked her interest and consequential motivation in studying French.

Once in Switzerland, Kaplan seems almost obsessive in her studies, substituting physical nourishment for a philological diet, "I grew thinner and thinner. I ate French." This intense desire to learn French seems to stem from her search for a new identity. The loss of her father seems to have left a void, which she fills through her study of French. She compares herself to her past, "At home I was the worst in sports; here, miraculously, I was good. It felt like my life had been given to me to start over."3 It is this new life and new identity that fuels her desire to absorb her target language.

The environment in which language acquisition takes place is, in my estimation, probably the most influential factor in successful learning and retaining of the target language. The obvious benefit is the amount of time the native environment provides the learner to use the language. Numerous other factors involved in the process of acquiring a second language seem to be contingent upon the environment in which those factors are operating. For instance, motivation has been considered a factor that plays a role in learning a second language. From my experience, I was much more motivated learning Polish in its natural environment rather than being limited to the classroom setting three hours a week. In addition to the excitement of being abroad in a foreign country, I was always eager to be able to apply the knowledge gained in the classroom through real world experience. The natural environment seems to make the acquisition of a second language practical, rather than a theoretical knowledge used only in an academic setting.

Further, being immersed in the natural environment also seems to decrease one's inhibition with the target language. When Kaplan arrives in Switzerland, she soon realizes that French is required in everyday functions. In the classroom one might be more self-conscious, whereas in the environment, one's concern is likely more on using the language to achieve a practical goal. This appears to be an important point given the effect inhibition has on acquisition, "In a series of studies, Alexander Guiora and his colleagues found support for the claim that inhibition is a negative force, at least for second language pronunciation performance."

Kaplan's early years of study in Switzerland had heavy emphasis on dictation and memorization. This was the typical approach to language instruction; to teach it as you would any other subject. It is this approach that Kaplan excelled in, "Don't be original, learn from a ready-made reality ready-to-hand." One interesting approach that she spent a year with while a student in Switzerland was the lecon de choses; a method in which the student draws objects and then labels them. This method appeals to me because it incorporates other motor and cognitive skills that may lead one to acquire lexical items unconsciously. Further, this approach seems a lot more enjoyable than rote memorization and thus may increase the student's motivation with the language while decreasing boredom and consequential discouragement, "Dictation can ruin a child's relationship to language."

Once Kaplan becomes a language instructor she relies upon the Carpretz method, a tradition that fully immerses the student and then forces them to "sink or swim". The Carpretz method incorporates the visual stimulation of an on-going television sitcom in the target language. English is not spoken and there are no exercises in translation. Grammar and vocabulary are integrated into the plot of the story. "The Carpretz method reproduces the conditions by which a student on her junior year abroad might learn French language and culture..." Kaplan asserts that this method is very successful in the classroom and that her extroverted students did so well that it frightened her.

Kaplan's text was especially beneficial in its practicality. She did not leave us to indirectly derive various factors in her language study and then speculate about their effectiveness. But rather, she went into detail about the instructional methodology of her own study of French, as well as the methods she incorporated in her own classrooms. As she says, "...language teachers are always in search of the full proof method that will work for any living language and will make people perfectly at home in their acquired tongue." This book is definitely appropriate for those that wish to increase their effectiveness in language instruction, as well as those that simply wish to have a better understanding of the process behind second-language acquisition.

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Summary: Living the Language
Review: I wish I had started this book sooner. I quickly put it ahead of everthing else I was doing, including lesson plans for my Spanish classes. Kaplan writes very convincingly and vividly about living in France and Switzerland while learning French. She has a family story to tell and she weaves in so many important elements that create an emotional ending. I relived so many of my own experiences living and learning Spanish while I read her stories. She helped me put lots of memories into some more simpler order that had escaped me for years. Merci.

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Summary: Haunting book.....
Review: It is said when the student is ready the teacher will appear, and for me this has always been the case. Having first studied Latin and Spanish, I finally arrived at a point in my life where I wanted to learn French. Suddenly, everything seemed to facilitate my efforts. My job enabled me to travel to France, I discovered my new colleague was a French tutor in his spare time, and one day I found this little book.

Imagine a story about learning a language that holds your interest as the momentum builds until suddenly you reach the climax -- the sounding of the perfect French "R". Those who've worked and worked at learning a language can appreciate the moment. But this book is not just about reaching the perfect French "R" it's about coming of age.

The writer is a professor of French Literature at Duke University who says she found her own voice through the learning of another language--French. But before she did that, she was a young girl living in America who was the daughter of a man who took part in the Trials at Nuremberg. And, she had a Jewish grandmother who spoke to her in Yiddish.

Alice Kaplan's autobiography of her early years in America and France and her recollected memories of her parents and grandparents, especially her father and her grandmother are haunting.

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Summary: Good book in many ways
Review: This book was a textbook in preparation for a study abroad trip to France. In many ways I could relate to the author. In particular, I too lost a parent suddenly and unexpectedly when I was young. I too (for different reasons) ended up living in France, learning French, and falling hopelessly in love with it (as well as the people and many aspects of the culture; however, I'm a linguist at heart). Because of this, much of what she wrote about her life experiences, her love of and need for French, rang true to me. I was profoundly grateful to her for giving me the words and concepts necessary to understand myself and the world around me better. On the other hand, I found her intellectual approach to life difficult to handle. I appreciate the intellectual side of life, but there's a point when it becomes too excessive and all-controlling. At times I felt she slipped over into this too much. For example, her experiences in French graduate work convinced me almost single-handedly NOT to study French after my bachelor's degree. All in all, I would recommend this book to someone who is already in love with France, French, and the French. Otherwise it may come across as overly intellectual and of little interest.

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Summary: A helpful book, and a bit of a puzzle, too.
Review: This is a book about learning to speak French almost perfectly, and it uses this process - learning French - as a complicated metaphor for something else entirely. I wasn't quite sure what, exactly, but it evidently has to do with switching languages as a way to fiddle with or tune up or peer in upon repressed memories: Individual memories, national memories, the author's personal memories.

In other words, this is a book about How to Learn French in the same way that Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Mechanics was a book about How to Fix Your Motorcycle. You could learn from Zen, etc., how to change your spark plugs, yes, but it was a book about living with schizophrenia. Similarly, you can learn a lot of French grammar from French Lessons, but it is a book about living with death. It is nevertheless cheerful.

She writes brilliantly, with wonderful turns of phrase that make you smile again and again as you read. "... the push and pull of conversation," for example. Or, following a highly physical description of a new boyfriend, she appends: "He was a moralist and had theories."

The subjunctive is a tense that has been largely lost from English but survives in French to help express obligation, doubt, uncertainty, sentiment, desire, possibility, impossibility, etc. She observes that we live most of our lives in the subjunctive.

She makes sense, in English, of three past tenses of French verbs (the passe simple, the passe compose and the imparfait). Her explanation will stick with you --- practical and excellent help for a student of French. But it is also a demonstration of her special gift for, and evident obsession with, timelines, history, and the suddenness of terrible things.

Every now and then the book goes straight out of control. It includes long winded ego trips, academic winks and nudges, other stuff that was evidently written into the book to be read by specific readers who knew her personally. But you can spot and skip these passages easily enough.

When she stays on the bicycle she is just terrific. I look forward to reading her more recent book.