Learning Language Alongside My Students

When is reading with students NOT actually reading with students? I found out this month.

One of the biggest indicators for whether a silent sustained reading program will be effective is whether the teacher also reads. It sets an example and confirms that this is indeed a valuable activity. So I’ve always read with my English language arts (ELA) classes. I love to read. Why wouldn’t I grab every minute I can?

So this year when I expanded the experiment to my English as a foreign language (EFL) class, I continued to set the example of reading English books. The students were compliant. There were even two students who were already reading English books on their own. Still, there wasn’t the same total buy-in I’d gotten in my ELA class, with every student buried in their book before the period started, groans of disappointment when my phone alarm signaled the 10 minutes of reading were over, some students asking for a new book every few days. In fact, in the EFL class, I could detect a distinct restless at about 7 minutes, and two weeks into the year, only one student had finished a book. What’s more, the vocabulary words some were picking seemed to be the most obscure they could find rather than the most helpful. 

Finally it dawned on me that to truly understand what my students were experiencing, to demonstrate my value for what I was asking them to do, and to discover how to practice it most effectively, I couldn’t be reading an English book like they were. I’d have to be reading a book in my second language—Japanese. So a couple of weeks ago I announced that’s what I’d be doing, and I showed up to the next class with an elementary level Japanese book about Jean-Henri Fabre, the father of entomology. I committed to reading an additional 10 minutes per night. And I even did the vocabulary record—4 words per week. 

Here are a few of my discoveries:

1. I started getting restless at the 7-minute mark, too! Reading is a completely different experience when you're decoding language.
2. It’s really hard to write a definition of a foreign word in the foreign language. A translated definition is not cheating—it’s enlightening. Inferring from context only works up to a certain point of understanding.
3. Google Translate is my friend—not for writing, but definitely for reading. Once I’ve entered an opaque phrase in it, suddenly everything makes sense. Being on the computer is not avoiding reading--it may be trying to get back into it 
4. Re-reading is also my friend. The first time through a page is pretty confusing and slow. I’d of course re-read the page after I’d struggled through it the first time. But I was really excited to finish the book and go back and read it again—straight through, understanding the whole thing.
5. A pattern of words emerges in a book, given the topic. Words I came across repeatedly in this one: observe, research, specimen. My favorite phrase: “observe on hands and knees.” Fabre was a real field-research type of scientist.
6. Flow can still happen. Just because I don't get into the flow of unselfconscious reading the same way doesn't mean that puzzle-solving doesn't have its own flow state. Sometimes now the 10-minute timer startles me out of it.

Well, that’s my own bit of field research for this year. As I said in the essay on why and how to learn another language that I wrote alongside my students: 

One of the ways I will work to become a successful language learner is to persevere. I will persevere by reading a Japanese book at least 10 minutes a night at least 5 times a week. Sometimes I feel like I have lived here too long, I will never get any better. Or I feel like I am too busy to study. However, this is not a good attitude for a student, so it is not a good attitude for a teacher. I want to continue to learn Japanese, to set an example of learning for my students, and to understand what it is like for them. 

I wonder how much my Japanese will improve this year? I wonder what else I’ll learn about language learning?