"It's like learning a language; you can't speak a language fluently until you find out who you are in that language, and that has as much to do with your body as it does with vocabulary and grammar." Fred Frith
Much has been said about the different intonation, tone of voice, pose or attitudes we have when speaking a foreign language. It’s not uncommon to see people who are reluctant to utter a single word in a foreign language or that just can’t learn it either because they harbor a negative attitude towards that language or culture or just because they are not connected to it in any way. Even when it doesn’t mean that we embrace or completely agree with every aspect of the target culture, if we’ve gotten so far, there must be something- a place, an idea, an image - we feel identified with, something we wish to achieve or we want to recover when we speak English.
In my case, I first went to the States when I was a little girl and even attended kindergarten there for some time. I remember I cried every single day at school. I cried when I waved my mom good-bye, when we sang the anthem, when other kids wouldn’t play with me. Every morning, the teacher would ask “Is everybody here?” and I simply cried because I couldn’t understand. I got the noise, the sounds of the language, but I couldn’t figure out the meaning of those words until, suddenly, one morning, it just happened: “everybody” referred to “all of us”, all the students in the class. An insight. Sheer epiphany. A moment of discovery. That’s how I picked up the language and made sense of the world around me at the time.
Many years have passed by; years of formal language instruction at ARICANA, at school, at teacher training college, and some things have remained instinctive, playfully accurate, awkwardly natural. I think I am still that little girl trying to find her way back home, to discover the wwworld around her, and to invite others to explore it with her.
Now, the big question arises:
Who are you when you speak another language?
