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A reflective Review of my  Previous Language Learning

Dr. Salomi Papadima-Sophocleous
It all started in Cyprus where I was born. I am Cypriot of Greek background. I lived my childhood and teenage years in Limassol, Cyprus. After the war in 1974, I went to Athens, Greece, where I stayed for four years to obtain my first degree. I then moved to Melbourne, Australia where I lived for twenty-three years. In January 2002, I moved back to Cyprus with my family. I now live and work at Intercollege in Cyprus.

My mother tongue is Greek. At home I have always spoken the Greek Cypriot dialect and at school I learned standard Greek. I guess, this was a kind of initial introduction to some kind of bilingualism, a kind of a smooth way of being introduced to different ways of communicating at school based on a learning theory, at home in a practical, experiential and meaningful way. I don’t exactly remember when I started learning English. All I remember was that during my childhood years my mother had a novelties shop in Limassol and her customers were mainly English speaking people: personnel from the British military base of Akrotiri and their families. I started speaking English with them. In theory, this would be called immersion. One of them, being a primary school teacher, took me a step further. He introduced me to reading English by giving me //Ladybird// books as presents. I remember enjoying reading those illustrated and clearly layed-out books and was proud to be able to read them. Later on, I started to officially learn English in grade 5. I continued learning Greek as an L1 (standard Greek that is, although strictly speaking my mother / first tongue is the Greek Cypriot dialect) and English as an L2 during all of my secondary schooling. During this time, I also studied French and Italian. Learning languages became, I guess, a way of life for me. This was reinforced by the fact that I was living and learning languages in a multilingual environment (non-officially declared, however), where one could hear various languages being used in everyday life (Greek, Turkish, English, Armenian, etc. and many others used by tourists) and where language learning was occurring both at school (English and French) as well as during after school hour institutions (German, Italian, Russian, etc.) In the Cypriot society of the time, language learning was considered important and prestigious and was envisaged as a tool towards achieving future personal, social, educational and career success. Both my parents were competent speakers of both Greek and English. This was another motivating factor. They always encouraged their three daughters to learn languages and read books in different languages and about different cultures and mix with people of other linguistic and cultural background. An indication of their philosophy was the fact that they sent us to //St Mary’s School,// a language school. I will never forget when one day, my father, coming from the town of Paphos, brought home some French tourists he found on the way, so that he would provide me with an opportunity to speak French with real French speakers, thus complementing my class exposure to French with real life usage of it.

During my language learning years I experienced learning and being assessed and tested in mostly traditional ways. I will never forget, for example, that we learned a lot of Grammar but without actually learning to put it in authentic use, in close-to-realistic or authentic interactive situations. I remember in the fifth and sixth years of high school, I was examined for oral competency when I have never had the chance to say much in class, let alone communicate freely using it. In class, I remember reading a lot, listening to the teachers a lot and writing a lot. However these skills were not learned for communicative purposes and real life situations. They were mainly grammar and literature based. Since then I started feeling that there have to be better ways of teaching and learning a language, ways that would produce competent users of the languages and not people who would study languages for many years and end up saying in their adult life: “I have studied X language as a foreign language for many years during my school years but I don’t remember much and I can hardly speak it…” I had the same feeling during part of my tertiary studies where I continued to be taught languages and at the same time learn how to teach them. I will never forget our pedagogy lecturer teaching us how to teach English by showing us a pen and saying: “This is a pen. Is this a pen? Yes, it is” I still think the following about those lines: “I can see it’s a pen, why ask me what it is? Why not ask me, for example “How do we say //στιλό// (pen in Greek) in English? That would be a more meaningful and authentic-like question…” I knew since then that there must be meaningful ways of teaching and learning a language I should find out about and explore. I started learning that later on during other postgraduate courses I undertook, and through my own need as a teacher as well as through my continuous curiosity in finding better teaching methods and techniques. There was a time, for example, in Australia, when I was teaching French in the morning and Greek in the afternoon. For French there was plethora of suitable material for meaningful learning, continuously following the most current theories and practices in L2 teaching and learning. For Greek, there was not much as material for its teaching as a foreign language. The same was happening in the area of testing.

This made me conscious of some of the key differences between the two dominant ways of learning a language (traditional and communicative), and confirmed for me that learning a language for communicative and interactive purposes is most suited to today’s learners’ needs. Since then, I embarked on various work-based curriculum development projects which I will describe at a later stage in this review, in an attempt to explore this area and suggest solutions to existing problems. This curiosity passed through the various L2 theories and practices of the last twenty-five years and extending to the possibilities new technologies offer to further improve and develop best practices in L2 teaching and learning, including that of testing. My interest in this particular area was increased since I started working at Intercollege and looking at the existing pen-and-paper English Placement Tests. For this reason, I embarked on a project which resulted in the development of the NEPTON test (New English Placement Test Online).

Since my high school years, I continued to be interested in improving my language skills and knowledge, and developing my multicultural and intercultural awareness. I achieved that in various ways: through the languages I learned by speaking them as often as possible; through teaching them; through reading various types of written text types in those languages; watching films; listening to songs; attending language weekends for educators; staying in target language countries for a certain period of time (three times as a scholarship recipient in the case of French, as a visiting lecturer in the case of Greek); living and working in Australia for twenty-three years; visiting the target language countries; using the language constantly with colleagues; using the language at seminar and conference presentations; doing further postgraduate studies; doing and presenting research in the target languages; even developing L2 curriculum has been a valuable way of improving my language communication skills in the various languages I learned and am still learning, enjoying to improve and enriching. In the same way, I believe that, in the evolving international scene, and more particularly, in the Cypriot society, where so many languages are now present, language learning can contribute tremendously to the language learners’ future, in their personal, social, educational and career success. I believe that this can be done if language learning considers this multilingual reality in which language learning occurs, and uses it as one of the starting points for successful language learning. Part of the process is keeping L2 programmes informed with current theories and practices in second language. Type in the content of your page here.