Tongue-Tied to Fluent: A Teacher's Tale of Language Transformation

Imagine if you had to learn to speak Sanskrit with the same fluency as your native tongue. It seems challenging, right? Now, let’s also assume that no one in your family or social circle speaks a lick of the Vedic language, so your only hope is to enrol in a daily class where a Sanskrit scholar teaches you how to speak Sanskrit. If you were to estimate your progress a month after this commendable commitment, how far along do you think you’d be?

Whatever your answer, I’m sure you don’t think you’d be proficient enough to hold your own in a conversation with your learned scholar. Six months later, you’d be halfway there, but by that time, your frustration with the virtual stagnation of your abilities has reached its crescendo, and both your resolve and inspiration have been blown away by the winds of time, which ruins even the most well-laid plans.

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Now, imagine you’re a 13-year-old teenager surrounded by an array of glittering distractions.

Oof.

That’s exactly how my batch of 13-year-olds felt three days after we collectively ventured out on this adventure of learning how to speak English. And, as effective as I was as a tour guide, there were a few shortcuts I took to accelerate my students’ progress and satisfaction with their abilities. While this isn’t a silver bullet, and they weren’t neck-deep in Shakespeare’s rhetoric after a month, they had a process, a path, and a way to achieve an audacious goal.

It all began with a blanket ban on everything not spoken in English. Every time a student spoke in any other language, they incurred a penalty. Nothing draconian, I assure you; all they had to do was practice the art of repetition and do the same thing over and over: write down the erring sentence. And you might be thinking that that in itself should’ve worked. Even I, as a full-grown adult, have no intention of moving my hand any more than I need to, especially when all I need to do is censor every word that comes out of my mouth.

And that’s exactly what happened: every student in my class double-checked every word before saying it, so what I had could be characterised as smashing success; a batch of students who’ve only ever treated English as an acquaintance were speaking pitch-perfect English. The only problem was that that statement only applied to when they spoke, which they altogether stopped doing, resorting instead to their own homemade flavour of sign language. However endearing, that wasn’t what we set out to achieve.

Thus, I kicked in phase two of this experiment, prompting my students to talk about themselves. We all love to be heard, and I recall that as a kid, there was nothing more I adored than an adult listening to me with rapt attention. While this was slow going at first, I started to find traces of traction. An errant sentence there, a fully formed phrase there. Although there wasn’t a single eureka moment that I could pinpoint, I remember one day overhearing a couple of them chatting away in the hallway before the class, and I think I was prouder at that moment than I was when they spoke up during my class.

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Alluding to the earlier dilemma-inducing scenario I had posed before you: it’s virtually impossible to learn a new language without pursuing it on your own, and while it is possible to swim upstream and practice speaking all on your own, it’s more likely, that like all humans, you learn better when you use it in your day-to-day life. I’m fairly certain that that’s how you attained native proficiency in your native tongue. The hiccup here, however, is that it’s hard to force an entire family to speak the same language unless you possess unearthly levels of patience and oratory skills. To sidestep this obstacle, my students and I turned to technology.

(Explore the wonders of technology via online schools in India!)

As artificial intelligence proliferates and human-like intelligence grows more ubiquitous, the applications of LLMs in coaching and personalisation become clearer. Today, there are a host of apps that allow you to practice conversational English with an AI persona, and frankly, for my students, it was a lot more freeing than having to speak up in a group of their peers. At home, in the privacy of their room, they were free to make mistakes and explore topics and vocabulary that they might not feel comfortable exploring outside their safe spaces.

My students used the English Chatterbox app, which allows users to chat with multiple AI personalities and talk about their lives and their stories. Additionally, it has exercises that students can use to practice their vocabulary, pronunciation, and diction. Not only was it fun for my students, but it was also pretty fun for me, a native speaker. I believe that using this seminal technology created a much deeper impact because it made the art of learning a language real, a tangible concept that we all use, instead of a virtual abstraction where you must learn eight forms of tenses and nine forms of verbs before you can form a sentence.

If I were to distil this journey into a few sentences, I’d say it was a combination of strict enforcement and small wins that got my students speaking and learning faster than they would’ve if I had followed a conventional structure. Additionally, having the technology to help keep the students on track without boring them to death was a huge plus.

As for my students, they’re doing just fine. They’re talking, making mistakes, paying penalties and talking even more, and even though they don’t always make sense, it’s a treat to hear them make the effort.

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