Learning a language and becoming fluent

Let’s face it, unless you are lucky enough to have been born in a multilingual family or have been exposed to more than one language in your childhood, learning a new language will take some time and effort. Anyone who has tried it in their adult years knows that unfortunately, there is no magic trick. Becoming fluent in a new language takes dedication and time. And when I say fluent, I don’t just mean that you master the structures of the language and have an extensive vocabulary. What I mean by fluency is that you start thinking in that language, you don’t translate in your mind anymore. In fact, you don’t even know how to translate something into your native language, but yet you understand 100% the meaning. You understand the small nuances, and rhythm flows easily. It’s also these kind of things I mean when talking about fluency.

My native language is Finnish and I started learning English in primary school when I was nine years old. Later on, when I was in my thirties, I started studying Spanish and that truly has taught me a lot of language learning. I wish all language teachers stepped out of their comfort zone of using only the language they master to see and feel for themselves what it is like to struggle with a new language. It is so frustrating when you have so much to say, but you just can’t put it into words. I’ve also had my go with Modern Greek, German, French and Arabic so I know a thing or two about trying to learn a new language (just for the record, all those four have so far remained at beginner’s level).

When teaching English and Finnish, I’ve noticed that some learners seem to have this natural tendency to learn by imitating. These students just know what is right because it sounds right. If you have this skill, good for you! Go with the flow. Speak, imitate and follow your intuition! If you think you don’t have this natural inclination, don’t worry, you also have the possibility to become fluent. It will probably just take a bit more time and effort, but it is there for you to achieve. With these learners I’ve noticed that the teaching of phonetics and structures has been of great help.

Fluency doesn’t happen in a snap of fingers. However, it IS possible and more importantly, with the right techniques it doesn’t have to take an eternity. All learners have their own unique backgrounds so what works for one doesn't work for the other. In my next posting, I’ll give you some practical tips based on my experiences as a language teacher for students of various language levels. 

How has it been for you, easy or difficult? What would help you in becoming fluent?

Best, Minna

Speak to you soon! Just returned from South Africa!

Glimpses of our school year in pictures!

Here's a link to a recent posting in our school blog, you don't need to know Finnish to check it out, since it's all about photos.

Click here to take a look at some moments from our school year 2015-2016!

Vanhankaupunginkoski in Helsinki (now that is a long word!). It's such a beautiful place to walk around!

Skating and skiing

A big part of our study programme covers learning about Finnish society, culture and the way of life. For this reason we have had several field trips, and there are still quite a few more to come before the term finishes at the beginning of June.

What we Finns are passionate about is winter sports. Everybody skis, skates and enjoys wintery sports of some sorts. The students were excited to have a go at skates and skis. Helsinki City offers excellent, I mean really excellent sport facilities to young people aged 17-29. The programme offers 49 different sports for free! My colleague and I were happy to take our students skating within this programme.  Off we went to an indoor ice rink! The city even provides two instructors to instruct the skaters, how great is that!

Another great field trip took place in the skiing tracks of Paloheinä in Helsinki. Unfortunately, it was the only cloudy day of that week, but nevertheless, it was simply fantastic! The students had their first experiences on cross country skiing and they loved it. Many local skiers approached them and wanted to learn more about them. What a great way to interact with the locals!

Tools and ideas

Voice typing with Google Docs

It really is great that Google has this feature. How to use it in language learning? The first thing that came to my mind was to help students check their pronunciation and get immediate feedback on it with the help of voice typing. What we did was pretty simple. The students had a text in the target language, which in our case is Finnish. They read the text and observed if it was similar to the original one. They often wanted to try several times to make the pronunciation match with the text. The feedback is instant, which is great. It's also really easy for them to practise pronunciation this way at home. 

Do you have any other ideas? 

For those readers who are not familiar with voice typing, check this posting by Alice Keeler.

Quizizz

When I heard about Quizizz, I was curious to see what it has to offer in comparison with, for example, Kahoot and Socrative which my students really like. Turns out Quizizz also offers a homework option. The gaming factor is also there, but instead of time pressure, the students can now do the quiz in peace and quiet with the help of any material they can think of. Highly recommended!

Google Slides

Better late than never! I have only recently discovered the wonderland of Google Slides for language learning classes. What a great way to collaborate, differentiate, learn together and so much more!

Presently my students are practising the use of past tense both in affirmative and negative sentences in Finnish. For revision I created a presentation with each slide containing only two sentences: the first one being affirmative and the second one negative, which appears with a click. The students worked in pairs and took turns in reading the affirmative sentences and then trying to form the negative ones and then checking with a click if they got it right. It worked really well and the students got a lot of practise! Simple and useful! 

I was pleased to find a lot of information both in Finnish and English on how to use Google Slides in the classroom. I very much like the idea of creating a presentation and giving each group a slide number to work, and there are so many other cool ways to use this tool. To read about them, here's a link to a crowd sourced presentation initiated by Alice Keeler and Hans Tullmann.

 

Quizizz in the classroom

Quizizz in the classroom

Practice makes perfect

A study programme for immigrants aged 17–25 without school leaving certificate

A new term is about to start in our school! This week we’ll be interviewing and choosing new students to our study programme which is officially called instruction for preparing for basic education. Basically it is a one-year-programme for young adults aged between 17-25 who have recently arrived in Finland and who don’t have a school leaving certificate from their home countries. They don’t need to have previous knowledge of Finnish but they need to be literate (if they aren’t, we also have courses for illiterate adult immigrants). I think this is an excellent opportunity for a young adult to start a new chapter in his or her life in a new country by learning the language, getting to know how the new society works and exploring what options there are for the future. We also have a strong emphasis on developing each student’s learning skills and helping them to find their true potential as learners. 

This is, in brief, what their their school year is made of:

• Finnish studies: starting level 0, target level A1.3-A2.2
• preparatory courses in mathematics
• preparatory courses in natural sciences
• preparatory courses in social studies
• preparatory courses in English
• fine arts
• field trips
• ICT-skills 
• introduction to the Finnish school system with the focus on the students’ own interests and study plans

I’m running out of superlatives when thinking about the students who completed the programme last May. I’m also so very pleased that they all are now carrying on with their studies, which means they reached the language level required for entering the basic education for adults. This is fantastic news given the fact that most of them started the term last September with little or no knowledge of the Finnish language. I was happy to see their skills develop in so many ways during the school year.

Before starting to write about this up-coming term, here are a few highlights of the last weeks of May with my highly motivated students I had the privilege to work with for the entire school year. I wish them all the best and all the happiness in the world!

Getting a hands-on experience on how to prepare Finnish bun at Fazer. 

Learning about the biggest chocolate factory in Finland.

Ending the tour with our goodie bags.

Learning about underwater world in Sea Life.

The students practised theme-related vocabulary on Quizlet before the field trip.

Celebrating and saying farewells at the end of the school year.

Encouraging students’ plurilingualism

It’s been one of my busiest school year so far. Since my last posting, there’s been so much progress in the language and studying skills of my students in the preparatory class. For my new readers: After nearly 20 years of teaching EFL in high schools, I am now teaching Finnish as a second language to 17 to 25-year-old immigrants preparing them for basic education, along with other school subjects such as, for example, English, Mathematics, introductory courses to societal studies and natural sciences. The students come from various cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and in September they started learning Finnish from the beginning.

Lately I’ve been trying to figure out ways in which they could truly use their full potential and personality to help them in the face of the enormous challenge of learning Finnish and adjusting to their new home country. With this object in mind, I also took an online course on multicultural learning and teaching (arranged by Open University of Jyväskylä, which, by the way, I can highly recommend to anybody interested in the topic, the information is in Finnish).

In a truly multicultural and plurilingual school, the appreciation of different cultures and languages doesn’t limit just in theme weeks or projects, but instead multiculturalism is a natural and visible part of every school day. I'm now working on how to take this into account in my teaching and make multiculturalism a resource in learning and teaching. To remind the students that they already know many languages and have many skills, we started off by creating a poster in which each student wrote Hello and Thank you in all the languages they knew. They also asked me to add these words in Swedish since Swedish is the second official language in Finland. Later, they found flags of their own countries and glued them on the poster.

Hello! Thank you!

The following day we started with khmer which is spoken by some 16 million people and is the mother tongue of my student from Cambodia. She kindly taught us how to say hello, goodbye and thank you in khmer. The pronunciation was easy, but the writing was a huge challenge. This is how it looks like (copy pasted from Google translator, my handwriting wasn’t very presentable :) 

hello ជំរាបសួរ 

goodbye លា 

thank you សូមអរគុណអ្នក

What a great reminder of how difficult it is to learn to read and write with the alphabet you’re not familiar with! Just imagine the challenges for students who are not familiar with the Latin alphabet!

For the coming two weeks or so, we’ll be using these three words whenever possible making the effort to really learn them. After that we’ll take another language until all the languages in the classroom are covered. Three words doesn’t put too much strain on anybody nor does it take too much time from learning Finnish. What I am hoping it does, is to show appreciation of each student’s mother tongue and culture. It also reminds the students that they are the native speakers and experts of their own languages. It’s great that they can, in turn, be teachers and guides and show their expertise. I hope that this will further increase their motivation to attend the classes and carry on with their language studies. All the information the students give also integrates well with the introductory geography course we are about to start.

I've already tried out some other ways of taking the students’ plurilingualism into account in their learning processes and in my teaching. More about this in my next posting. I would be very glad to hear any experiences you might have on the theme. 

Three iPad apps for language learning classroom

It's been a busy autumn with my new group. The students have already improved their Finnish skills quite a bit and they have  also started a course in mathematics. There will be more school subjects coming as their language skills develop. 

This time I'm going to present a few more iPad apps that I have used with my students to encourage them to practise their pronunciation, speaking and listening skills:

Decide Now!

The app is designed for decision making but it turns out there are so many other ways to use it. My students, who are presently at beginners’ level in their language studies, have been using it for practising question formation, followed by discussion: Just add question words in the wheel and voilà, you’ll have a wheel that can be used in various contexts. Decide Now! is also a handy tool for practising vocabulary: Write the words in the wheel, students can then form sentences using them, define them or create a dialogue around them. Fun and effective, and when students work in pairs each one of them gets a lot of practice!

Dragon Dication

Pronunciation can be tricky. I am a supporter of each student’s own personal accent but I also encourage them to learn pronunciation to avoid misunderstandings simply because in the real world they need to be understood. I listen to my students speaking a lot, they also read aloud to me from time to time. I encourage them to use online dictionaries with audio as well as listen to the language around them. Yet another way to practise pronunciation is with Dragon Dictation. It is a voice recognition application. My students have used it, for example, for reading aloud short dialogues. Then they check the writing and see if there’s something to be corrected. In this way they also practise reading and spelling. The app can also be used for reading out easily confused words. For example, many Finnish language learners find it challenging to recognize between long and short vowels (tuli – tuuli) and double consonants (kuka – kukka).

Microphone and Recording Pro

So far we've only tried this app once, so there are yet many things to explore. The students were given a situation and they created a dialogue. The students then recorded the dialogue and later we listened to each one of them. A quick and easy way to practise speaking and listening skills. The students also like the idea of re-recording the dialogue if they were not happy with the final result.

Quizlet with photos

A few words about Quizlet: It is so great for learning languages!

As an EFL teacher, I have used Quizlet a lot with English-Finnish-English phrases and words. This term I am mainly teaching Finnish as a second language for young adults. I will be teaching EFL for them later in the spring term but as for now, the focus is on the Finnish language. They don’t all speak English so I had to give up using translations. Instead I am using photos, and it is working really well.

Using Quizlet image search is such a time saver! In addition, it is great how the photo sources are listed below each set.

I only now discovered the folders, which makes it easier to find a certain set. However, it seems to me that my folders are visible only to me, my students can’t see them. Can anybody shed some light on this? Is it so? Or perhaps the folder function requires logging in? So far, my new students haven’t done that.

The only disappointment with using photos instead of translations has been the reduced amount of study modes (Cards, Learn, Speller, Test, Scatter, Space Race) when studying the vocabularies on iPads. I was looking forward to the students having a go at Scatter but instead they got a notification “You cannot play scatter because there are images for every definition. Please try another mode.”

Having said that, I still think Quizlet is awesome. Easy and simple to use, very efficient and also so much fun for the students with the competitive side of it! And I love the idea of sharing!

If you want to have a go at practising the sights in Helsinki, click here. 

Or have a try with the colours in Finnish.

Helsinki sightseeing

Part V: iMovies for teaching and learning

Part V: Some highlights of the previous school year

Just a quick note on using iMovies. This posting will finish off the five-part-series of my reminiscing about the previous school year.

Last year I took a one-day-course on how to use iMovies. Teachers in Helsinki are very lucky to have so many opportunities to stay up-to-date with the developments in educational technology. Helsinki City Media Centre organizes a variety of courses with the focus on professional development.

So, there I was for one day and with friends who are teaching in other schools, and together we were learning on how to use iMovies. Since there are so many excellent instructions on how to use the programme, I won’t bore the readers with that. I just want to say it was so much fun!

I got somewhat excited about the possibilities to make my own teaching material and teach my students to do it, too. I definitely wanted to share my experiences with my colleagues, and happily they were interested in the topic. There are 20 Finnish as a Second Language (FSL) teachers in my school, and on one Friday afternoon 13 of us showed up to learn more about it and work together.

We had a great and productive afternoon. We created a YouTube channel for our work (so far it's private). The idea was that slowly but surely, whenever we would have time, we would add videos on our channel. These could then be used in our classrooms, and, of course, the students would also be learning on how to use the programme.

I was (and still am) excited about this idea. It's so much more fun and efficient to have many people working together. I believe in the power of sharing.

Here are glimpses in photos of the demo video I made. I asked our staff members to tell the camera what languages they speak. The result was a two-minute-video for a beginners' FSL course.

For the photos and speech bubbles I used an iPad app called Photogene.

What language do you speak? What languages do you speak?

I speak Finnish, English, French and also Swedish.

Part IV: Teaching illiterate immigrant stay-at-home moms

Part IV: Some highlights from the previous school year

Practising with verbs

Everyone knows that it’s not easy to study if you have small children and you are staying home with them. An ongoing project, organized by the Education Department and the Department of Early Education and Care in Helsinki, encourages immigrant stay-at-home-parents to study Finnish AND bring their babies and toddlers along. The children are taken care of on the same premises by trained staff. Isn't that just so practical and wonderful! No wonder the courses have been popular. The courses are offered at several levels starting from learning reading and writing skills to beginners’ and advanced level Finnish.

For the past two school years, in addition to my EFL classes, I was teaching two groups of illiterate women. I was very excited about this opportunity. I have been a language teacher for ages and I am also a qualified primary school teacher with the experience of teaching children to read and write. So I was interested in putting my experience into practice and finding out how it would be to teach adults to read and write in their second language.

To cut a very long story short, I can say that the two-year-time I was working with illiterate adults was definitely one of the most rewarding teaching experiences I have ever had. I feel my students were truly learning for life, and for me that was the best reward.

Some observations:

• The mother tongues of my students were Somali, Arabic and Mandinka to mention but a few. At the beginning of the course, the students spoke no or little Finnish. Thus, they were learning to read and write NOT in their native languages but in Finnish. I can’t even begin to understand how challenging this must have been for them. And yet, those students, who participated in the course actively, did it.  At the end of the course they could read and write! I am so proud of every one of them!
• As in all learning and teaching, I think it is important to create a comfortable atmosphere for learning. It was important that the students enjoyed coming to the classes. If they didn’t, they would simply not have showed up anymore.  
• The focus was both on the spoken language and learning to read and write.  It was important to practise skills that would help them to cope with everyday situations. As a guideline for my teaching, I used the curriculum for illiterate adults (link in Finnish). 
• I was very lucky in that I had the luxury of having a school assistant working with me all the time. This is something I have never had as a language teacher. It was great to share the work with another professional. What made things ever greater, was the fact that my assistant was studying Somali. That became really handy when explaining the meanings of some words and phrases. I have to say, it does take quite a bit of creativity to teach without a language in common. In addition, for most part of the courses we also had the services of a social worker available for the students. Together we were able to offer the students individual and differentiated instruction. 
• At the end of the course we discussed the future plans with each student, and helped them in finding a suitable course to continue their studies. This was easier said than done. Helsinki is a true haven for learning languages but there aren’t all that many courses for students with limited reading and writing skills.
• On a final note, as I mentioned before, the students took up a huge challenge in learning to read and write not in their native languages but in Finnish. I can’t help but wonder how great it would be if these illiterate immigrants could learn to read and write first in their native language. This would make a world of difference for their learning process. 

To finish off, a few more pictures of the teaching material I used.

Practising with the letter "j"

What's the weather like?

Where are you from? Where do you live?

Some background information about me (updated)

Hi! I'm Minna, a language teacher from Finland with an MEd and MA. I have been teaching English as a Foreign Language for about 20 years, at all possible levels with pupils and students aged anything between 5 to 75. I have done most part of my EFL work in upper secondary schools. While working as an English teacher, I also fulfilled my long-time dream of studying to become a Finnish as a Second Language teacher. In addition to my education in languages, I am also a qualified primary school teacher. I can truly say that I love teaching and learning!

I have always been an edtech enthusiast. I was a Google Certified Educator (2019 - 2022) and a MIEE (Microsoft Innovative Educator Expert in 2020-2021). 

I am also a Kahoot! Verified Educator. These are my profiles:

• Minna Teacher: Advanced English, levels A2 - C1
• MinnaTutor: English and Finnish for Beginners, levels A1-A2

My goal is to encourage my students to become lifelong learners through meaningful learning experiences. Needless to say, I am a lifelong learner myself!

I have a YouTube channel for intermediate and advanced English language students and two other channels for Finnish learners. You can find the channels here:

• YouTube: Minna Teacher
• YouTube: Suomen kurssi (Learn Finnish in Finnish)
• YouTube: Finnish Lesson with Minna 

You can find language learning & teaching materials I have created from here.