A YEAR IN BRATISLAVA by John Attard
So ends my first year of overseas teaching. And a very successful one it was too. Having been headhunted by a school owner visiting Malta in the summer of 1999, I jumped at the opportunity of plying my trade away from these shores. After my first post-CELTA assignment in Malta teaching mixed nationalities in the summer, a stab at an academic-year course teaching a monolingual class in Eastern Europe seemed like a welcome challenge. Being an inveterate traveller with a chronic case of travel bug had something to do with it as well!
BRATISLAVA
Upon my arrival in the capital of Slovakia I had the welcome carpet pulled from under my feet. I sauntered down from my apartment to the nearest crossroads and into a roadside café. When attempting to explain apologetically that I don’t speak Slovak, the café attendant rolled her eyes. No smile, no attempt at helping; just a sign of exasperation. I finally got my cup of coffee – and was charged for extra milk! I was to have similar experiences with café and shop assistants later on.
Being right on the border with Austria, Bratislava is, in this sense, the western-most East European city. The city is pretty and quaint. Bratislava’s town centre is full of crescents, squares, courtyards and cobblestone streets. None of the gridlike urban landscapes that make city life so dull and depressing elsewhere. However, it is a small capital and lacking in the grandeur and breath-taking sights of other cities in the region. Luckily it is within land travel distance of major cities such as Vienna, Budapest and Prague and train connections are good.
Bratislava is only 50 kms from Vienna, but the difference between the two cities is stark. Only ten years out of communism, the Slovak capital still has some way to go to reach the standards of other European capitals. Getting by in English in this city is difficult (even the overseas operator didn’t speak English!) and the general level of customer service is poor. I wonder whether this could be a vestige of the communist era when customer and salesman were just ‘comrades’. The arrival of the free market doesn’t seem to have motivated shop owners to try and win more business. As one leading newspaperman said recently, Slovaks try very hard not to relieve you of your money!
TEACHING ENGLISH IN BRATISLAVA
My career as an English Language teacher in this city has been most satisfying. Slovak students are the most respectful and unassuming I’ve ever met and a joy to work with. Indeed, they are too respectful. Getting Slovak students to speak in class is like pulling teeth. They rarely volunteer language and I often find myself urging students to ask questions when they don’t understand a language point. Check questions and elicitation take up most of my lesson time. The fact that these students were bred on traditional teaching methods doesn’t help.
Teaching conditions weren’t ideal in my school. The classroom set-up wasn’t conducive to effective language learning. The seating formation was one of parallel benches which severely limited student interaction; and we used blackboards! Ugh! That chalk’s messy. However, this isn’t the case with all schools in Bratislava. Some schools I visited have adopted modern methods of teaching and the learning facilities catered for them. This was due in part to the arrival of internationally renowned language organizations in Slovakia, bringing with them their teaching methodology to a country which was bred on the ‘jug into glass’ philosophy of teaching.
The problems with teaching a monolingual class should be obvious. Group work and closed pairs were almost useless for conversation purposes, more so with students who don’t have the discipline or understanding of the need to converse in the target language. I found open pairs was the best technique to use with my Slovak students, a technique hampered by the fact that students were unable to face each other due to the seating arrangement mentioned before.
Extra monitoring and supervision was therefore required during group/closed pair work, as well as constantly exhorting students to desist from cross-class explanations and discussions in their mother tongue.
ENGLISH OUTSIDE THE CLASSROOM
So opportunities to learn English exist through the proliferation of language schools in the city, and also through the British Council’s language resource centre in Bratislava which is the best appointed language library I’ve ever used as an English Language teacher.
What Slovaks need now is practice. The opportunities for that are scant – and it shows. In nearby Vienna I can make myself understood practically wherever I go. Not so in Bratislava! Even in places where English is the lingua franca, people insist on speaking Slovak. Long have I tried to get my Slovak students to speak English amongst themselves and to seek out other opportunities to practise the language. This contrasts with some of my students in Malta who, admirably, speak English with their compatriots even outside school.
THE NATIVE TONGUE
Native speakers of English are highly valued and sought after in Slovakia. I was appreciated as much for my diction as for my teaching abilities. Regrettably this has led to the recruitment of persons as teachers of English by virtue of having been brought up with the language, and little else. This is to the detriment of qualified teachers, expatriate and Slovak, who have made teaching their career, not to mention the students who receive sub-standard instruction from non-professionals. Nevertheless, Slovak English Language students appreciate good teachers of whatever nationality who care about the language and speak it well. They are keen on adopting the English idiom and strive to emulate good diction. Not an easy task the latter, considering the language’s lack of pronunciation patterns and perplexing phonetics. More so because the students’ own native tongue is phonetic in nature. The transition from a ‘say it as you see it’ language to English can’t be easy, but my students coped remarkably well. This is due in no small measure to the ever-increasing exposure to English language media.
THE SLOVAK LANGUAGE
All this brings me to my attempts at mastering the Slovak language. They were pitiful. My first contact with a Slavonic language came a cropper in a big way, not least because all such languages are inflected. The English language abandoned declensions centuries ago yet they persist in the languages of Eastern Europe. The Slavic obsession with declensions is such that even proper nouns are declined – in seven different ways! So I was variously referred to as John, Johna, Johnovi, Johnom, Johneho and other appendages which I can’t remember. And that’s not all. The other parts of speech, with the exception of the verbs, are also inflected.
So, dear colleagues, if your students moan and groan about how difficult English is, pack them off to Slovakia for a course in Slovak. I guarantee they’ll come screaming back faster than you can say 'Bratislava’ – and all will be forgiven.
RETURN TO BRATISLAVA
As I await the start of academic year 2000/01, I am enthusiastic about my second year in the Slovak capital, not least because this time I’ll be working in a much more professional environment. I was impressed by my new employer’s attention to high teaching standards and the rigorous manner in which prospective teaching staff are vetted. Perhaps they overdid it. My erstwhile employers weren’t impressed when they received a telephone call requesting a verbal reference while I was still on their books. Apparently professional etiquette hasn’t arrived in Slovakia yet.
I am especially keen to return to my friends in the anglophone community of Bratislava. They have been extremely supportive both in my social and professional life in Slovakia and I am looking forward to working with the Slovak anglophones to sate their thirst for more contact with spoken English.
I should be kept fairly busy with my teaching and I hope to be awarded more spin-off work, which is interesting if not lucrative. Perhaps the English Department of the national radio station will commission more writing work or even invite me once again to read on air. (To all you thousands who tune in to Radio Slovakia International – Yes! That was me!) It seems this English-hungry country will be providing me with a living for a while longer yet.
[This article appeaed in the Winter 2000 newsletter] |
