Brenda Dyer is a French professor at Drexel. After being her student for more than three terms, I wanted to pick her brain about her past, her students, and her passion—language. During the interview, Dyer showed me the complexity, the craziness, and—most importantly—the beauty of language. She humorously depicts the difficulties of learning a language that all of us have went through and the rewards gained by mastering it.
ASK: How did you get involved with the French language?
BD: It's actually kind of funny. I wasn't planning on studying French. I wanted to learn German first. In my high school you start foreign language in 9th grade. So in 8th grade after junior high we were signing up for a language and I signed up for German because my mother's great-grandfather came from Germany, that much I knew. I thought, "Oh, it's my heritage. Let me learn German." When I got my schedule that summer for school there was a note attached saying they were phasing out the German program due to lack of interest. So I said, "Fine. I'll take French." So they put me in French.
ASK: What about it appealed to you?
BD: Well, I had a very enthusiastic high school French teacher who was really nice and it was fun. I really liked working with language. I always liked language. Just taking language apart and putting it back together, sort of like puzzles--the analytical aspect of it. I joined French club and had fun. When you're a kid it's all about having fun.
When I went to college I thought, "Oh, I want to be a French major." What did I know? I was eighteen. So I went to college and declared myself a French major. I got assigned to an academic advisor in the French department. It was a small liberal arts college. He sat down with me and said to me in our very first meeting, "Mademoiselle, if you are serious about this French major you must go to France." I said, "Sure, sure. Junior year abroad. I'd love to do that." He's like, "No, no, no, no, no. Next semester." I was like, "What? I just got here and you're sending me away!" He explained that when I took my placement test I scored towards the end of my second year. I was in that position where, from my four years in high school, I knew grammar and I could read and write but my listening and speaking skills were not as well developed. There was definitely a gap between the two. They had a program at my college, I went to Oberlin. There were 20 of us that went. We lived with families. A professor went with us so it was sort of a group. So I wasn't really leaving Oberlin. I was just going with a small group of Oberlin…to France. It was great. It completely changed my whole perspective. I totally fell head over heels in love with French culture, the language, the food.
ASK: Tell me about the trip.
BD: The trip was great. It was really my first time in a commercial airplane. It was a big change. It was my first time anywhere. I was nineteen. I had been to a few other states near Ohio, but my family doesn't travel a lot. I'm a first generation college graduate. My parents didn't go to college. For me it was a big broadening of my horizons. We left on New Year's Day from Cleveland and I flew to New York. There was one other girl who was a local in Ohio. A lot of Oberlin students are not from Ohio—they're from all over. So there were two of us. We flew on the same plane together. In New York, at JFK, we met with the rest of the group and we all flew to Brussels, Belgium, and then we had a charter bus that took us to Paris. The professor was with us so we weren't doing it on our own. It was good ‘cause we didn't know anything.
We spent a couple days in Paris to get over the jetlag and to see Paris. We then took the train from Paris to Tour, which is where we took the train to the family in the Loire Valley. We got assigned by twos to families. So there were two of us for each family. They met us at the train station and off we went. The funny thing was for the first three weeks I couldn't understand anything that anyone said to me. I would keep saying, "Repetez, s'il vous plait?" (Repeat, please.) I could say stuff but I just couldn't understand. I was very grateful to have another American in the same family with me. And we went to class every morning. We had three hours of intensive language classes, which really gave me support. And after that program I was completely fluent. All the little parts that I thought I didn't really know had gotten filled in. In the afternoon we had a literature class or something of that type and we did lots of excursions and went on lots of trips around France. We were there for three months and then we spent the last month of our semester in Paris with the whole group. We stayed in the same hotel and we had our daily trips around Paris. They had it all set up so we had all kinds of guided tours, all the museums. At the college we knew someone who worked in the Louvre so we even got these "line-hopper" passes that way we could go straight to the front of the line to get into all the national museums. We didn't have to pay.
It was exciting and I honestly believe at that point in my life that this was my one opportunity to go abroad, to see France. I decided that I was going to do everything that I could possibly do. I had never been any where before and I thought that this was the trip of a lifetime, [so I was] going to take full advantage. I did everything I could do. I learned everything I could learn.
I made friends with another student at the college who is still my best friend. It's been more than 20 years. [That] was in 1986. We became best friends on this program, we roomed together in Paris and we still talk at least a few times a month. She teaches high school French. We vowed that we would speak French while we were there with each other. So even when we were off doing things together we only spoke French. I think that is what it took to really feel comfortable [with the language] and to get to that point [of fluency]. We had a professor say to us right as we were leaving, she said in one of those speeches that professors give to students-- sometimes you listen and sometimes you don't--she said, "As long as you only use French when it is easy and you never try to use French to talk about things that really matter to you, it will always be a game and it will never be a language." I remember her saying so vividly and thinking, "Wow." I had played the French game for a while. I had four years in high school and a semester in college and it was a game. You play with the language. That's why I liked it because of the puzzle, the language, expressing yourself in different ways. Then I said, "Okay. I'm here. I'm in France and I'm going to speak French. I'm going to talk about the things that matter to me in French." It's hard.
When I came home four months later, I was completely fluent. No one knew I was American. I had forgotten a lot of really obvious words in English. I felt like I had more culture shock coming home then I did going there because I had decided I was going totally native. I would do everything that I could do. Then I came home and I was like, "Oh wow. What's that word? It has two wheels and you ride it?" And my mom would say, "Your bike?" You would just have these holes in your memory because you couldn't remember. Like when I went through customs in New York, when I flew into New York, I was having trouble answering the questions. And the guy in customs was teasing me, "How long have you been gone?" while checking my passport. I hadn't spoken English really for four months.
ASK: Since you have become fluent with the language and been exposed to the culture, what about the culture do you see through the language?
BD: A lot of those things show up in idiomatic expressions or ways you can say things. I think one of those things is that there is a word for expensive. Things can be cher (expensive). But there is not really a word for something that is inexpensive. You can't say something is cheap. You can say something is of bad quality: mauvais qualite, or you can say something is bon marche, like it is a good deal. You can either say something is expensive or not expensive but there is not a word that means "cheap." This is because it is sort of culturally taboo to talk about money a lot in French culture, certainly if you compare it to American culture. That's an example with things that are said or not said.
ASK: What was something that surprised you about the language?
BD: This is a great story. It isn't about language but more about nonverbal communication. I had went to this bakery and ordered one pastry and I held up my index finger and I asked for, "One." The girl behind the counter then held up her thumb and said, "One?" And I said, "Yes, one," as I held up my index finger. She's like, "One," more emphatically with her thumb. And I'm like, "Okay. One," with my thumb and then she gave me the pastry. It is clearly some kind of crazy communication thing going on there. So the next day when I went to my class, my teacher's name was Christine, and I asked her about what happened. I told her the story and she said, "Oh! When you count in French you start with your thumb." So if you hold up your thumb to a French person when you're saying numbers they perceive the thumb and index finger together almost like "two." When you hold up your index finger they are looking for the thumb. So when I was holding up my index finger saying, "One" I confused them because she was thinking, "Two," which is why we had that little back and forth. That is an example of something nonverbal that you don't know until you've gone and lived in another culture.
ASK: How do you think your style of teaching differs from other professors?
BD: That's hard to answer because you don't really know what's going on in other people's classrooms. But what I think is different with teaching language, as opposed to teaching something like history or biology, is that it is not so much perfecting the imparting of my knowledge to the student; because when you're learning a language, you're not just learning knowledge about the language--it's also a skill. You have to learn to develop the abilities to read, and write, and speak, and listen in that language.
On top of it all, the knowledge of what is culturally appropriate. What grammar rule applies here? Which vocabulary words? That part is knowledge but the other part is skill. I think that has to translate itself in the classroom in a way that the students are the center of the stage in the sense that you need practice and you need me to facilitate for you an environment so you can practice and I can supply the support you need so you know which direction to go in. In that sense, it's very different from what we think of as a lecture class or even discussion classes. You need a little more support because you don't spontaneously know which words to use. Maybe there's a little more "hand holding."
I think I am a little more involved in the process of learning than I would be in a different kind of class. That's part of language teaching. The class size would have to be small in order to do that. It means you know the students better. It's a small program. There's not a lot of faculty so you tend to see the same students. You have a relationship that is a lot longer than ten weeks. You see the development going on when you see students' progress and you get to know them. It's nice. I like that.
ASK: How has being a mother changed your way of teaching?
BD: I'm kind of maternal anyway, even before I had kids. I mothered my students just a little. It's just the way I am. Just a little. I still respect the fact that you are adults. What has become clear to me is just how hard learning language is. Watching my own daughter, who is now 10, develop her native language of English. You realize that there are things that are hard to acquire about your own language. Like times when all little kids over-apply the rules. Like when they say, "I runned around and I felled down." There's the rules that are past tense, every language has those. You don't one day speak like a sophisticated adult. It's a process. Being able to apply those kinds of things. Thinking from English versus French even and thinking, "Wow, you know."
Language is complex and difficult and it takes a long time to learn. Being able to speak after 20 or 30 weeks helps accentuate that idea that it's a process as opposed to a product. You have to always keep learning language because you'll forget it if you don't use it, and things change. You never one day wake up and say, "Today I am fluent. That's it. I will never have to do this thing anymore." No. You don't. If you don't use it you'll get rusty.
ASK: Advice?
BD: Here's the thing about language studies that seems obvious to us who have done this as our careers, but not seem so obvious, is the most important thing that determines whether or not you will be successful at really learning a language, not just getting a good grade in the class, but really learning it and acquiring it and making it a part of who you are is the emotional aspect. I think you really have to want to learn it. You have to have some kind of attachment whether you fall in love with a cute French guy and you decide that you really need to speak his language. You have an external reason that is not just get a good grade or fulfill your language requirement. But that effective, emotional aspect. One of the reasons that I had wanted to study German was my cultural heritage. You have to have something that is beyond the intellectual interest to make it your own. In some way or another you identify with a culture that speaks that language. That is the key. The people who do go through the thick and thin of it. The day-in and day-out practicing, the verb conjugations and memorizing the vocabulary and all those nongrammar things that learning a foreign language as an adult [consist of]. That is work. If you're deciding which language you're going to study, don't think that you're going to study this language because it's practical or because your mom says this language is more useful than that language. No, choose the one you love. The one that speaks to you. The one that you think you love. Because that's what it takes. And they're all useful. You'll learn something from all the languages, whatever they are.