The sound of Spanish is so nice. Uxua is from Pamplona, a super interesting region of the world linguistically. Spanish and Basque, but that’s too simple, of course. She speaks types of Spanish and Basque, the recipe of sounds from her specific region, colored by her personal background. The result is musical as she goes around the classroom, connecting with each student with a sentence of two. One is wearing a disfraz – a costume. Uxua asks him why he’s wearing a costume, the student answers what the costume is: “Soy un pumpkin.” Indeed he is! This is a beginning level Spanish course, the first semester, it’s Halloween.

Uxua projects some nouns and adjectives on the whiteboard and leads the students through an exercise to recognize the syllables and to determine where the stress falls. Ciudad, capital, Madrid, profesor. 

I love language. The students are most likely going to learn some rules about stress, how to know where to place the stress on a word. Those rules are essentially patterns, stress that tends to happen in similar environments across words. It’s not so much that there is a rule book of the Spanish speaking mind, but rather the accepted patterns, from generations of use, that look like rules when we start to analyze and sort the patterns to aid our understanding. We call the words that don’t follow the pattern exceptions. There’s probably pressure on these exceptions to conform. If I anthropomorphize a bit, I can think of it in terms of linguistic peer pressure. Maybe over time some of the exceptions join the majority, maybe for some reason they hang out in the margins, asserting their independence.

In a graduate class for second language teachers I teach, the creator of the curriculum inserted a unit on understanding language as a complex adaptive system. Insiders call it a CAS to show they are insiders (ah, we humans and our need for recognition!), or more generously of me, to save time typing. Thinking of language as a CAS is fascinating, but it throws students off a bit, it’s a different (and interesting!) way to think about language. Grammatical rules aren’t just neat bits of info that sort into neat tables in the textbook, but rather individual nodes or small agents that exert pressure on other nodes and agents. In general a node is best at having an influence, if it actually has an influence, on the nearest nodes. There isn’t a general planner controlling all this, that’s why the nodes can be thought of as agents. 

And thus language shifts over time, things evolve. Perhaps the stress patterns the students are learning today are different from how one might have spoken when Spain was at war with England in the late 1700s, and different still from the crews of ships headed to the New World and when El Cid, before that, ruled Valencia. Language only looks fixed to us, sitting there in the textbook, or in the newspaper. 

Language as a CAS. Instead of thinking of individual speakers as a node or agent, thinking about the elements of language itself as agents. It’s quite a switch. Like how the pronunciation of a sound might be different due to the sound that precedes or follows it, like how the Spanish pronunciation in Uxua’s region is influenced by other languages in the region. 

I’ve gotten quite lost in my thoughts. When Uxua turns out the light so the students can see the screen better, the sudden change brings me back to the activities of the class.

They are talking about Cartagena, Colombia, these regular looking high school students with the one exception in the bright orange pumpkin with the bright orange wig. I thought he was going to be distracting, but he isn’t. Uxua drives the pace pretty quickly, cold calling students, they don’t have time to admire the calabaza much. 

They move from Cartagena to Madrid. They are looking at a picture of the Museo Nacional de Prado, the huge museum, answering questions about what else is in Madrid. ¿Qué hay en Madrid? Some of the students are doing quite well, just two months in. Some struggle, but there isn’t room here for not trying. Their task is to write sentences about each of the cities, Uxua was just getting them started by doing it orally first. Now they write. She gives them some vocabulary that might be useful in their descriptions: capital, edificios amarillos, estilo colonial, montañas, bonito. 

Uxua has done what my graduate students are counseled to do. Start by connecting with each student. Introduce the lesson as the teacher, don’t be afraid to lead as the teacher for a bit, at least to model what to do, then get the students working independently so the teacher can circulate and help students individually. After they’ve worked for awhile, she collects their attention again and for the last five minutes spot checks, more or less, what the students have written during the time they were writing individually. 

I can’t believe 45 minutes has passed. My intermediate Spanish loves to live in a class like this, where the teacher is often speaking at a normal pace, but with lots of repetition and about topics that have lots of visual support. It’s understandable and makes me feel proficient, more proficient than I really am, a feeling that is likely to generate further learning. Maybe a sort of psychological bootstrapping, I’m not sure. If you think you can do more than you can, well, look at that! You can do a little more. Or at least you can fool yourself into thinking you can. 

I choose to remain fooled, it feels good!