Yummy

It’s the end of the month of Ramadan very shortly, which means that many, in fact, most of my students are approaching the festival of Eid ul-Fitr, the ending of the fast, at least a day of family, prayer, and, of course, eating. At the moment most of my students are from a southern Asian background, so there is a lot of talk of samosa, biryani and pakora in class, not to mention various astonoishingly unhealthy sweets (jalebi is a personal favourite, but being deep fried batter soaked in sugar syrup, is about as far from healthy as it’s possible to be). Times of celebration in ESOL classes, whether it is Eid, Christmas, Nowruz, Vaisakhi, or simply the end of the academic year, are usually times of great sharing of food, although I do always say “bring enough for one person. Small plates!” This is, without exception, ignored, and instead, I always find myself juggling a plate covered in food from several continents. Turn away for a moment and the plate is, magically, refilled. I like food, of course, and I’m a fairly adventurous eater, but more important than this is the gesture of offering and sharing food. By accepting that wobbly paper plate piled high with food, you are partaking in some ancient ritual of respect and bonding which has been going on since time immemorial. That’s my excuse, anyway, and I’m sticking to it.

ESOL parties are a well known phenonomen, of course, and to hear ESOL teachers talk about them, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this is why we do the job. This is, of course, not true, but it reflects something quite unique to ESOL (and I really mean ESOL, language taught in an immigrant setting). ESOL represents something of a cultural intersection. This intersection is not a tidy suburban crossroads of “host culture” and “immigrant culture,” but rather a twisting multilane junction¹, where any given class brings together multiple takes on multiple cultures, and is often a two-way learning process for teacher and students. My knowledge of Islamic customs, for example, is pretty decent, my understanding of central and southern Asian politics is passable, and I have a very rough working knowledge of Polish history. I know a colleague who delights in learning elements of students’ languages and using it with them (a trick I have never had the confidence, ironically, to pull off). Indeed, my white-British-maleness provides something of a bland cultural backdrop for the rich variety of the cultures of the students I’ve met over the years. This is not to do down my own culture and traditions, of course, and I will equally share my own stories and traditions, but they are culturally well known.

ESOL classes are so so much more than just about language. It suits the mainstream educational model of FE and elsewhere to consider the class as a targeting environment – the students are there to learn English and nothing else. Every lesson should be beholden to the single-minded pursuit of learning the language. Time spent talking, sharing stories, traditions and indeed food does not sit well with “purposeful.” That’s not to say being purposeful is wrong, far from it, but that the sharing time, which may more wandering and responsive can be as valuable and important. Every second in the classroom counts, absolutely, but it doesn’t always have to be in a single-minded, honed focus. Such a focussed, knowledge-first approach to learning skirts the notion that language can be learned as an objectively defined, unchanging phenomenon divorced from human experience. There are grammatical rules and lexical meanings and that is language, the end. Don’t split infinitives. Never begin a simple sentence with a conjunction. Always use the Oxford comma. The present perfect is a tense used to describe past events with present results². “Dog” means “dog³.” But ESOL teaching and learning goes far beyond these things because language is bound up with our cultures. Everything we say or write focusses our traditions, experiences and values into a single moment, right down to the full stop at the end of this sentence.

ESOL isn’t just about learning language. It is a process of sharing human experiences through language. Sometimes the language takes the wheel – lessons hang on grammar or vocabulary, say, or functions, or language skills, and the culture comes alongside that. At other times the culture is in charge, the traditions and experiences of the students and the teacher are the emphasis, and from that sharing comes language. And that is why the food is such a big thing. Food is an expression of who we are and sharing food is one of the universals of human experience.

But, yeah, it does also taste good.

1. The most famous example of this is, of course, junction 6 of the M6 motorway, known as spaghetti junction, but my personal favourite bit of road intersection madness is the Magic Roundabout in Swindon, where I was born. I’m told by my family who live there that this works beautifully and makes all sorts of sense when you’re using it. ↩︎
2. It isn’t a tense, strictly speaking, and it can be used in a whole bunch of ways, including a completed future event, as in “I’ll call you when I’ve eaten.” But you knew that, right? ↩︎
3. Whether you thought “canine” or “follow” or “dog days of summer” or made the leap to unsavoury vehicle-based sexual practices is, of course, entirely down to you. ↩︎