Discovering Language Commonalities – A Fun Surprise for French Class!
On Thursday, Mrs. Dixon’s French class walked into their classroom awaiting a surprise .... a white board full of writing in a mysterious language. Who was it from? What did it say?
An unexpected event turned into a wonderful opportunity to learn about the commonalities of language. “When I came into my classroom today to teach French, I found the board full of writing in a mysterious language," says Mrs. Jennica Dixon, Liberty French Teacher.
Another teacher informed her that this was left by Mr. Ben Struck, one of our middle school science teachers. In addition to being brilliant at science, Mr. Struck is an accomplished writer who has already produced one book, “The West Wind Tales,” and is currently working on his sequel.
Like the great writer J.R.R. Tolkien, Mr. Struck has created not only a world full of characters and stories — he has also created a language in which he writes songs and poetry.
So, when Mrs. Dixon's French class came into the room that morning, she set aside her lesson plan for the day and instead focused their attention on the board. (What a gift that this writing was left there for the class!)
Mrs. Dixon instructed them to “decode” the mystery language. Their eyes were wide. "What? How?" they exclaimed. "We don't even recognize the writing!"
“Every language,” Mrs. Dixon explained, “has consistent patterns. Since we humans are all made in the image of God, we do certain things again and again — we connect with each other, we communicate with each other, we build things, and we build families. Every language expresses these things consistently. Even if you have no idea what you’re looking at, you can begin to find patterns. Let’s find them!”
The class began by determining if the language went right-left or left-right. (Handwriting clues helped!) They noticed figures that repeated themselves and marked them. With the repetition and inconsistent spacing they determined that this must be a language with some manner of letters combined into words (as opposed to a language with single characters for each word).
They figured out that small repetitions were probably common little useful words like “the,” rather than big abstract words like “consideration.”
Next, they picked up on the pattern that every other line had the same ending… perhaps this was a poem? The English teacher joined the fun. Then, Mr. Struck arrived and confirmed that the students were on the right track!
After a few additional clues from the author himself, they began to get a sense of the poem — and at that point, the English teacher played the audio recording of the song that had been created from these very lyrics. The class heard a beautiful song and understood the meaning quickly after all our hard work!
"Science, language, song, poetry, decoding, languages, patterns… It all comes together for students in a classical classroom! And I don't think they minded putting off French verb conjugations for another day," says Mrs. Dixon.
Thank you to Mr. Struck for this wonderful detour into language and creativity! We encourage you to check out his book on Amazon.
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