Armed with only a serviceable knowledge of Mandarin Chinese and a crude, self-taught understanding of Portuguese, veteran journalist and linguistic dabbler Tim Johnson entered the unique world of immersion at the Middlebury Language Schools last summer.
During his time on campus, he lived in the dorms, attended classes and other activities, and spoke only Portuguese and Chinese. Over the course of nine weeks, as a resident and as a visitor, he experienced many of the challenges the language students faced—and witnessed the students' evolution as language scholars.
By Tim Johnson
Illustrations by Seth
One of the first things you have to do when learning a language—in Middlebury or anywhere else—is come up with a response to the Question: Who are you, and what are you doing here?
When you don't know a language very well, replying to the Question is not an easy matter. I got a taste of this my first evening at Middlebury, in the first-floor hallway of Painter Hall, the Portuguese School's dorm. There I encountered Keith Johnson and Sarah Martin, two Portuguese-speaking staffers. The Language Pledge (a vow to use only the language being studied) was still two days away, so I could have spoken English, but I thought it would be interesting to see how far my pigeon Portuguese would get me with these two, who naturally lost no time in asking me—in Portuguese—who I was and what I was doing there.
Every student in the Language Schools encounters this situation, and it's obviously more daunting for the beginners. Imagine what it's like: You know a few words, or at best, a smattering—of French, say, or Russian—and now you're on the spot. You have to explain yourself in that language and no other. You are permitted, of course, to use gestures, perform pantomimes, draw pictures—whatever you think will help get your message across.
My two inquisitors stood there looking at me, patiently, as I pondered how to say that I was a writer who was going to do an article on the Language Schools for Middlebury Magazine. How to express this, given that I didn't know how to say "alumni" or "article" or "magazine" or "college" in Portuguese?
From my recent review of the booklet "Portuguese in Three Months," however, I did know how to say "journalist" and "to write" and "school" and "news." So, with stammering difficulty, I said something like this:
"I am a journalist. I am going to write a news about the language school for the newspaper of the Middlebury school. What newspaper? A newspaper for the old Middlebury students. Students go to Middlebury school for four years. After, they go to other cities. This newspaper is for them."
That, at any rate, was what I tried to say, but I don't think I did it quite so clearly. They looked puzzled, in a discreet sort of way.
In the real world—on the street or at a restaurant in Lisbon or Rio—anyone subjected to my explanation would soon be looking at a wristwatch or edging away. Keith and Sarah did neither. They stood there indulgently, even engagingly, suggesting a word or phrase now and then to help me along. The effort of explaining myself left me exhausted, and in the end I was the one who edged away, although I still was a bit unsure if they really understood who I was and what I was doing there.
After this experience, I took advantage of the two days before the Pledge to put the Question in English to other students of Portuguese. They included undergraduates who wanted to jump ahead when they resumed school in the fall, graduate students fulfilling language requirements, business people hoping to make a go of it in Brazil, and a few who said they simply loved the sound of the language and were interested in Brazil. Dana planned to travel to Mozambique to research a sculptor for his senior thesis. Mark, a middle-aged writer who adopted the school name "Marx," said he wanted to be able to converse with his Portuguese-speaking grandmother. Jonathan, a college student majoring in French, wanted to study medieval Portuguese poetry. There were two teachers from Massachusetts towns that had experienced an influx of Brazilian immigrants. Daniel, a student of Spanish, had applied too late to get into the Spanish School and had settled for Portuguese instead, albeit with trepidation: he fretted that Portuguese would ruin his Spanish.
The State Department didn't send anyone to learn Portuguese, but one of the advanced Chinese students I met was in the U.S. diplomatic corps. The Navy dispatched a handful of students to the Chinese program to refresh the skills they'd learned in the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. (DLI is not an immersion program, but it's no less rigorous than Middlebury's: eight hours of class a day for a full year, as one of the alums described it to me.)
The faculties, for their part, embodied a diversity of skills and interests. If you're hired for the summer at Middlebury, chances are you won't just teach language classes. You'll be asked to coach the soccer team or lead culinary workshops or hold forth as a film critic. One of the Chinese teachers doubled as a tai chi instructor. A Portuguese faculty member, Antonio Luciano de Andrade Tosta, coached the volleyball team and directed a choral group.
The day before the Pledge, I had a conversation (in English) with Jianhua Bai, director of the Chinese School. He outlined the program, described the five levels of proficiency, the recruitment of teachers and their training. Then I asked him: Why would anyone want to pay $7,000 to spend the summer studying Chinese in Middlebury when, for about the same price, one could study Chinese in China? He nodded, as if he'd heard this question before.
Bai's Reason No. 1: Students speak more Chinese in Middlebury than they do in China. That's because of the Language Pledge. In China, Bai said—and he was speaking from his experience in language centers there—Americans go to class but then speak English among themselves the rest of the day. In Middlebury, by contrast, it's Chinese, all the time. If you have trouble with a certain intonation or sentence structure or idiomatic expression, chances are a teacher will drill you on it over lunch or on the soccer field or even in the hallway as you go to brush your teeth. The faculty doesn't disappear after several hours of class—they live in the same dorm, and they're likely as not to be present throughout the day.
I heard a similar rationale from both a teacher and a student in the Portuguese School. The student, Gregory, a retiree and one of the more advanced students, said he was learning more, faster, in Middlebury than in Brazil. "I can afford to go to Brazil, and I have friends there," he told me one day in Portuguese, as we walked across campus. "It's not a question of money or of contacts. It's that when I go to Brazil, my friends want to speak English or practice their English. Here, that's not a problem."
Keith Johnson, the instructor I met earlier, has seen his share of Portuguese language programs for Americans in Brazil, and he said those programs inevitably draw many students who aren't really serious about learning the language—they're there for other reasons. Anyone who chooses to come to Middlebury, he believes, is seriously motivated.
The strength of the motivation—at least, in the form of wanting to excel—was evident in the run-up to the Pledge. Most schools give a placement test on the Saturday before classes start, and there was some pre-exam anxiety among the Portuguese and Chinese students who considered themselves intermediate or advanced. What if their test results put them in a level lower than they expected? If you're serious about learning a language, some of your ego is at stake when you subject yourself to a rigorous evaluation by a native speaker. Are you as good as you think you are?
I'm familiar with that sort of anxiety, and no doubt I would have felt it had I taken the Chinese placement test. I opted instead for the Portuguese exam, where I had much less ego to lose—I knew barely enough Portuguese to take the test at all, much less to expect to do well in it. So I was considerably more relaxed than some of my fellow students, who were feverishly reviewing verb conjugations the hour before.
The test, oral and written, posed a variety of scenarios and asked for a paragraph or two in response. (Your car breaks down en route to Middlebury—what do you do? You miss your flight to New York—what do you say to the ticket agent at the airport?) I had no choice but to make the most of the few words and expressions I knew, in applying them to every situation. The last written question asked the examinee to imagine that he or she had been awarded a peace prize and had to address an assembly of diplomats. What to say? The best I could do was to declare that true peace depended on good food, such as grapes, melons, and prawns (the three foods that came to mind from "Portuguese in Three Months").
Somehow my exam performance landed me in Level 2, which was designed for those who knew either a little Portuguese or more than a little Spanish. I suspect that if I'd tried to pull something like that in the Chinese exam, I wouldn't have gotten away with it. The Chinese program has a pretty rigorous reputation, after all, and the instructors I encountered had a serious, no- nonsense manner about them.
This brings me to Bai's Reason No. 2: The teaching in Middlebury is better, on balance, than in China. The instructors here are more experienced and more adept at teaching Chinese to Americans than their counterparts in the old country, many of whom are up to speed linguistically but not necessarily pedagogically. A good deal of thought and research, after all, has been applied at U.S. universities to the question of how best to teach Chinese to Americans.
I'm not in a position to assess the state of Chinese-as-a-second-language teaching in China. I can attest, though, to the quality of the Chinese teachers at Middlebury. I spent one morning auditing classes in Levels 2, 3, and 4, and all of the teachers were first-rate. The classes in Levels 2 and 3, each with more than 30 students, were essentially interactive lectures. The instructors were brisk, exacting-but-engaging, and full of humor—always in full control, and always ready to call on anyone at any time. The students broke into smaller groups led by other instructors in the next hour, with still more dialogues and drills. The Level 4 class, with nine students, was more akin to a seminar—a session that, like the lectures, demanded the students' full attention.
The Portuguese faculty was also top-notch. (Most were natives of Brazil, and the school is heavily Brazil-o-centric.) They were clearly experienced in teaching not just the standard English speakers but those who had studied Spanish or other romance languages. The classroom work in Level 2, where I was assigned, was structured but more open to free-wheeling discussions and digressions than in Chinese Level 2. This wasn't just because of any cultural differences evinced in the two schools, but because the Level 2 Portuguese students were simply able to talk about more things. It was hard to imagine Level 2 Chinese students talking about why Donald Trump or Howard Hughes were averse to shaking hands—a discussion that the Portuguese students wound up having during a lesson that was mostly about interpersonal greetings in Brazil. (Two airborne kisses on the cheeks or three? That's a matter of which part of the country you're in. Or, to use one of the all-purpose responses I learned during my few days in the Portuguese School, depende (pronounced jeh-PEND-jee).
The commitment to forgo English has been a distinguishing feature at Middlebury since the Language Schools' founding in 1915, although it wasn't referred to as a "Pledge" until the late 1920s. The Pledge mandated that students speak only the language they were enrolled to learn, which meant that the students of German, French, and Spanish—the first three languages offered—were linguistically segregated.
That segregation is maintained today among the 1,250 students in nine schools. (The Spanish School is the largest, with more than 300 students; the Portuguese School, just two years old, is the smallest, with about 35.) The decision to make Portuguese the ninth language was made for many reasons, according to Language Schools Dean Michael Katz, among them, a recognition of the growing prominence of Brazil and an effort to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to the popularity of foreign languages in the United States, where enrollment tends to rise or fall with prevailing geopolitical preoccupations. The addition, in 1982, of the eighth language, Arabic, looks prescient in retrospect.
Each school is assigned its own dorm, its own time slot in the dining hall for lunch and dinner. Students of different languages inevitably cross paths—at breakfast, walking across campus, in volleyball games—but they're not supposed to use anything but their target language, however fluent they may be in others.
The Pledge signing is a climactic occasion. It comes two or three days after students have arrived and gotten settled. Even though everyone knows what the Pledge will require, many are nervous about it—and not just the beginners. The afternoon before the signing, for example, I spoke with three college students who were coming off two years of Russian and who nevertheless confessed to some unease. They could discuss Pushkin, but they were at a loss when it came time to talk about doing the laundry.
The apprehensions of the novice Portuguese speakers were probably typical. They worried about being isolated, or about being seen as stupid. They worried, simply, about how they would get by. "I'm a talker," one said. "What will I do when I don't know the words for anything I want to say? Just say, 'Good day, good day, how are you, how are you,' over and over again?"
"This is your opportunity," Carmen Tesser, the Portuguese School director, said just before the Pledge signing, "to take on a new identity, to be someone else. This someone else speaks only Portuguese." She urged everyone to take risks and not to worry about making mistakes. She looked at her watch. "You've got one minute more to speak English." Chatter filled the room, and then it was time.
The event seemed like something of an initiation rite. One by one, she called the students by name. Each one signed, then passed by a receiving line of the faculty, receiving congratulations. It felt a bit like crossing a river to an alien land from which there could be no return. One student said "bye-bye" before signing. Another crossed himself. Finally it was over, and gradually, the chatter resumed—although much of it, now, was of the "good day, good day, how are you, how are you" variety.
The day after the Pledge ceremony, the Portuguese beginners attended four hours of classes, outlined the study regimen, were assigned homework, and were left with a few rudiments of conversation. The rest of the day found them responding with frustration, zealous determination, and humor. Some put on brave smiles and stayed mostly mute. Others talked and gestured endlessly using their tiny vocabularies, coached by any advanced students or faculty who happened to wander by. Still others played their guitars and sang Brazilian songs, or puzzled over the detailed Portuguese instructions on what to put in each of the multiple recycling bins in the lounge and the dining hall. A few students relaxed by drinking up the last of the Guarana, a caffeinated Brazilian soft drink whose name—which they pronounced gutturally, lustily, as if it were some sort of exotic booze—became a kind of an in-joke.
For the beginning Chinese students, jovial linguistic acrobatics were probably too much to expect. I sat down to lunch with three Chinese novices, after their first day's classes, and they had difficulty saying much of anything beyond "What level are you?" I did my best to explain to them in Chinese who I was and why I was there, but alas, they were baffled and soon wandered off with an apologetic "good-bye." I resolved to check back in on them later in the summer.
Indeed, "What level are you?" was probably the most common question I heard from everyone at the Chinese School, when I'd show up seemingly from out of nowhere and start speaking Mandarin with them.
With five levels of proficiency, everyone in the Chinese School seemed a bit more mindful of the stratification than in the smaller Portuguese School, where the classification—at least in most students' minds—was more informal. In Portuguese, there were the beginners—and everyone else.
Tuesday morning at breakfast, barely a day and a half after the Pledge, I witnessed an encounter between two beginning Portuguese students that struck me as remarkable. Marina, a school principal who had come through the first full day of Portuguese looking flustered and a bit haggard, arrived in the dining hall bright-eyed and ready to go. She sat down next to Marx, who was never at a loss for words, even if he didn't know many. Somehow, these two had never met, so now Marx put the Question to her in Portuguese: Why was she here?
Marina nodded. She replied that she worked at a school where there were Portuguese-speaking students and that she wanted to be able to talk to them.
It occurred to me that, after only two days in Middlebury, she already could.
I had to leave Middlebury on Tuesday to take care of some business, but I returned Thursday to finish out the first week. Two days away seemed to bring out the idyllic, other worldly qualities of the place—the Adirondack chairs dotting the landscape, the American elms gracing the main quad, the snippets of intense, incomprehensible conversations overheard during a walk across campus.
As I approached Painter Hall—Portuguese territory—the first person I recognized was Simao, one of the beginners whom the Pledge had rendered relatively mute. Now he was outside, exercising, and when I asked him how it was going, he smiled broadly and said, in Portuguese: "I can speak!"
Beyond Simao, toward the middle of the quad, a volleyball practice was underway. I walked over for a closer look. It was the Russians. They had a couple of serious spikers. An hour later they were still out there, working out. They looked formidable.
The next morning, at breakfast, I wound up sitting with Amalia, a student, and Carmen, the Portuguese School director. Carmen happened to mention that the school's first volleyball match was against the Russians. I said I was worried about that. I'd seen the Russians practicing.
"Don't worry," Carmen said blithely, eating her yogurt. "We'll win."
"The spirit of the Portuguese School will carry us through," Amalia said gamely.
Inter-school rivalries—most evident in soccer and volleyball matches—were a strange mixture of intensity and tongue-in-cheekness. The spectators' cheers were somehow both genuine and full of amusement. The first taste of this came in Mead Chapel during the welcoming assembly, when Michael Katz introduced each of the schools' faculty leaders—to thunderous applause from their respective students, each section trying to out cheer the other.
After the Portuguese classes got underway, no one discouraged the idea that the school had its own personality, drawing loosely from qualities often associated with Brazil—warm-blooded, impassioned, rhythmic, free-spirited, hip.
It was fun to attend a school that watched a different movie every night and discussed it later in the classroom. At a Friday morning lesson, at the end of the first week, I got to hear the beginners debate whether the Wednesday night film—Baker Street, a Brazilian take on Sherlock Holmes—was a comedy or not. The two groups made creative use of their limited vocabularies, and they showed the same mixture of earnestness and good humor as I had noticed in the chapel and on the playing field.
The first volleyball practice, led by Luciano, was Friday afternoon at our end of the quad. He began by running through the terminology—how to say "in," "out," "serve," and so forth, then divided us into opposing teams. With classes done for the week, everyone was full of energy.
Meanwhile, the Russians were back out, and they were hard at volleyball, and tug-of-war, and three-legged races. It was virtually a show of force. Their cheers echoed across the quad, as the little Portuguese School scrambled and joked its way through its own scrimmage.
I wasn't there for the match with the Russians, but Carmen reported in an e-mail that the Portuguese gave them a run for their money in the first game, then got trounced in the second. Oh well, I thought, at least no one got hurt.
The big volleyball news, she said, came the following week—against the Chinese. The Chinese won the first game and had the Portuguese down by 13 points in the second, when the Portuguese staged a miraculous comeback, won the game, and pulled out the next one as well. Pandemonium ensued.
"You would have thought that we won the World Cup!" Carmen wrote. "This, of course, made history in the Portuguese School—first victory ever, in any sport." The school's on-line journal, written by students, gave a breathless account under the headline, "Ganhamos!!!" (We won). Photo coverage included a shot of one of the students doing a "danca sensual" on the sidelines to distract the Chinese team.
Academically, Carmen reported, the novices' spirits hit a low point after two weeks, as expected. (The initial fervor wore off, and they started feeling overwhelmed, she explained.) But they came out of it the third week and were beginning "to unravel the intricacies of our Portuguese language."
They were still unraveling when I dropped back in on them one day during the sixth week, but I was unprepared for their degrees of intricacy.
The Level 1 Portuguese students, whom my memory had frozen in the "Good day, good day, how are you, how are you" stage, were learning the imperfect subjunctive. The mute ones were talking plenty. Daniel jokingly confided that his Spanish was indeed ruined, but he didn't seem too worried. My old Level 2 classmates were drilling each other on irregular participles. Several students had jumped ahead a level, into another class.
Everyone was tired, everyone was grousing about the workload—the exams, the essays, the assigned presentations. Four hours of class, four hours or more of homework every day. Marina, the school principal, said she'd never worked so hard in her life. Sure enough, right after dinner, there she was with a teacher, poring over the draft of an essay.
This was, after all, the penultimate week for the Portuguese School, so maybe they were feeling more pressure as the end neared. And of course, once school was over, they'd have to figure out how to keep their Portuguese up. Marina would practice with her students. Marx would practice with his grandmother. Kevinho would practice by reading Harry Potter—in Portuguese! He was going to have to order it, though, because the campus bookstore didn't have it. The store did have French, German, and Italian editions of Harry Potter, and in fact, the Chinese offerings were the most extensive of all.
The Chinese students were muttering about the workload, too, but the intensive regimen was having an effect—most dramatically on the beginners.
A few weeks before, these students were virtually speechless. Now, when I sat down at their table, they lost no time in putting the Question to me. And now, when I told them who I was and what I was doing, they understood—or seemed to, anyway.
Several weeks after the Portuguese School ended—after he'd had time to recover—I asked Simao what he made of it all.
"The summer was pretty amazing," he replied. "I went in not speaking any Portuguese and left feeling pretty comfortable." He realizes he's still a long way from fluency and he still has a lot to learn, but it was that first step that was the hardest.
If his first big "jump" had been after the first two weeks, his next breakthrough came in the last week or two, "when speaking started to become more comfortable and the smart-ass comments that I normally make were suddenly given a path out of my mind and off my tongue."
"That was fun," he said. "After all, what is a language without that?"
Tim Johnson is a writer and editor in Burlington,Vermont. He profiled psychology professor Michelle McCauley ("Court Sense") in the fall 2003 issue of Middlebury Magazine.