How to... Put life into languages

Whether it is talking to dinner ladies or the blind, students can learn more on their year abroad if they stop, look and listen. Pat Leon looks at the benefit of understanding more than just a language.

For movie buffs, 2001 is the year a lone spaceman discovers to his cost that computer Hal speaks a language of his own. For English-speaking undergraduates, living on the Continent can throw up just as tricky communication problems. But 2001 is also the European Year of Languages, whose official opening event is in Lund, Sweden, on February 18-20.

Communication is more than just speaking the lingo. It is about understanding the expressions, body language and culture of people you meet. Traditionally, language courses have focused on grammar and literature, either as a single degree or within an area studies programme. But the steady decline in the take-up of language degrees has led university linguists to start thinking of ways to make them more attractive. One idea is to introduce an ethnography project into the residence abroad part of a student's course.

Modern languages departments across the United Kingdom this academic year received a free course pack Introduction to Ethnography , written by Shirley Jordan and Celia Roberts. The pack is an attempt to spice up the curriculum by introducing modules to train students to be amateur ethnographers.

Jordan, who introduced a course, "Understanding French culture and society", at Oxford Brookes University in 1999, says: "Many teachers come to language teaching through literature. Often teaching is through texts. Ethnography is a novel approach. I read about it and I was hooked."

Ethnographers look at the customs, habits and differences between races and peoples and try to see life from their perspective. They watch, listen and then note what they see and hear, trying to reproduce the voices of their "informants".

The ethnography pack contains materials organised in units to train students in ethnographic methods so that they can do their own fieldwork once they have selected a group they wish to study. Examples of projects so far include studies of Sevillano dancers in Spain, blind students at Marburg University in Germany and carnivaliers in Nice, France.

The pack was developed by Lara, the learning and residence abroad project, which is based at Oxford Brookes. Sponsored by the Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning, it is one of three residence abroad projects that were set up in response to Quality Assurance Agency criticism in 1995-96 of support and guidance for students preparing to go overseas. The newly formed subject centre for languages, linguistics and area studies, based at Southampton University, has organised a workshop and Lara plans to organise others and arrange consultancy visits to language departments to explain how to build the module into the curriculum.

Roberts, senior research fellow in the school of education at King's College London, says: "We are advocating a break with tradition. It involves training people in a method. Students need an extensive period of preparation. But staff also will have a long way to travel."

When Jordan introduced a pilot course at Thames Valley University in 1998, she had just hit on the subject herself and was working only one step ahead of the students. "I was a novice and yet in front of the students I had to act like a professional. I decided to do an ethnographic study with the cleaners. I found it difficult personally and socially. I worked three mornings a week, up with them at 6.30am in their tea break."

But how did the cleaners react? "They thought I was writing a book about their lives and so started to tell me about their lives outside," she says. Jordan had no tapes and note taking became difficult when the cleaners were talking so directly. "I had to rely on memory and write up comments after."

The experience made Jordan realise the difficulties her students might encounter. "Although I flung myself in at the deep end, you can't do that with students. They need to be given a context or a way of looking at the context in which they find themselves. They can't take the attitude, 'I'm a Brit'. They have to see that other people live in different ways and that these ways are just as valid."

Roberts says: "In the early stages you get student resistance because they want direct knowledge of a country. Students like to hoover up information and spill it out. Our approach is very different. We want to slow them down and say 'Here look at this, look at the local, everyday and trivial'."

The course is divided into units that focus on subjects such as families and households, gift giving, sociopolitical systems and identities at national, regional, ethnic and gender level.

"It makes students talk to people," says Roberts, "We had a shy student at Marburg who helped a blind person across the road and, in talking, discovered the city had a blind school. This gave her a topic. She had to be more up-front because the students couldn't see her. She had to ask questions."

Southampton University ran its first ethnography module as a lunchtime non-compulsory class for language students in 1998-99. Eighty students turned up and 20 went right through the year. The next year it was a curriculum option.

Vicky Wright, director of Southampton's language centre, says: "Students often panic about their year abroad and whether it might be aimless. The ethnography project meant a change in the type of work students do abroad."

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Ladies of the Restaurant

Second-year students Tricia Legg and Sue Arquier decided to do their ethnography project together in a Southampton University restaurant before their residence in France. At lunchtimes they watched the "ladies", as they called them, at work.

"We chose the restaurant because it fitted in with our families and timetables," says Sue.

The dinner ladies got curious about why the women were there and started to chat. They talked about who used the café and about their working relationships. When a contractor was brought in to do a time-and-motion study, he found it impossible because the ladies had already worked out their division of labour. Everyone did a bit of everything.

The students had to write an essay on their findings and do a presentation.

How the programme works

The ethnography programme comprises:

• A module the semester before students go abroad introducing anthropology and ethnographic methods, culminating in a "home ethnography" project
• An ethnographic study and field diary while abroad with tutor visits or distance support
• Project write-up with tutor support
• Presentation as part of a final-year module on language development
• A viva on the project as part of the final degree award.