One down, many to go: The year that was and those to come 122

In December Marianne and I meet for the very last time. By now the Centro’s courses are finished and Marianne can reflect on the year that has been. When I ask her to evaluate her learning experience she begins by commenting on what she considers positive outcomes of the year she has spent learning Italian at the Centro. Among these she mentions that, especially during the last weeks of the course, the activities have been even more focussed on developing the students’ speaking skills, and as a result she strongly feels that her pronunciation and her comprehension have improved:

In the last month we’ve probably been doing more talking aloud and a lot more kind of talking in front of others and that’s been quite good. She’d ask you questions and things like that, and usually the answers are one-word answers and so on, But recently she got us to through a dialogue and we would each read put one bit, so that was quite good,

because you realise how far you have come, and you actually sound OK and so I didn’t even get picked up for anything so that was quite good. (M5)

However in terms of language production Marianne expresses a degree of disappointment as in particular she feels that even her rather conservative expectations of the degree of fluency she would achieve by the end of the year have not been met:

I would have thought I would be better (by now). We are at this stage now where you can read Italian and you can make it sound vaguely… You could be understood – by a patient Italian – (laughs) but you can’t do a lot more… So in ten months that’s quite… That’s slow. I think we could have progressed a lot more. And I feel like I haven’t learned anything that useful. I have learned tourist Italian and I mean, I don’t see a lot of value in knowing how to get on a train… I don’t know how to construct a sentence, so it’s really been about learning words. I definitely progressed since the beginning of the year, my pronunciation is much better and my understanding is better, so no, I definitely come quite a long way but what I have learned – and this is my test – with what I have learned I could not go back home to Italy and conduct an everyday conversation. (M5)

Clearly Marianne also has reservations about the kind of language she has learned, which overall has done little to bring her closer to her initial objective to “have the confidence to have a conversation”. In particular, remembering the argument put forward by the Centro’s president at the beginning of the year, which meant to reassure her that she would learn grammar by osmosis with the rest of the course content, Marianne doubts that is indeed happening. This is disappointing; however the only solution to the problem, Marianne believes, would be to self-manage her study and invest more time studying the language outside the classroom, which Marianne is not prepared to do as this would clearly upset the delicate balance between effort, results and motivation that are at the basis of her learning experience:

I probably could have put in a lot more work on my own if I wanted to but then it defeats the purpose of going to lessons, and it’s hard to be self-motivated outside the class. I think that’s the only way you could overcome it. (M5)

Marianne’s unwillingness to invest more of her time and energy in the pursuit of the language is understandable if we consider her focus on ensuring that learning Italian becomes a permanent part of her life (and identity), a focus that is clearly highlighted by the fact that for her the greatest achievement of the year was to complete the course, or

as she puts it “to stick with it”. The value that Marianne places on this feat does not just derive from the sense of accomplishment she gains from it, but from its motivational value: she knows that her commitment to studying the language is inextricably tied to her perception of how much she has already invested in it, and that the longer she studies the more difficult it becomes to abandon the quest. Marianne’s comment about the possibility of continuing her studies on her own confirms this:

I think if John dropped out now, I would not continue on my own, but I think if I had put two or three years into it… Like if I had been doing it for two years, I probably would stick with it regardless, so I think it probably depends on how far I’ve come, before he pulled out. (M3)

To be able to “stick with it” is also particularly important for the first two years in that it represents a good motivational basis for continuing studying in the following years. This, in the end, might just be the reason why Marianne has been so eager to focus on the positive elements of the course and to downplay, ignore or explain away some of the potentially most demotivating aspects, such as the lack of focus on the grammar and the sometime less than stimulating nature of the lessons, all in an attempt to build up a motivational momentum which will allow her to continue learning for years to come. Thinking along this line, Marianne expects the second part of the Centro’s beginners’ programme, which she will be attending next year, to be simply “more of the same”:

I think I see next year now as I just have to get through it to see what is next. I mean I am expecting it to be exactly the same but with the second half of the book. I expect to still be there, stressing my Ts and rolling my Rs (laughs). Anyway it’s not difficult to survive that class. It’s not a big commitment, it’s not anything really. (M5)

However it seems that despite the less that thrilling prospect, Marianne is prepared to invest another year in a very similar if not identical learning environment in order to be allowed to progress to the pre-intermediate level, which she has been told is run by a different teacher, and focuses on developing a wider range of language skills. With her sight fixed on what is to come, Marianne decides to commit herself to next year’s course, in the understanding of course that John will again be at her side for the duration of the whole year.