Self-conscious three point five year old

My three and a half year old son has been saying ‘Voglio un papa Italiano’ recently – this means ‘I want an Italian dad’.  He still wants me to be his dad, luckily, but he would prefer me to be Italian, which is a little difficult seeing as I’m English and all that.  What he really means is that he wants me to speak to him in Italian, which is something I will not do, at least not until he is able to speak English as well as or better than myself.

I have to admit to being a little taken aback by his comments and also somewhat surprised that a 3.5 year old must be feeling a little self-conscious, which is a phase I thought most youngsters went through in their teens.  I was wrong.  He is obviously aware, even at this young age, that he is different in that he has a dad that speaks to him in a language that nobody else he knows uses, apart from all those people speaking on the films I bombard him with, but he does not seem to have made the connection between the films and me just yet.  This is possibly a good thing as it shows that he has some awareness of what is real and what is not.  He is also convinced that he is 100% Italian (He can sing the Italian national anthem quite well!!), which he is really.  It’s a little difficult to explain to a little one that he has mixed-blood.

Oh the problems of being a parent, especially a parent who has a son whose father insists on speaking to him in a funny language too!

Skeletons

While walking down my street I notice them tied to lamp posts or fixed to the upside down U shaped things designed to stop people from parking on the pavements.  Some appear to be in perfect condition.  But the poor objects seem to have been forgotten, no longer cherished, but abandoned by their owners.  Their loneliness does not, however go unnoticed by others who often give them a cruel kick hard enough to cause a once essential part of their anatomies to buckle.  These objects start to look a little unwell and, if they had not truly been abandoned before, then they surely will be now.  And they are.

They sit there looking forlorn and pieces of them gradually start to disappear.  First the saddle rides off into the sunset, followed by someone putting a stop the existence of the brakes, next the chain becomes the missing link, the unguarded mudguards dematerialise , the pedals are spun off somewhere, the sprockets go for a run and finally the wheels revolve away into nothingness.  All that remains is a destitute naked frame,  which sits there looking rather like a modern sculpture that never made it to the Tate, and lingers for some months more until it too mysteriously goes down the tube.

After a short period yet another bicycle will appear, often in the same place as the skeleton which resided there before it.  The cycle, if you will excuse the pun, is repeated and another wheel is kicked and the slow process of disassembly over time begins once more.

The bicycles subject to this process of ‘delayed theft through disassembly’ look ever so sad, almost as if they are some kind of poor defenceless animal.

Alas there is no society for the prevention of cruelty to bikes in Milan, Italy.

Language level test

Quite a while back I cooked up a 90 question multiple choice test to help me divide groups of between 30 and 50 people into two or four sub-groups.  My test has proved to be very effective and certainly speeds up the process of dividing classes into groups.

The test attempts to assess both grammar knowledge and an individual’s ability to use commonly used English expressions and structures – use of English.  It is specifically aimed at Italian learners and has a focus on so-called business English.  The test takes around an hour to complete – much less if someone knows English well and more time if someone is at a lower level.  While I won’t explain exactly how it works, because I would quite like to market it someday, I would like to say that it bucks the trend as far as multiple guess tests go, possibly because multiple-choice tests are not really in widespread use here in Italy.

The test also allows me to identify those who are border-line so I can carry out a short interview and is quite good at identifying people who have picked up the language through using it, rather than having studied all the rules and then gone abroad somewhere to perfect their conversational skills.  I used to incorporate an extra comprehension test, but abandoned it after a while because I found that there was a high correlation between those who scored highly on the multiple choice parts and their ability to understand the spoken word.  I have had some circumstances in which the results have proved to be highly inaccurate, but I can count them on the fingers of one hand.  I have tested over 1200 people over the last four years, which means the accuracy is more than acceptable to me.  Sometimes people do ask to be moved between groups but this is usually a reflection of their confidence and the fact that some ambitious students think that they can learn more from being in a class of higher level learners.  If they have the right motivation and are not too far behind, I agree to movement between groups, but only within the first two or three lessons.

I believe that the test could become more accurate and could even be used to establish levels and progress, so if anyone out there is interested I’d be happy to discuss how it works and how it could be improved.  It could easily be adapted to learners other than Italians, I reckon and it could also be modified to test either more general or more technical varieties of English.  I’m sure it is not perfect, but it works very well for me – but then I did design it, so I understand how it works.

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