Before and After

Preposition usage is one of the most difficult aspects of learning a new language. When I studied French as an undergrad, my colleagues and I were always confused about which verbs require de after them and which require à. There was no rule for the choice, only an ambiguous guideline about the intent of the verb. Very French.

English is crazy with preposition use. I once made the family I lived with in France laugh wildly by running down a partial list of how the meaning of the verb to get changes with different prepositions: we get up in the morning, get down with our bad selves, get in on a deal, get out of work, get over a loss, get under the covers, get around a problem, get to the point, get behind a candidate, get out in front of a crisis, but can’t get next to you, girl! Get it?

So I can understand how confusing prepositions are for new speakers of English. I helped Rebecca’s class work on before and after this week.

First, I wrote out the entire lower-case alphabet on the white board.

“What is this?” I asked, pointing to the three lines of letters.

Silence and blank stares at first. Then a chorus began:

“A, b, c, d, e, f, g…”

They ran through the whole thing in clashing cacophony, each of them pointing in the direction of the board while reciting.

“Yes, very good!” I said. “But what is this called?”

I waved my hand in a circle toward the board, trying to indicate the group of letters as a whole.

Blank silence. Then:

“A, b, c, d, e, f…”

So they know how to recite the alphabet, but they don’t really understand how the alphabet works. I don’t think they quite get the idea that letters are the moveable, functional components of words.

If I had to learn Chinese or Arabic, I wonder how long it would take for me to recognize the individual elements of the written characters, rather than merely memorizing whole characters by rote. Probably a very long time.

The exercise Rebecca had chosen for the day’s lesson looked fun and simple at first. A photocopied page from a workbook showed five exercises that looked like mini crossword puzzles, with three vertical columns and differing numbers of horizontal rows in each exercise. The far left and far right columns each contained letters from the alphabet that are one letter away from each other, with the middle column left blank. For example, if the left column contained a c, the right column would contain an e. The object was to fill in the blank center column with the letter that occurs between the two other letters in the alphabet. In this example, the center column should be filled in with d, because d comes after c and before e. The letters filled in would form a word. The exercise enforces the memorized alphabet, as well as the two new prepositions before and after.

Simple, right?

I put a copy of the exercise sheet on a clipboard and held it against my body so the class could see it.

“Let’s look at number one,” I said, using my dry-erase marker as a pointer. The first exercise was also the longest, with a seven-letter word. And the first letter was something of a stumper.

“What letter comes before b and after nothing?” I asked, as if nothing were a linguistic concept they already knew. The worksheet showed a blacked-in square to indicate nothing. For those of us who have filled out official forms all of our lives, the black-shaded box was clearly a representation of nothing. But to Bhutanese farmers with little or no formal education? How can a black square mean nothing?!

On the white board, where I had also written before / after underneath the alphabet, I drew an empty line before the letter a. Then I drew exaggerated arrows from the b to the a, and from the empty line to the a, while I repeated the question.

“What comes before b,” exaggerated arrow, “and after nothing?” Then I tapped my marker on the letter a, hoping they might even guess from my clues.

A heated debate in Nepali erupted at the table, with much pointing at the white board and the papers, and generally furrowed brows. I repeated a few times and finally drew a box around the letter a.

“It’s a, right?” I said. “So write a in that first square.”

I wrote the letter in the square on my form, and the students did the same, their Nepali conversation continuing. I sallied forth.

“Now,” I said pointing to the second row. “What comes before e and after c?”

More exaggerated arrows; more heated, unintelligible debate.

Finally, Saraswati, a woman about my own age with deeply creased skin and a blank spot where one of her font teeth should have been, seemed to have figured out the code.

“D?” she said, smiling tentatively.

“Yes!” I almost jumped on her. “That’s right! D comes before e and after c! So we write the letter d in the box.”

This is progress, I thought! The third letter was exactly the same as the second, so I naively thought it might make a few light bulbs go on. I was overly optimistic.

“Okay, the next one is the same, so what comes before e and after c again?”

Le, one of the younger students who insisted on keeping his hand over his mouth when he spoke, ventured a guess: “T.”

“What is it, Le? I couldn’t hear you. Would you move your hand, please?”

“T!” he said again, more confidently. He also pointed at the white board with his pencil, as if to punctuate his answer.

“No, it’s not t,” I said, tracing my arrows again and drawing a box around the letter d. “It’s the same as the one we just did.”

“S?” Saraswati tried again. That’s when I realized they were totally confused and simply guessing random letters.

We continued through all seven letters, ever so slowly. I went around the table, pointing to the boxes on individual papers, hoping somehow it would sink in. Most of the students had an incorrect letter in at least one box, even after I showed them mine with the correct answers on it. Saraswati had all the correct letters filled in on hers, but still couldn’t decipher the word. Of course, she couldn’t; it was vertical. We don’t write words vertically!

So I drew seven short lines on the white board in a row and asked Saraswati to come up and write her answers in them. After she wrote out a-d-d-r-e-s-s, I asked her what the word was.

Blank stare.

Slowly running my finger under the word, I pronounced it for them.

“A-aa-d-rr-ess.” I intoned slowly. “What word is that?”

And finally the light bulb.

Saraswati’s brow cleared and she smiled, covered her face with her hands for a second. “Address,” she said, as if to say oh, yeah, now I see it.

We got through one more word, city, before class time was done.

“Okay,” I said. “We’re finished for today. We’ll work on the rest of these next week.”

To my amazement, they all stayed at the table instead of getting up to go to the bathroom or get their lunches from the refrigerator. Bhim even held up his paper to me, pointing at the next exercise with his pencil, as if he really wanted to continue with this.

“No,” I said. “We’re finished for today. Next week we’ll do more. Or you can work on these at home, if you like.”

When he finally understood that we were done, we smiled his shy, boyish smile and nodded.

Before I started volunteering with these ESOL classes, I think I had a certain idea about how language education works, about how language works. Tutoring other college students only reinforced that idea: memorize the components of the language—vocabulary and verb conjugations—then move them around to express ideas with increasing speed and complexity over time. My idea of language was very linear.

With refugees, however, nothing is linear. They have memorized the sound of certain phrases by rote, for example “whatisyouraddress.” But they have no idea which part of those sounds has the meaning of address. And, likewise, they seem to not fully understand how the letters of the alphabet are not just a string of memorized marks and sounds, but the building blocks of words.

A big part of this is, of course, a culturally skewed perspective. I come from a family and a country that values formal education, and that education is parsed out very linearly: alphabet and numbers, then sentences and simple math, then paragraphs and algebra, then books and calculus. Much of Bhutan is still agrarian; many of our refugee students never used pencils before coming to the US. I'm sure my students could teach me a lot about gardening, if only I could speak Nepali.

I am going to pursue this exercise to its conclusion next week, no matter how long it takes us. And I might go shopping for magnets that are the letters of the alphabet, so the students can more clearly see how letters move around to form words, but are also part of the entire group. (That was my husband’s idea.)

Just like I did in French, I will get up every morning, get down to business, get over my fear of teaching, and try to get it right. I know that’s what these refugees are doing, even if they don’t have the vocabulary for it.