Péter Medgyes

Speaking in Tongues

...

Meanwhile, I also had my first steady relationship. When I was offered the opportunity to spend a year in Moscow to study Russian, I turned it down for fear of losing my girl-friend during such a long absence. Instead, I chose a one-month grant to Kiev, but even this proved to be too long - she broke it off two weeks after I had gone. I was still a student when I tried my hand at translating and submitted my first piece to a publisher. I was told that my translation had not yet reached the level of editability. Never again have I given translating another chance.
Although I didn't intend to be a teacher, a condition for graduation was to complete a one-month period of teaching practice in the country. I happened to land in the lovely town of Sopron, near the Austrian border. My teaching duties involved two groups of secondary school students with an overwhelming majority of girls. Their eyes were glued on me, a strapping young man to replace Aunt Aliz, who would doze off as soon as I started the lesson, only to wake up for the bell and say: "Splendid! You're a born teacher, Peter." On graduation, I was offered seven teaching jobs - this had much less to do with my competence than with the fact that I was a male in a female profession and that English was more and more in demand. I accepted a job in the school named after a great Hungarian poet and Holocaust victim, Miklós Radnóti.
At this point, I was haunted by the spirit of Dr Koncz one more time. The headmaster signed my contract in June with the proviso that I take up German at university, because he was short of qualified German teachers. I was directed to the Chair of the German Department, who advised me with a stern face to study der, die, das during the summer and come back for the entrance examination at the end of August. I spent the whole summer poring over Deutsche Grammatik, but no notification about the exam came along. I lay doggo. The school-year began, and there was still no news. At the end of September, my conscience urged me to make a confession to the headmaster. It took him a while to realise what I was getting at. He told me that the situation had changed in the meantime, so I need no longer worry about German. I was terribly relieved, but now as I come to think of it, I believe it was a missed opportunity, as my German was thus left to rust for ever. A real shame for someone who lives in Mitteleuropa and claims to be a language expert into the bargain.
French is another sore point. For several years, a fellow teacher in the school taught me French and in return I would give him English lessons. When I was sent in as a substitute to cover a French lesson, I began to talk to the pupils in French. They responded at a level way beyond mine. My command of French has only deteriorated since then.
Nor has my Russian fared much better. Well-known for the high level of Russian instruction, Radnóti School had many excellent Russian teachers, many of whom were native speakers of the language. Albeit deprived of the opportunity to teach Russian, at least I had the chance to practise it with them. My speaking skills in Russian have since shrunk to a minimum.
Thus there was nothing else for me to teach but English and, like everyone else, I was teaching from the one and only mandatory coursebook written by Hungarian authors. I found this book so boring that I decided to supplement it with extracts from British publications. Rewarded by my pupils' (and their parents') positive feedback, I finally chucked the Hungarian book altogether and began to use imported books only. One day I was summoned by the school principal. He said that my illegal use of foreign books had been brought to the attention of the Ministry of Education. My heart sank. Then he asked, "Do you find those books any better than the compulsory ones?" I stammered that I did. "Well, you should know. You're the expert," the principal said. "Carry on. I'll take care of the rest." I carried on as before, unruffled under his protective wings.
I had been a teacher for five years when I had my first chance to go to Britain. That British Council summer course for teachers of English was a real experience: I was suddenly faced with the harsh reality that my listening comprehension skills were far too limited to understand an accent as thick as the Geordie spoken in the north of England. On my first day I went for a walk in the city centre and I lost my way. I stopped a man to ask the way back to the university campus. As I couldn't make head or tail of his explanation, I repeated the question. Seeing that I was still at a loss, he made a third try, but then shrugged his shoulders and went on his way. My subsequent travels confirmed that indeed English was spoken with enormously different accents throughout the world.
I no longer made a big fuss about the pronunciation of my pupils or that of my own, for that matter.
I was in my late twenties when I was commissioned to write my first coursebook, followed by many more for both primary and secondary pupils. In all fairness, my work was not hindered by political dictates; while I was never forced to include specific content, I instinctively knew what not to include. The most serious objection of a political nature was raised by an editor who insisted that I delete the word "godfather" from my text, because it had religious connotations. I complied. In general, English teachers were considered a suspicious lot, even in the era of "Goulash Communism" of the 80s. When I applied to the Hungarian Ministry of Education with the idea of establishing an English teachers' assocation, I was flatly rejected. I realise now that my plea was considerably weakened by the unfortunate choice of an acronym - ATAK.
The coursebook, Linda and the Greenies, which was a great success in Hungary, was written for 8 to 10-year-olds. This is a story about a teenage girl who is kidnapped by the Greenies to teach them English. The Greenies are cute little monsters, who live under the ground, mostly in the urban sewage systems, and speak a language called Ündürixi. The book introduces about a dozen Greenie words, such as Hömöpö apor Ündürixi, and flik primuli/primur (translated as Welcome to Greenieland and silly girl/boy, respectively). While the book went down pretty well with the children, some parents wrote angry letters, calling me a flik primur, for teaching their kids nonsense words. I replied by arguing, in all seriousness, that Ündürixi was a language in its own right and the only reason why they had never heard of it was that they had not yet been to Greenieland. This must have convinced them that I was mad, not just silly.
I wrote most of my coursebooks in collaboration with others and frankly it was not always easy to get along with them. One elderly collaborator was convinced that a coursebook must be boring lest it should divert attention from the language itself. He not only strove to be dull in the bits that he produced, but systematically killed whatever humour there happened to be in my parts.

Péter Medgyes
is Deputy State Secretary in the Hungarian Ministry of Education, responsible for international relations and the promotion of foreign language education. His publications include The Non-Native Teacher (Macmillan 1994; winner of the Duke of Edinburgh English Language Book Competition); Changing Perspectives in Teacher Education (Heinemann 1996, co-edited with Angi Malderez; The Language Teacher (Corvina 1997); Criss Cross (Hüber Verlag 1999) and Laughing Matters (Cambridge University Press 2002)