ELT News Think Tank

Panelists: Marc | Peter | Chuck
Date: October 2002

Topic: "What role does imagination play in language learning?"

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Now, with this understanding would you join me back in my imagined corner of rural New York State? It is 1921. There are some things I want to tell you:

My great-grandfather was named Charles Nelson. I am writing this with a fountain pen that once belonged to him. Perhaps he brought it with him from Sweden when he immigrated to the United States? I don't know. I am imagining this. What I know is that English was not his first language and that he struggled with it all his life. He valued education and wanted my grandmother to be anything she wanted to be. She wanted to be a teacher and he sent her to college. He gave her this pen when she graduated and she put it on her desk in a one-room schoolhouse where she first taught kindergarten through high school. Her students were the children of immigrants and many of them had never been to a school before. Most of them spoke English as a second language. It is 1921 and we are in America.

Imagine it is autumn and you are a new teacher in a one-room schoolhouse in rural New York State. The weather has turned cold overnight and when you arrive at school you find the windows covered with ice. Imagine your first task as a new teacher is to build a fire in an old iron stove in order to heat the classroom. Can you imagine warming your hands over this wood fire you have built as the ice melts slowly from the windows? Can you hear the fire crackling in the stove? Can you imagine how my grandmother must have felt that morning while waiting for her first students to arrive? Was she nervous? How would you have felt? I imagine her arranging the desks in the room as the fire she'd built burned hotter. I imagine her sitting at her desk waiting for the day to begin. Maybe she took out this pen and wrote something in her journal. Can you imagine what she might have written?

As I close my eyes for a moment to imagine this I find myself carried away to a moment in the 1960s. I am not yet 10 years old and I am in my grandmother's study without permission. Will you close your eyes for a moment and remember a time when you were small and did something you knew you shouldn't do? Remember that moment as clearly as you can. Where were you? How did you feel about being there? What could you see and hear and smell?

Now imagine me reaching out to pick up this pen off of my grandmother's desk. I know I shouldn't be doing this, but I've never seen a fountain pen before and can't help myself. Imagine me, a small child, taking off the cap of the pen. Imagine the mess I made on my grandmother's desk with the ink I spilled. Now imagine how I felt to look up and see the door open and my grandmother walk in. How would you have felt then? What do you think she said? What did she do?

I'll tell you. As we cleaned up the ink, she told me the story of the pen and why it was so special to her. Then she put me on her lap and placed the pen in my hand. She was old then, and I wonder if you can imagine how soft and wrinkled her hand felt when she then placed it over mine and helped me guide it across a piece of paper to write my name. Can you imagine the sound the pen made, the ticking of the old clock in the room, the smell of my grandmother's rose-scented perfume? How would you have felt to not get the punishment you'd expected? Why do you think I can see this scene so clearly in my mind so many years later?

Does it matter that I am imagining some of this much more than actually remembering it? What if it turns out that in fact my own father gave my grandmother this pen when he returned from Japan after serving in the US Air Force in the 1950s? What does it matter what really happened? We have taken a long trip and come back to see the sky lighten and the sun begin to rise. It is now late autumn. The weather has turned cold overnight, cold enough for me to reach for an old cardigan sweater that my father got in Ginza in 1956. I reach deep into the pocket and there, right there, is a small piece of paper folder up into a tiny square. I pull it out and carefully unfold it. What do you think it is? It's a letter he wrote with this very pen describing what he saw on the Ginza that night. Can you imagine what Tokyo might have been like then? What I wonder is why he never sent the letter. What do you think? Do you think there is in fact a cardigan with a letter in one pocket? There might be, and if there isn't, if we create the imagined reality of one, isn't that enough?

In a few hours I will walk into a classroom where my students will expect me to begin the class as I usually do. Perhaps I'll be wearing a cardigan. There might be an old folded-up letter in one of the pockets and this pen in the other. What I'm sure of is that I'll take a deep breath and look around the room. Then I'll say, "Pull your chairs up close. Listen. Imagine you're living in a foreign country. Imagine it's the middle of the night..."

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Panelists: Marc | Peter | Chuck

Chuck Sandy, Chubu University

Co-author of two series from CUP, Passages and Connect

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