Locating Language Teaching
French-Moroccan-Canadian comedian Gad Elmaleh has this bit about learning English that is well-known to Francophone comedy enthusiasts. In it, Emaleh pokes fun at a typical English class exercise in which students track the domestic movements of an unknown but named protagonist Brian through a series of questions and answers. The exercise begins with a question posed by the teacher: “Where is Brian?” This question is followed by a canned response from the students: “Brian is in the kitchen.” The Q&A location exercise continues by extending to questions about Brian’s family members, then into other question-answer sets about locating not people but objects (e.g., an umbrella).
Emaleh describes these language lessons as “pointless questions & automated responses,” and “stupid sentences [you must] repeat”—locating this teaching method in the rote learning of decontextualized everyday language.
English comedian Eddie Izzard has her own bit about language learning. In her special Dressed to Kill, Izzard talk about learning French. Like Emaleh, Izzard uses the impractical French sentences she memorized as her source material to describe a ridiculous scenario in which she must bring a table, chair, cat, mouse, and monkey to a forest so she can work her memorized sentences in an interaction:
« La souris est en dessous de la table ». [The mouse is under the table.]
« Le chat est sur la chaise ». [The cat is on the chair.]
« Le singe est sur la branche ». [The monkey is on the branch.]
Izzard too locates decontextualized, rote memorization in these language lessons that become entertainingly absurdist in this bit specifically because of their lack of relevance to actual communicative use.
These two examples lead me to the following locational questions: