Had the pleasure of watching Nancy Llewellyn begin learning Afrikaans over lunch. She uses a method pioneered by Evan Gardner known as “language hunting.” She asks, in English, how to say “what is that?” in the target language. Once she had it, she then used the phrase over and over again to learn the words she wanted to learn. So she pointed to a fork on the table at lunch and asked, “Wat is det?” “Dat is a verk [furk],” came the response, and then she had another word. Soon she learned how to ask “War is de verk?” putting it on the table. “De verk is ob de taffel.” (You must forgive my spelling of Afrikaans, as we were learning the language without seeing it written.) Then she would put it under the table: “Nu war is de verk?” “De verk is onder de taffel.” You can thus create all kinds of setups in order to isolate certain concepts and formulations – singular and plural, hot and cold, under and over, inside and outside, etc. She was learning Afrikaans entirely at her own pace, in a way that was entirely memorable, and the pedagogical method was in the student, not the teacher. Talk about teaching students how to learn – Gardner’s method really is that.
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