Do You Diglot?

If you’re teaching your classes a foreign language, and you have a fair amount of awareness into how the foreign language works in terms of structure, in relation to English, I have an unusual technique to share with you that you might find of use. It’s called a ‘Diglot Weave’.

‘Di’ means ‘two’ and ‘glot’ means ‘language’ and, just in case you’re interested, it comes from Greek. So a ‘Diglot Weave’ is a technique that uses two languages: the native language of the learners and a foreign, or ‘target’ language, that you’re aiming to teach.

A ‘Diglot Weave’ introduces the foreign language to the students through their own language by way of stories. The stories are carefully crafted, so that a certain number of new words and phrases are presented during the story, in both the context of the story and, hopefully, in appropriate grammatical/idiomatic context too.

It works kind of like this:

"Once upon a time, there was un hombre who lived in una casa pequeña in the great land of Somethingorother. He fell in love with a beautiful mujer who lived in the castle. Unfortunately, the man was pobre and the mujer was the daughter of el rey de Somethingorother..."

OK, I’m not claiming to be a children's fiction writer here, and this is just an example off the cuff, and obviously the story needs to be captivating for the children, but hopefully you can see what’s happening within the story. Certain words and phrases have been replaced with the equivalent in Spanish, but only a select few. The story is then presented to the children, preferably with storybook quality pictures, and the children learn through listening and repetition of the story.

You can make ‘Diglot Weaves’ yourself, as long as you’re careful not to overload the story with too much foreign vocabulary in the early stages of learning. One word or phrase per two or three sentences is probably enough to start with, allowing you to teach 10 such words or phrases per story. The cringe-worthy example I created above is probably a little too overloaded for first stories.

Planned carefully, you could teach quite a lot of target language through this medium. The more captivating stories you create, the more target language you can teach. So far so good. Actually, though, there’s a potential problem but it can be easily overcome if you take the following into consideration:

You need to be aware of the differences between the language you teach and the target language. For example, ‘grande’ meaning ‘big’ in Spanish usually follows the noun it refers to, in this case ‘casa’. So I’ve chosen to take that whole phrase and put in into Spanish. ‘Una casa big’ or ‘una big casa’ have been avoided. Choosing to put just ‘casa’ into Spanish in this case would work, but again, you need to look at what you’re teaching linguistically to ensure you aren’t teaching something that will be detrimental in the long run. Think in terms of phrases and collocations where necessary, and you might be able to benefit from this unusual and unconventional technique as a supplementary teaching medium.