When is a Foreign Language Not "Foreign"?

I walked into my inner-city high school French One class, and started out by distributing textbooks, with the suggestion to "look through them while I finish giving them out". When I put the last book into a student's hand, I looked up to see what I always saw the first day of class - a sea of faces with expressions ranging from puzzlement to dread, or even terror. I knew what they were thinking. "How am I gonna pass this class?" "Uh-oh" and even "Get me outta here" Even in my next class, Spanish One, I saw heads buried in well-used texts, eyes bulging at the written form of a language they heard in the street, or even in some of their homes. Thoughts of an "easy A" gave way to despair. But I knew I could turn anxiety into self-assuredness in the fifteen minutes remaining in the class period.

In my French class I wrote the following on the blackboard. "Take out a sheet of paper and translate the following into English", followed by a list of twenty French words starting with la télévision, le téléphone, le théâtre, and le cinéma, and ending with la biologie and l'histoire. I was met with blank stares, and silence, except for the usual sassy "Yo miss, how you 'spec us to do dis?" "Oh, I forgot," I said with a smile "ignore the "le" and "la" and any marks above the letters (I would confuse them with lessons on articles and accents later that week).

Now we were cooking. Pens were scratching paper. "Yo, dis is easy!", "Oh man, I can do it!" "Miss, count dis as a quiz!" Most of them would have scored a perfect hundred percent. Magic? Hardly. The same scene occurred in my Spanish class later on, This time, el televisor, el teléfono, el teatro, and el cine topped a list that culminated with la biología and la historia. Again, feelings of impending failure quickly morphed into smug confidence. A miracle, right. NOT! I simply introduced my students to "cognates"