"This was and was not, have a good trip, goldfinch..." The velvety tone of the language spreads soundlessly throughout the classroom. The children's ears open, ready to receive the melody. They are the teacher-grandmothers who revive stories, a project by Rosa Sensat promoted by retired teachers, who travel throughout Catalonia explaining stories, myths, and legends in schools. A magnificent group, made up of dales, speakers of ancestral voices who defend the bare bones of orality. They don't use those modern-day rampoines called that: supports. They don't use text or illustrations, and needless to say, screens. Just voice and gesture. The narration, then, becomes fluid and full of cadences. The power of the language alone is felt, filled with couplets and tongue twisters. The oral transmission of myths and stories connects children to our tradition and brings them into contact with an exceptionally beautiful Catalan language, which these teacher-grandmothers know inside and out.
Orality has to do with two things: the voice of the speaker (the tones, the melody) and the words they use. As the philosopher Miquel Seguró would say in his latest book on the enchantment of the world, knowing how to speak well makes the world possible. In this sense, teachers should speak impeccable Catalan, be able to enjoy the natural and spontaneous pleasure of the spoken language and its music. The pedagogical goal would be to transform spoken Catalan into an aesthetic and ethical experience, of appreciating the world and of civic responsibility.
I'm thinking about these things while I read the data on the results of the Catalan oral tests in 6th grade of primary school and 4th grade of secondary school: "In the latest oral language tests carried out in schools and high schools in Catalonia, there have been three times as many failures in Catalan as in Spanish." I'm not too surprised, because the Catalan language is becoming less vehicular and more academic. This means it is less spoken: the language is neither heard nor used spontaneously. However, I am concerned about a paragraph that says: "According to the marking instructions, a 4th year ESO student reaches a satisfactory level of Catalan even though he makes excessive use of crutch words like Well, Okay either in plan; present quite a few interferences from another language using expressions like we had to go either my house, or suffer from linguistic interferences of very frequent social use such as Well either spikes"I find it unacceptable to consider a damaged language satisfactory. Now, how do we address this problem from a pedagogical perspective, and not just a political-technical one? This is the difficult question we must confront today, and to do so, we must rely on exquisite speaking. The group of teacher-grandmothers knows a recipe harvested in the night, from the resonating of words never heard before, in the echo of a place where the chain of generations exists, of a world enchanted with a polyphony of voices, a magnificent canon of our language, so beautiful and so forgotten.
