Deconstructing and Feeling

"LET'S DECONSTRUCT THE NEWS!". One of the sentences which has stroken me the most this month, "DECONSTRUCT, people... remember that you have to DE-CONS-TRUCT". So in the last four weeks I've been deconstructing absolutely everything I had in front of me, from the BBC1 news bulletin, to the platform of Northwick Park tube station. It is true that you get to understand your environment much better, through an almost scientifical point of view, like if you were some sort of engineer.

I realised that deconstructing was one of the most useful observation technique, and probably the most efficient way to improve your own skills. I teach French to a 25 year old English girl, and I began to use that 'deconstruction' thing in my lessons. I recently noticed that people who only speak English find it really hard to learn another language because their mothertongue is not as logic as other indo-european languages can be. I go to an Italian class in London, and I can see that it's a long and complex process to make them get the gender and number rules for example. So my objective was to make sure that my student could understand the mechanisms of French language. I was struggling sometimes to make her accept the idea that you have to say "she" in French when refering to a table or a house... Sounds silly? In fact it is (relatively) logical. So today I thought: let's start from the beginning, and as I had this hallucination that my TV lecturer's face was appearing through the window, I told her "LET'S DECONSTRUCT!". And so we did, and so it worked. She saw the light emanating from the verbs, subjects, accusatives and circonstances laying in the sentences. And then she smiled with satisfaction.