Speak with your mouth full, but in a foreign language

Language and culture in the kitchen

Because it evokes conviviality, hospitality, and exchange, but also because it requires coordination and following instructions, cooking is a particularly rich space for communication. Language teachers have understood this. It's a useful recipe for working on grammar and vocabulary.

But cooking also provides an opportunity to address an entire cultural component: lifestyles, geography, agriculture, family organizations,...

Inngredients and Recipes

Paola Rebusco's videos on MIT's website show us a language class around a table...cooking. The teacher wears an apron, and there are more dishes than notebooks. There are utensils, an oven and hotplates in the room. But one would look in vain for a video projector!"

Her course "Speak Italian with a mouth full" is composed of 13 sequences. More English is spoken than Italian, but participants use the words in context, for action, and coordinate.

The combination of language and culinary skills produces a relevant mix. The many training centers that offer courses based on this concept attest to this, such as LangueOnze Toulouse.

Culture and Lifestyle

To convince yourself that cooking fosters the discovery of a culture and a way of life specific to a country or a city, just read Guillaume Long's books, or follow hisblog. "A boire et à manger" features the author. Regularly, he takes us on vacation, meeting people who share his passion for cooking.

The Lonely Gourmet, a comic strip by mangaka Taniguchi, also highlights this connection between cooking, dining and culture. A Japanese middle manager wanders from small restaurant to small restaurant. Through his gustatory experiences, he reveals to us some facets of Japan in the 1990s.

Fork and Backpack thus offers a animation in the form of a culinary travelogue. She invites us to build our own travel book, by picking elements from hers.

Geography and lifestyle

The travel book allows us a transition, from culture to a geographical approach. We don't eat the same thing, we don't cook the same way in the north or south of a country. Certain traditions continue to weigh.

It is impossible to talk for a few minutes about cooking or gastronomy without mentioning the places where they are prepared. Fork and Backpack thus offers a animation in the form of a culinary travelogue.

Learning a Language by Doing

Researchers in linguistics and computer science at Newcastle University have studied this method of learning languages based on cooking. We often learn languages by repetition, by learning lists. This learning is disconnected from everyday life. Instead, they recommend learning language through a meaningful activity that forces the use of language, rather than repeating words.

A meaningful activity that is based on a set of specific instructions? An activity that uses nuanced vocabulary? An activity that allows for challenge, while still being fun? The Newcastle researchers quickly found it: cooking. But there's nothing to prevent investing in other fields: "fixing your bike in German," "gardening in Spanish," "taking pictures in Italian."

Fixing, consolidating

But there can be a great danger of putting a higher stake in the success of a recipe than in learning the associated points of syntax and vocabulary. Maryse Morin, an Italian language trainer, used this detour through the kitchen with a group of 7-8 year olds. She insists on the fact that learning must be fixed, consolidated with tests, multimedia animations, reformulation activities...

So crossword puzzles made with the classic Hot Potatoes help to freeze learning. More complex, a flash-based animation allowed children to re-do the recipe, step-by-step.