The bilingual chess classroom: Some anecdotes and tips

Defining some terms: Monolingual, bilingual, multilingual

“monolingual” is an adjective that refers to one language. A monolingual setting is a setting where only one language is used. If I watch German tv, for example, that’s a pretty monolingual experience. If you are lucky, you get to hear some regional languages or variations or don’t translate a few words or passages of dialogue for a certain effect. There are some German tv channels that also air English or French shows without dubbing them but those are in a minority.

“bilingual” is an adjective that refers to two languages. Thus, a bilingual setting is a setting where two (or depending on the definition or use of the word more than two) languages are used. When I was in school, for example, I had bilingual History classes. The main language of the subject History was English, and we used German as a support language. It’s not like all our English levels would have been good enough to discuss history only in English. In addition, we also had to learn the German terms because you really want to be able to discuss, e.g., German history in German terms, too, if you are German speaking, living in Germany, going to a German school. Another bilingual setting would be a family setting in which (at least) two languages are used. A family using German Sign Language and German, for example, or a family using Turkish and Kurdish.

“multilingual” is an adjective that refers to several languages. You can guess it by now. A multilingual setting is a setting where several languages are used, normally more than two because otherwise, one could use the term “bilingual”. Sometimes, people use “bilingual” to refer to “more than one language”, e.g., because they might not care that much if it’s about two or more languages, they just want to point out, that they are not talking about a monolingual setting. In this article, I want to talk about a bilingual setting in the sense of “at least two languages” with more focus on two languages but this can be extended to a multilingual setting as well.

If you check in with a dictionary or even read some linguistic papers, you’ll see that there are several (sometimes maybe even opposing?) definitions of these terms. These definitions here are the ones, that I want to use for this article. As I said, I want us to start in the same page.

What makes a chess classroom bilingual?

You’ve just read my anecdote of the bilingual History class. For a bilingual chess classroom, it’s possible to simply do the exact same thing. You use one language to do the main stuff and use another language to support communication. You could also scramble around with those two languages. At university, for example, I had classes where students and professors would talk in different languages, e.g., a student would feel more confident talking in language A but was fine with listening or reading in language B. Depending on the people in the room, this can get very multilingual very fast. When I teach German to German learners (and we have to rely in support languages to explain some words or concepts), we sometimes change between English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and the students use their shared languages to explain concepts to each other as well. Turkish, Arabic, Ukrainian, Polish, Filipino, Russian, Czech, Dutch, Farsi, Swedish, Hindi, ... There is really no limit on certain languages, it just depends on what languages are shared languages that could help to explain something. It obviously helps, though, if the teacher has shared languages with their students as they are the one with the job to communicate and explain the concepts at hand. So, a teacher being able to explain concepts in various languages helps for a multilingual setting. But shared languages between the participants of the class, languages that the teacher doesn’t know, are a great tool for peers supporting each other as well!

Again, what does this mean for a bilingual chess classroom? Basically, a chess classroom starts to get bilingual the instance more than one language gets used. Maybe two people discuss the names of pieces in Ukrainian while someone else repeats the names in German. Or we talk about a concept that one person only knows from an online video in English. As someone who teaches several languages and who coaches some chess groups, I live for this kind of thing. You want to tell me the how to call a pin in your language? Yes, please! Did you know that, sometimes, German and Polish or German and Italian can have more similar words for a certain thing than Polish/English or Italian/English?
I once had no idea how to say “hood” in English and explained the concept and said the German “Kaputze”. After that, my Italian speaking friend exactly knew what I was talking about. If you don’t know any Italian, you might not know “cappuccio”, but “cappuccino”, right? Okay, that’s not exactly a chess word but as coffee is internationally famous, this should communicate my point anyways. Let me give you a chess example now.
At some point, I wanted to talk about stalemate. There is “mate” in it what gets some people confused if they don’t know the term stalemate (or if they hear it for the first time out of the mouth of someone with a German accent), this could get confusing as stalemate is not winning the game and we want to evade that as much as possible if we have the better position. While I tried to explain the concept, I also dropped the German term “Patt” for stalemate. Do you know how many languages use some variation of the word “Patt”? You can check the Wikipedia page for “Stalemate” and go through the different languages to get an idea.

This lets me get to this tip: If there is a problem in communication because a person knows the word for a certain thing only in one language, you can try out all words for that concept in all languages that you know and see if any of them works. Maybe you get lucky!

Formalized bilingual setting vs. informal bilingual setting

In my examples, I gave you an idea of formalized and informal bilingual settings. My bilingual History class was planned as an English/German mixed class. When I teach German, we try to use mostly German and then see on the go if we need other languages. That’s more on the lines of a spontaneous bilingual setting, less formalized to be bilingual. I personally love to prepare for bilingual settings, e.g., if I know that a support language will be needed, I check if I can prepare for that. This formalizes the bilingual aspect at least a bit and can make it easier for communication during the class. However, this depends a lot on the class, the participants and the person talking to the people. You can’t learn an additional language for one class where a person speaking that language might participate once.

Handling different language needs

When I communicate with a group (may it be in a teaching or coaching context or in another context), I often encounter people with different language needs. An example that always spooks in my mind is the following: Lets imagine we have a group of people in a local German chess club. People speak German to each other. One person is looking confused and can’t participate in the conversation because they don’t understand a word. That’s not great for that person, right? Okay, maybe the person finds out that they can speak in English to some of the people around. Now, all people talking switch to English, but they miss that another person now doesn’t understand a word because they don’t understand any English. That’s not great for that person either, right? Situations like these aren’t always easy to handle. What I think is important in this context, is to keep in mind that scenarios like these can happen. Only when you remember that different people can have different language skills, you can think about ways to handle these situations. Again, it depends on a lot of factors. What languages do you use? What languages do the other people use? Are there ways to translate between different languages? Can peers support each other with shared languages?

There is also the possibility that some people don’t want to use a certain shared language because they don’t feel confident in a mostly monolingual setting to use another language. To help people feel more at ease with their use of any language, it can help to show some appreciation for the use of other languages. I don’t think the appreciation should make the person feel even more put under pressure, encouraging people to speak can end up in them not wanting to speak at all as encouraging can end up in pressuring – even if you don’t mean to do so. Welcoming the use of different languages and actively working on finding ways to support the bilingual setting of a group, seems to me to be a good way to go with this topic.

Checking out what others do

Have you ever heard that you don’t need to invent the wheel? That this has already been done? Bilingual group settings aren’t exactly new either. Even if you haven’t heard about bilingual chess classes, there are so many events and groups that work with several languages. Have you ever heard about language meet ups? Those are meet ups with language tables. Every table gets a certain language and whoever wants to talk to people in that language goes to that table. The organizers might even try to partner up people with shared languages so that no one has to sit alone at a certain language table as the others speaking that language are sitting at another table with trillions of people. Or have you ever been to an international conference at which several languages are been used? Or some international sports event with teams or even fans from around the continent or globe? Maybe you even have a colleague at your chess club who has some experience in handling these kinds of situations and they can give you some tips or help out.

The visual side of chess: non-verbal communication

A great thing about chess is that the game itself can be played without much use of language anyways. You can give your group some puzzles to solve, you can let them play. Visuals are a great support for communication and chess is great in giving you opportunities to work with visuals. This is part of non-verbal communication. Gestures and facial expressions are parts of non-verbal communication that get talked about a lot. Little figurines like chess pieces and pictures of chess positions and little signs like arrows are part of it, too.

And if nothing works...

And at the end of the day, there is always an online translation tool that gives you, maybe correct, maybe not so correct, translations as well...

References

Wikipedia.org: "Stalemate", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalemate (link checked on August 1, 2024).