Michelle Naranjo: The French Dream

From the age of eight, my mother, like any good parent, pushed me to play a sport or play an instrument or any other activity that would benefit me in the future. Sports didn’t stick due to my crystal-like ankles shattering with any sudden movement. My guitar classes ended quickly, too, because my teacher only allowed me to strum about Jesus and I wanted to be the next Avril Lavigne. Then, there was French. My mother worked as a janitor at high school and occasionally would take me to work with her so I could sit in on French classes with the “older kids.” After class was over, I stayed and practice my French with the teacher who would generously give me French books and little pamphlets for me read while my mother finished cleaning. This is where my interest for French culture and language began and thirteen years later; I’d be on a flight to Toulouse.

By the end of my semester abroad I was to complete my French coursework at a B2 level and take the DELF certification exam. The experience was to live, eat, and breathe as a French for four months and come back home fluent. But, what I didn’t expect was to form real relationships with others.

Significantly, I was one of two Americans at LangueOnze, the language school I attended, which made the cross-cultural experience much more appealing. Everyday I spoke with someone from a different country. Everyday I spoke English, Spanish or French and found my tongue twisted just to get a simple hello out. And everyday I heard my friends tell me a new story about themselves, about why they were in Toulouse and why they were learning French. There were two Argentinean brothers were there to go to school and play rugby. Some worked in industries, like tourism and information technology, where a lot of the communication was done in French or the clientele were francophone. A handful eighteen and nineteen year olds were taking gap years before college. The older crowd, in their mid-twenties, was looking to fill a language requirement to work abroad and even men who were trying to get out of military service by studying away.

Among this group, I met Alejandro, my Spaniard neighbor following in his brother’s footsteps to speak another language and become a valuable asset to the Spanish workforce. In our daily conversations, we compared our generations in perspective to our home countries. He is part of Spain’s “lost generation” and as for me, I’m considered part of the “spoiled millennials.” We bonded over our broken French, my strange Spanish accent and his elementary English. Our time together proved to me that as multicultural and politically correct I believe myself to be as an American with Colombian parents, there is still so much left to learn, see and do in this world that a semester in France cannot begin to convey.

As the exam date approached he motivated me to continue studying, and practice my oral skills for the assessment. To me the exam was something extra that the study abroad director had suggested when I was signing up for class in August, but to Alejandro, this certification would open up doors to work in numerous countries in the European Union, Canada and even Africa. Unfortunately, I failed to realize that. The weekend before the exam, I had spent it in Sevilla speaking Spanish for five days. I was reading and tediously correcting my faulty grammar skills, but put off any verbal work. Unless I was at the dinner table with my host family or speaking with another student who didn’t speak English or Spanish, I did not utter French. The failure to put most of my time working on my oral skills was evident by the time December 11th pulled around.

My favorite excuse to use at the time was that because I was an American, my exam and assessment was weighted heavier than other students. A theory that I continue to stand by and will perhaps be the topic of my hypothetical essay (Anglo-Saxon Languages: the French Perspective), but as a student of communications I am aware and reiterate daily the importance of communicating with others. Nonetheless, from failures we learn. By not receiving my certification in B2 French, I realized how important multilingual communication is in bridging the language gap in the global community today. I became inspired by this can-do attitude among my Toulousian friends, who did not have a DELF certification, but were going into international relations with what French they did have to improve global wellbeing. As disappointed as I was in myself once I received my results, I viewed it as a motivation to continue to strive to better myself and not give up with the French language.

While abroad, my friends back home who already graduated found it hard to find a job in their field. With a bachelor’s degree, a majority of them were glorified nannies or working the same job they had in college but full-time. Alejandro is two years older than me and has his masters in architecture but he’s currently only able to find internships to fill the work void in his career. My time in France and among other students from all corners of the world taught me the value language could have in the workforce. Young people today need to transform themselves into something more than just their degree. We need to become flexible, we need to multitask effectively, we need to have exceptional technological knowledge, and we need to learn how to communicate with others. Whether it is a co-worker or an international liaison for their company abroad. Becoming multilingual in today’s economic workforce is a prime asset for student graduates.

In a nutshell, there are times where I become discouraged in my abilities. It may be from coming up seven points shy on my DELF exam or hearing other students’ thought-provoking research or falling straight to my doom and breaking a tooth because of my fragile ankles. But, I remind myself, you are multilingual. You can switch from French to Spanish to English in a matter of seconds. You can transmit messages to a variety of people. Because as a little girl you found another language and did not give up the incentive to explore and continue to learn. In school, my mediums of communication are images and words and we are reiterated daily a Chinese proverb that say, “One picture is worth a thousand words.” But imagine this: that word count could multiply if you have two or more languages in your vocabulary.




Michelle Naranjo is an honors Mass Communications and French student at Lander. She was born in Greenville, South Carolina but her parents are from Medellin, Colombia, where she spent many of her summers growing up. She studied abroad in France during the Fall of 2015 to complete her french coursework for the university. She graduates in December of 2016. After her tenure at Lander, she plans to involve herself with organizations outside of the States and apply to graduate school for international relations.