When Elizabeth Mack took a break from the University of Texas for a semester abroad, she elected to study in Provence, France.
Tough assignment. Dreamy landscapes. Delectable cuisine. Lots of art. People open to a smart, young, vivacious lover of French culture from Texas by way of Michigan.
Mack’s deliriously full immersion in the French way of life informed her current project, the Freestyle Language Center, which teaches French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese to Austinites through basic classes, wine tastings, museum visits and something called Saturday Cafe, where students gather for coffee and croissants to practice casual chatting.
Meeting mainly at the Khabele School on Rio Grande Street, this diverting program went from four students to more than 80 in little more than a year. She now hires top UT graduates to handle the flood of students.
“It needs to be social,” Mack says of language acquisition. “It needs to be fun. And it needs to be frequent.”
Finding words for it
Mack’s family balanced intellectual interests. Her father is a retired chemical engineer, her deceased mother an artist. At high school in Houston’s Memorial area, she ran track, was elected to student council and excelled at academics.
“I’ve always been a dork,” she admits. Mack also idolized her brother, now a medical doctor in Chicago. “Whatever he did, I did. I took French because he took it.”
The family sense of proportion was maintained at UT, where Mack majored in French and also international business. After her first adventures in France, Mack signed on with the New York marketing wing of L’Oreal beauty products company, partly because they offered tutors in Paris.
“You have to learn the language,” she’d tell her American co-workers. “You could get ahead if you learned their language.”
Mack married at 27. “That’s what people do. Right?” she thought. “Parents expect it. Friends expect it.”
Divorced, she now raises two teenage daughters. After spending seven years at home with them, she headed to graduate school.
“I asked: What do I love? I love French. What’s in Austin? UT,” she says. “I’ll get a master’s degree in French. It became my real focus after maturing.”
Mack’s family, however, was taken aback by her decision to specialize in 18th-century French literature. She hadn’t looked ahead to the next career step. Mentors at UT had the answer: “Are you crazy? You need to be teaching.”
Mack loved her next job as a lecturer at Texas State University. After five years, however, she hit a motivational wall.
“That sort of teaching is not always effective,” she says. “Nobody comes out speaking the language. And a good part of the class didn’t want to be there.”
So what else could French teaching look like? Something that was, at the same time, fun and effective?
With veteran Margaret Dunaway, who devised the basic teaching model, Mack started the Freestyle Language Center (Dunaway is no longer involved).
Collaborating with the leaders at the Khabele School, who take a global tack on teaching, Mack set up eight-week sessions, taking cues from potential clients for the language selection, so far all Romance tongues.
“It’s demand driven,” she says. “Sometimes German is requested. I wouldn’t rule out Chinese, Japanese or Arabic.”
For $395 a semester — the center offers various reduced rates, too — students usually take two core classes and attend up to three special events each week. Sessions are built around themes. This summer, for instance, the commanding idea is “summer games.” Mack hopes to add trips abroad by this time next year.
During a Freestyle tasting at the Wine Merchant on West Sixth Street a few weeks ago, students of various ages and capacities asked questions and made comments, partly in English and partly in Spanish.
The wine expert was Joshua Marcoux, who looks and sounds like the sharp economics graduate student that he is. The language expert was Lorna Torrado, also a graduate student but in the Spanish-Portuguese program.
Her loose, animated style and exact pronunciation marks her as a popular teacher. Both interacted easily with the students who became incrementally more fluent as the evening progressed.
“Linguists say socializing is the way we learn,” she says. “But few people teach that way.”