The great
language teacher Michel Thomas often pointed out that when you learn another
language you often learn more about your own. The same seems to apply, at least
in my case, when teaching your own language. I’m currently teaching English to
Spanish adults through an eccentric language agency based in Madrid. All the
material they give us to use seems to be prepared by a non-native speaker or a
native speaker who is very very drunk all the time. Nearly every page is littered
with typographical errors and even though my colleagues and I repeatedly point
these out the agency is more interested in haranguing us about doing pointless
paperwork that no one ever reads and taking forever to pay us. Still, it seems
that pointless paperwork pretty much plagues most educational environments. (One
of the most embarrassing errors was misspelling the word shirt, without an r, right
in the middle of a piece advanced students had to read.)
Anyway… I’ll
step down from my soapbox… one interesting thing I’ve discovered is that many
of my students, who are obviously learning English as a second language, find
it far easier to speak in English with other second language learners than
native speakers. This seems to be partly because in most countries English is
taught is virtually the same way, so everyone involved understands the same
range of vocabulary and largely speaks with a fairly neutral accent, coloured
of course slightly with their native accent. (Interestingly it also means some
vocabulary is often unknown to them as it clearly isn’t used in the various language
courses. A piece I read recently with my students contained the word ‘astonishing’
and none of them remembered encountering the word before. (In fact, when I explained
its meaning – comparing it to synonyms they were aware of a few still sounded
warily sceptical about the word, as though I and/or the author of the piece
were playing some kind of April Fool’s joke on them.) They find it far harder
to understand native speakers, who of course speak with a range of accents and
colloquialisms. One student told me that on deciding he wanted to learn English
he moved to Glasgow for six months. With the deepest of respect to Glaswegians
you must admit that that was like jumping in the deep end of an especially deep
pool. (Have you encountered Bill Bryson’s account of walking into a Glaswegian pub
in Notes from a Small Island? If like me your bank had a call centre in
Glasgow you will understand exactly.*) To put things in perspective it’s not
just we Brits who expose foreigners to a minefield of different accents. Once an
‘intermediate’ student of mine told me for weeks about how much he was looking
forward to using his English on holiday in New York. On his return I asked him
how he’d got on. ‘Oh Steve, I couldn’t understand a thing,’ was
his disappointed reply
Recently I
was explaining the challenges I had teaching my students to pronounce various
English words accurately. His initial reaction when I brought up the subject
was, ‘Well, it’s easy isn’t it?’ Now I could at this point have referred him to
the book for primary schools I wrote with headteacher Simon Hickton Every
Phoneme Covered, which contains sentences and stories short and long
illustrating each of the 40+ phonemes. However, despite the previous sentence,
I’ve always been useless at promoting my own work. Instead I asked him how he
pronounced the word comfortable. ‘Oh…’ he replied when he’d thought about it.
No wonder many children (including me at the time) find learning to spell with
so many redundant letters. Possibly letters at the beginning and end of each
word are understandable but why two whole letters in the middle of the word?**
The same applies to favourable. I also have a lot of fun teaching words such as
chocolate and vegetable. As I suggest to my students English must be the most
boring language in the world in which to pronounce the word chocolate.
Seemingly
simple words like fuel and severe often cause problems. I’ve found a solution
for severe as its pronunciation sounds much like the Spanish pronunciation of
the city we call Seville – Sevilla. ‘Imagine severe weather in Sevilla.’ If any
of you can suggest a way of making the pronunciation of fuel comprehendible it
would be greatly appreciated. (By the way did you know that in the Spanish version
of the famous song from My Fair Lady, the rain in Spain lands mainly in
Sevilla?)
It's also
interesting seeing the emphasis the English courses seem to universally give to
certain aspects of the language. For example conditional sentences and the
passive voice. It is a long while ago but for the life of me I don’t remember
studying conditional sentences at school and I only remember passing references
to the passive voice. Now I’m probably just demonstrating my own ignorance and
the deficiencies of my education, and you wise and knowledgeable readers
probably knew this for years, but I would never before have known that conditional
sentences go by the numbers zero to three, from plain fact to conjectures about
what might have been. (I sometimes suggest to my students that grammarians may
have initially labelled the conditional sentences one to three and then in a
panic realised there was a conditional form simpler than the first conditional,
hence the peculiarly named zero conditional. Thank goodness they didn’t originally
start with the zero conditional I further propose, as now we’d be landed with
the minus one conditional Of course this is largely a smokescreen to disguise
my own ignorance.) I also could never have imagined that there were almost endless
varieties of passive sentences, which my students seem to know and understand but
leave me with my head spinning. Once again my students are incredulous when I
explain that in real life – where communication mostly takes place in the form
of conversation - the passive voice is very rarely used. Imagine having a
conversation in the passive voice, we would sound like aliens.
‘Is a good
day being had (by you)?’
‘Yes,
although a delay on the train was experienced by me on the way here. What
things will be done by you today?’
‘Shopping
will be done by me today and bananas and a bottle of wine will be purchased.’
And so on! I
hope an enjoyable read was had.
~~~~~~~
*Possibly,
again like me, you only tend to phone up call centres when something drastic is
occurring regarding your finances. What’s the worst time to try and have a
conversation with someone you cannot comprehend? …
**Have you
ever noticed that the word engine is pronounced as ‘n-gin’ with both the first
and last e silent?
~~~~~~~
Every
Phoneme Covered ISBN
978-1-90751-541-5 (Hopscotch Educational Publishing)
