Posts Tagged ‘Tyson’

What students (and he) ought to know

Monday, November 9th, 2009

You may be thinking that this video exposes that his knowledge of the make-up of our language and terminology used to describe it is a bit on the light side. You may also have noticed that his rant on “the general population [having] just stopped caring” is based on an irrelevant paradigm of what’s right and what’s wrong.

I did too. However, how this video spoke to me was, ironically, opposite to his point:  The way we use language, with all our spoken grammatical incorrectness, dichotomous pronunciation, relaxed speech patterns and word roots from the global kitchen sink, is fine.  In fact, it’s what students need to be more exposed to in order to gain competent comprehension and participate in meaningful interactions with native speakers.

Thoughts?

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42: Life, the Universe & Everything ESL

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

As I was browsing through my many Facebook ESL-related groups, I came across a perplexing question regarding question formation and found myself (and my colleagues) a bit stumped on what the direct answer would be.  Let’s see if anyone out there has a better answer than mine?

Mr. Clinton was 42nd President of U.S.
If “42nd” is the question subject how would you make this sentence into a question form?

The obvious question would end up being too ambiguous: “Which president was Mr. Clinton?”.  This could result in a variety of answers, like “the best” or “the one before George Bush” or “the one who was almost impeached for his behaviour”. So, most likely the best would be to qualify the question with a preface, like “If George Washington was the 1st president of the US, what was Bill Clinton?”. There isn’t any common noun for that particular expression and the obscure “ordinal rank of president” would itself be unfamiliar to most speakers answering the question.

What do you think?

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Assimilation: Good Times

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

Is it really necessary to discuss the need for teaching students how to learn versus only teaching them what to learn? Unfortunately yes, it seems. An article or two that I read recently by an enthusiastic learner and teacher of ESL, suggests that learners of anything (a language in our case), need to not only learn but assimilate the knowledge teachers give. However, to do this, focus needs to be on how to do this, not only on what knowledge should be learnt. Agreed. But don’t good teachers—I use that term supposing we all agree good teachers think and plan and grow—already know this?

Of her two articles, the first brings my thoughts back to the students who come here from Korea (or anywhere really) and spend time outside school with only their expats versus those who come here and immerse themselves in all things English.  Clearly the latter learns more quickly or assimilates the language they learn in the class (and outside the class).

The other is that teachers themselves forget how they like to learn things.  This largely comes from a lack of good teaching examples, either from their training courses or from on-site experience, not to mention falling into the rut of teaching what seems easiest.

Moral of the story, teachers:  think about how to get your students to learn the language, not just what target language you should put in your lesson.

Shameless book plug:  Knowing Me Knowing You (9780953309832 | Delta Publishing)

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