Job Discussion Forums

[Brian Hugh]

I have changed my view on what to teach. I used to teach mainly nouns when working with low level students in Korea. I am now spending more time teaching verbs in China. I use a system that was taught to me by a couple of old posters on Daves. I use DVD's such as Charlie Chaplan and Mr Bean and have the students repeat what is going on in the film. They chorus me. The Chinese teachers who watch me feel they must say evrything I say in Chinese. This is humorous to me because the students know what is going on in the film. The translation aproach of years gone by is still the most popular method of teaching in China.
I also do volunteer teaching a couple of times a week at the deaf and blind school. The interesting thing for me is that the deaf have better pronunciation than the regular students. They have learned to look at my face instead of reading a page. Students in China are taught to never look at the teacher directly. It is a throwback to the past. You were never allowed to look directly at the emperor. So the students when they talk to you look at the ceiling or at their feet.
They have trouble with the th sounds the f,ph and v sounds and words that begin with w. Just today my superior told me that I would get my vage today. She meant wage. She didn't know how to position her mouth.
So what is your position on what is more important verbs or nouns?

[Lobster]

I agree that verbs should receive primary focus with nouns as a close second. However, I also think that teaching closed word sets (e.g. pronouns, prepositions and conjunctions) should be a strong focus at lower levels. I notice that many students want to use a noun-verb combination instead of just using the relevant verb (e.g. make trouble instead of trouble).

Because the 'v' sound is not present in Chinese, we often see the substitution of 'w'. Because 'v' is just the voiced form of 'f', students should have little problem with place and manner of articulation, but my adult students often have 'fossilized' pronunciation. More difficult is the 'l-r/n' distinction because it's harder for students to see what's happening inside the mouth. I also find many students who have problems pronouncing words like 'fire and wire' (fair and wear) and 'sit and fit' (seat and feet).

RED

[Voldermort]

My teaching methods are centered heavily around the subject verb object model. We pick up a few nouns as we go but the majority of words we learn are verbs and prepositions (which I like to call grammar words).

Students pick up nouns very quickly but, in my opinion, have no clue as to how to use them. For example, how often do your students forget to add a quantifier? "book is on table." This problem can be overcome simply by teaching a few simple rules before actually learning the words.

Most Chinese teachers differ and disagree with me but I am a firm believer that ones English level is not measured by how many words one knows.

I teach the 8 - 14 yrs range, if that makes any difference.

[Opiate]

[Opiate]

[Denim-Maniac]

Yeah, this thread could have some interesting potential, especially as Im preparing for my DELTA and reading a book called 'How Languages are learnt'.Ill throw a few comments from personal experience and from stuff Ive been reading recently. (its very early in the morning for me, so Im not going to use proper references from my book...maybe Ill come back and add some later)

Brian - Having students continually repeat stuff after you is probably a method that is as outdated as having them perform translation tasks.

I teach Chinese adults (and at the moment, German teenagers). My syllabus is the same from both, graded from pre-int to advanced level, and I would say it doesnt have any single focus. Im not sure a particular lexical focus would be a good thing to be honest, but I think / would guess that a large, active noun vocabulary is more important than a verb one. Verbs can be modified quite easily with adverbs, certainly easier than random things can be described by using other nouns and adjectives. Generally though, a balanced approach to both vocabulary, methodology and skills is probably a better way to go IMO.

Opiate - On my learning Chinese CD they also pronounce 'wan' with a /v/. When I played it to my language partner, she didnt 'hear' a /v/ sound though. She hears it as /w/ even though her pronunciation is markedly different to the CDs. What I did find with other single sounds and Chinese students is that even if the sound does exist in Mandarin, that alone doesnt provice a guarantee that they can produce the sound and use it for English. Even though the /n/ sound exists in Mandarin, (neng/ne/nan/ni) many students can't use it and substitute an /l/ sound which I guess is because the /n/ doesnt exist in their mother tongue (which is normally the local dialect). There are quite a few sounds many Chinese cant produce in their own language, which has always made learning Chinese hard for me...Its frustrating that Chinese people cant pronounce their own language!

Anyway ... most of my pronunciation work is at sentence and clause level, with my focus on sentence stress and weak forms. This is pretty much the type of pronunciation stuff introduced in my materials, the bulk of which comes from the Face2Face series of textbooks. The methodology for this is generally listen / identify and recognise / repeat / apply.

The minimal pairs - ship / sheep type stuff is apparently also quite old and perhaps outdated. According to the book Im reading anyway...I didnt know that. Apparently linguistic studies suggest that language students who concentrate on pronunciation at the sentence level tend to be understood far better than those who concentrate at syllable level...which is probably why my textbooks are written the way they are.

Vocabulary - I think 400 - 700 is waaaay too low for any conversation. That isnt even likely to allow a student to perform many functional tasks, let alone have a chat. I know English and Chinese are different, but my Chinese learning means I am familiar with around 650 characters and due to the way they combine to make words, I would guess my vocabulary is about double the characters so Id guess its around 1200 - 1400 words. That isnt enough for me to have a conversation, and as English has many more function/grammar words Id guess you need a much larger vocabulary.

[Brian Hugh]

Thanks Demin maniac. Old doesn't make it bad. I wish my students could hear their own voices but language laboratories are something we can't have in China. In my travels I quite often get interviewed by English learning students who bring a tape recorder. This would be a no no here.
Your right about chorusing not being good. However the Chinese believe in it. A Chinese man made a fortune using the method. It has one value in that it is non threatening. If you have been in China you see this threatening element in the schools. I only use the chorusing with Children who are under 5. More advanced students I have them do role plays based on the scene from the DVD. I also stop the film and ask what has happened and what will happen. I had a chance to watch China Movie Magic teach a couple of years ago. He was doing amazing work.
The problem with your student is more to do with the fact that her Chinese teacher taught her the a w sound was produced as a V sound. The mouth is not position properly. They are placing the lower lip under the front teeth instead of making their mouth into an oval.
The point I am making is that after working with deaf kids I saw that their pronunciation was as good or better than my normal hearing students. This was because they learn to read lips. I also have them blow paper so they can see the difference between Ps and Bs , V and F's when they pronounce words like put and but, very and for,
With the R and L I have them put a pen or finger in the mouth and then say the R sound.

[Opiate]

[Denim-Maniac]

Normally Im all about superficial chats Thats probably why I post too much on here ... I dont have enough real conversations!

I like the link and the way they show word frequency, but Im not convinced that really applies to language learners other than as some kind of sales pitch. We all have passive vocabularies that are much much larger than our active vocabularies...this is probably even more pronounced with language learners. For an active vocabulary of 350 words, students must have a far larger passive vocabulary, that probably runs into several thousand.

[Opiate]

[allane]

Maybe it's a regional example, but in Hangzhou, I often hear the /v/ sound when people say "是吧？" as a tag question. They usually don't pronounce the /b/ sound to start "ba".

[Brian Hugh]

Corpous linguistics is facinating with it's word frequency studies. It would be an interesting study to compare the frequency of use of British to American words and expressions. My problem initially in China was trying to figure what to say to my students. They are taught the american work bike insteand of bycycle but they learn trousers instead of pants. This confused me because I would try and use bicycle instead of bike because they had said trousers. The problem with word frequency studies is that language changes so quickly today. Do you remember millenium. The word was in vogue in 1999. It was used for everything. Millenium party, Millenium Sale, Millenium virus. Now we have to wait a 988 years before it comes back into fashion.

[Denim-Maniac]

I use corpus.byu.edu

If you google it, its free to use with unlimited searches once you have registered. I did get very excited about it, started using it with my higher level students, and encouraged them to do the same. I find my students also use the word 'accompany' a little inappropriately and did some corpus research on the use of the word to try and illustrate how useful a corpus is to understand real English.

I've never seen a group of students so disinterested haha!

[Brian Hugh]

Ya that's the rub isn't it. Chinese want to use the big word and don't know the simple everyday word. They also think by speaking fast that their Engish is good. They learn to speak fast by doing recitations. They are required to memorize text and then recite them to the teacher. If they say it fast enought the teacher doesn't hear the mistakes.

[Lobster]

That's so true Brian. I am constantly telling my students to slow down so they can be understood and to focus on clarity. One of the greatest problems with adult students is poor grounding in phonetics.

RED