Job Discussion Forums

[MilesFerdinand]

My knowledge of Polish is, unfortunately, minimal. Nevertheless, my teaching qualification and experience Ive gained has never left me in any doubt at all that English is the only language necessary in the classroom. However, Im horrified when I hear that native speakers lucky enough to know some Polish, are using it in their classes. Doesnt this go against what we�ve been taught to do i.e. TESOL, TEFL etc....?

Ive nothing against using the odd word for vocab (thats all I could manage anyway) or showing the Ss you can also make mistakes, but Ive come across people explaining grammar, telling stories etc.... Surely it cannot do any good for the students and I would imagine long term it makes classes too lazy to "understand" in English when they know all they have to do is ask for the Polish version.

Your views?

[svenhassel]

I have three rules in my classes

1) no polish
2) no polish
3) no polish, russian, ukrainian or belorussian.

to enforce these rules, students caught speaking one of these forbidden languages more than three times in a lesson are given a paragraph to write on a theme linked to not speaking polish (i also teach writing) works quite well for me.

i ocassionally translate the odd word if a satisfactory explanation is beyond me, as in "what is sparrow?"

also i let the students have some fun testing my polish pronunciation, when they have me pronounce polish words, but generally classes are an english zone.

[Alex Shulgin]

[redsoxfan]

To be an effective teacher of beginning students, one should speak their langauge. It's impossible to teach most vocab (the most important thing for beginning students) without translating. Of course, some things can be mimed, shown through opposites, etc. but if the teacher speaks no Polish, how can he check that the SS understand? For example, I want to teach "to travel." So I say, "OK, I often travel to Germany to visit friends. I travel by train." So the SS start whispering to each other, "jezdzic?" "Tak, to znaczy jezdzic." If the teacher can't translate the word into Polish, the students have now learned a word incorrectly. Why not just tell them "podrozowac" and then let them practice their new lexis? The alternative is to use dictionaries, but this is a waste of time and still involves using a student's native language. Vocab at a beginning level can usually be translated directly from Polish to English. At a more advanced level, it can't be translated very well at all. (It's shocking to me how the two languages just don't translate.)

Students at that level lack the meta-language to talk about grammar in English as well. Could you imagine learning Polish grammar in Polish, after having studied Polish for a couple months? Oh man! I say, if you can, briefly explain the grammar in Polish, and get on with it.

Finally, no one ever taught me on my CELTA course that we must only use English in the classroom. I don't believe there are any hard and fast rules that must be followed. I don't like dogmas and ideologies. Generally speaking, English should be spoken in the classroom, but I'm simply suggesting that there are times when using Polish is more effective. For more advanced groups, I don't use Polish, saving for the odd vocab translation (with contextual explanation).

[MilesFerdinand]

Ok....To some extent I accept your point on beginners. But only to some extent. Ive taught beginners with some success in several countries and only had my English to rely on. It can be done - obviously using more props than we�re used to. If we�re really talking beginners (people with no or very very little prior knowledge) then I think the grammar structures and vocab they will be facing is doable only in English.

Anyway, the people Im refering to are not teachers of beginners anyway. As we�ve said, the odd word or letting your Ss see you trip up on pronunciation is fine but I think anything more than that is tending toward showing off. Polish is not necessary in the classroon as far as Im concerned.

[MilesFerdinand]

My TESOL trainer would cringe at the thought he was sending us out into the wide world with the thought that we can use the native language to teach in! As far as I remember, the onus was on English and in no way was the course geared towards preparing us for using a foreign language in the classroom. Its the lazy mans options.

[svenhassel]

[BindairDundat GotdaTshirt]

Polish? From a native speaker in the classroom? What possibly occasioned you to teach English through Polish? For that students will find more appropriate to learn English from a Pole who has studied English Philology or Applied Linguistics. If you don't present yourself as a native speaker English only teacher, why should they hire you then? What else can you bring to the table being a native speaker if you employ yourself as a distant cousin thereof?
With all due respect to the fanfare of knowing Polish is an added bonus to someone's teaching, I'm certain that native speakers should not use anything but the Queen's English in the classroom. I assume during the course of this thread I will be referred to as (in many colorful ways) a purist, but students will have a chance to find a measure of exclusivity by an English only motto in your teaching. In addition, they must use it and not seeing you use it all the time.
Moreover, and as a send-off, every teacher worth his or her salt should start the year by encouraging students to use the dictionary. Any learner, beginner or advanced, should purchase a good dictionary; and if they don't feel like doing this, there is always the Internet, where the best things in life are free. So when a new word is introduced, you can give them the meaning or an idea from which they can expand their imagination. If this can't satisfy their shock and drivel (when suddenly they quizzically turn to each other), you can trumpet the words "highlight it, write it down, and look it up later at home".
Students should consider learning new vocabulary as an extension activity like homework. The English language is capricious and teaching vocabulary strikes me as an inexact science. But taking shortcuts, using Polish in class as a recess, how can these seem remotely fair to them?

[Grrrmachine]

Polish gets brought into my classroom by the students and by myself, to clarify meanings and to make appropriate translations. Having students realise that an English idiom is almost identical to a Polish one, and having them tell me that, is very successful, and also stops them from trying to chat up girls with "I have a train for you..."

Of course, my poison dwarf of a method trainer would have killed herself if the rigid concept that Only English Be Spoken were broken, but with my adult students who have absorbed English rather than learning it, presenting Polish language models can be an effective way of making a memoriable grammar comparison.

Not much sticks in the mind more than explaining the English passive with "I was born..." by holding it up to "urodzilem sie" - especially if you provoke your students' imaginations a bit with the image of a baby Pole triumphantly squeezing himself out of the birth canal.

Polish shouldn't be necessary to teach English, but that doesn't mean it should be shunned completely.

[redsoxfan]

Bindair said:

[MilesFerdinand]

[simon_porter00]

I suscribe to the "use Polish to teach English" school in exceptional circumstances.

Any teacher with half a brain quickly can recognise that "Christ, I haven't got a bloody clue what he's going on about" look. If the word can be drawn, explained, put into context all well and good. But i had an example last week when my little darlings wanted me to explain "spindly". Naturally I saved 10 minutes of time and told the the preprapared Polish word.

Anyone know how you would adequately communicate "spindly"? Just asking, like.

[svenhassel]

It depends on the context, if you're talking about a person being spindly, as in having spindly arms, you could draw a cobweb, easily enough and say spiders spin webs, we can also use spin as an adjective and say someone is spindly and show them a picture of a spindly person, then they've learnt two words using no Polish.

this is straight off the top of my head but the theory works for me.

[biffinbridge]

This 'I never use Polish in a classroom' thing is nothing to brag about.Time needs to be used efficiently and sometimes it's far quicker to teach meaning through translation.

[svenhassel]

Is using Polish in an English language lesson an efficient use of time?

There are many ways to express meaning without polluting the language experience which we as native speakers have been hired to provide.

As far as possible the first language should be kept out of the classroom and students should be exposed to as much English as possible which proper lesson planning allows for, surely this makes for a more efficient use of time.

SVINE