Job Discussion Forums

[Ben Round de Bloc]

[mapache]

FreddyM,

I agree with your post regarding an overreliance on textbooks. My comments were based on my private tutoring of students at these schools who use these books. Often, my private students need help with their homework in these books. The worst experience was with a Mexican SEP textbook for English from Prepa Abierto. The explanations in Spanish of English grammar were so complicated my Mexican student didn't understand it in Spanish and there were many errors that the student had to learn bad English to pass the errored test.

My students going to Harmon Hall had text books with outdated topics like cassette recorders, the World Trade Center and others. The audio programs were made by Mexicans with heavy accents and there were grammar and spelling errors in the text.

Tutoring students at Tec de Monterrey was a problem because of English errors in the teacher handouts and tests. I checked the students' homework before they submitted it only to later have the correct answers marked wrong by the Mexican teachers. The students also received their corrected tests back with correct anwers marked wrong.

[Patrocleides]

Mapache, Freddy, Ben Round de Block,

The horror stories go on and on, don't they?

Here's two of mine:

I assigned a "What I did on my vacation" topic to an demonstration class while I was taking a credential. All the Anglo's thought it was a good, typical lesson plan. It was a damn disaster! I didn't understand that those nice, bright young people between the seven or eight of them had only one night "camping" to recount. They never got "vacations," unless you count being at home with the family at Christmas. I looked like a rich gringo who was in Mexico to loaf and patronize the natives in their poverty and those kids resented the whole exercise. I accepted reponsibility for it, bowed my head in humiliation, and never assigned anything like that again. I didn't of course mention that my professional elders and betters had all approved the plan first, but I never forgot it.

When I checked out some "True Colors" stuff, of course, there was a wonderful vacation story in it, adolescents who could spend the summer in the Caribbean scuba diving and exploring the wrecks of galleons, and a heroine who could babble about it in some gushy, Brooklyn-style, middle-class 1980's "revised teenager" dialogue. Just the thing Mexican adolescents get to do. Just the thing to remind them of the stomach-churning cultural ignorance and arrogance that can ooze out of these EFL packages. Of course this stuff had passed muster by EFL establishment and publishing powerhouses first. I guess that tells you where their heads are really at.

And, yes, I think I mentioned some absolutely awful Spanish-sourced stuff, probably "state-approved" as well. Mexican students really get caught between the frying pan and the fire. Mexican-style pedagogy I find resembles the kind of mechanical-tyrannical-critical methods of the nineteenth century...drill, kill, dictate, and berate. I exaggerate, of course, but...

I'm beginning to wonder if they future doesn't lie in some kind of "Linux" approach to getting people bilingual. Open Source rather than this institutional-corporate-governmental "proprietary" domination of the field.

[thelmadatter]

A lot of really fine comments here and Guy's right, we dont talk enough about this kind of thing.

I call most of my fellow teachers here "textbook jockeys". Like if they find the right horse, everything will be just fine, the horse will get them to the finish line. Needless to say, our TOEFL scores say otherwise. I dont entirely blame the teachers, only a few of them have had any teacher training (and those who do, boy does it show!) and none of those teachers are really high in the pecking order. Im probably highest but that's because Im the gringo with a masters and I would be too hard to replace. I also know that those lower on the pecking order feel the pressure more to pass students than I have and I have heard stories of admin passing students failed by their teachers. I also heard of one gringo teacher who quit (wasnt an English teacher) rather than pass a group of students admin wanted passed.

However, things might really be changing at my school for the better. I started and the school put in some good money for our school's computer language lab/self-access center (Ben, Id like to know what you guys do with yours principally) at my campus and we are expanding it to another. I have been permitted to redesign almost all the courses I teach using no text at all or using a LOT of supplemental materials. What I do sometimes causes friction (if certain other teachers feel I am imposing on how they do things). We have a new school director that shares much of my teaching philosophy and really seems to want to shake things up here (and already has). He's young, enthusiastic and a bit idealistic... which may be just what we need or may be the death of him... we will see.

Funny thing. When I got this job, back when I was still in grad school, one of my profs, who spent 20 years in Peru, told me all these horror stories about teaching in Latin America ... very similar to what I have read here although her versions was more dramatic. Fortunately, I listened but with a grain of salt. Ive seen maybe 10% of what she went on about, thank goodness. Guy is right. There is a LOT of garbage out there but with patience (or in my case, luck) one can find good situations. Tec has its problems, but some of that is being corrected. Why? Market forces. We have lost ranking and students, so we have two options. Lower tuition or make our school worth its tuition again. We are trying for #2. Fingers crossed.

[Guy Courchesne]

[mapache]

The story about "How I spent my vacation" reminds me of lessons in Interchange about neighbourhoods.
One topic is something like "how to you rate your house as compared to others" I taught at a school for poorer students and this was really embarrassing for them. Needless to say, I only used it once. Another lesson talks about "what do you and your neighbours do to clean up your neighbourhood?" It's a great lesson in the US and Canada where neighbours actually do this once or twice a year but neighbourhood clean up is not a part of the culture in Mexico. Other confusing references are central heating and electric blankets (talk about bad karma in a next life - being an electric blanket salesperson in Mexico.) Now I use these as culture lesions rather than language practice.

[Ben Round de Bloc]

[mapache]

so much for spell checker - of course I meant lessons, Tim. I am glad you are here in this forum to spend your time catching every typo and keeping us all in line. Sometimes if you read in context, you can tell when a word is a typo or misspelling. Try it sometime.

[Guy Courchesne]

I thought it was more a Freudian slip than a typo! You don't mind if I borrow the term culture lesion, do you?

[Patrocleides]

Don't knock a very creative and insightful "slip." I can think of "cultural lesions" on a major scale.

Subjecting Latino students to a "political correctness" agendum and "multi-cultural" pretensions are two of them. "De-gendering" English, for example, is possible, if frequently clumsy and embarassing, in English, not in Spanish. To present that as something devoutly to be desired to Mexican students because it's "First World Progress" implies that a gender-marker language such as theirs is primitive and prejudiced. I don't hesitate to use "he" with two meanings clear from context just as they use "los padres" with two meanings and use them clearly in context. This misconstructed notion of gender and language implies that they are in some way moral inferiors. Even the slightest possibility of that makes "political correctness" even more of a farce than it's been for the last decade and more.

Multiculturalism implies that somewhere there exists a universalistic framework with a set of criteria which applies to all cultures and has the wonderful power of deciding what "equality" is. The lesion is another ethnic bleeding sore. The multiculturalist can claim the Mexican and his culture are equal, but it's always the multiculturalist who sets the rules (whatever they may be) about equality. Multiculturalism is itself just another particular cultural complex, but in relations to other cultures it gets to present itself as "first among equals." After all, Mexicans have to learn "multicultural values," but multiculturalists don't have to do more than hand Mexicans their cultural grades. What's hidden under this "culture consciousness-raising" is a very unequal power relationship that's being peddled off as something wonderfully enlightened and just.

Apply these to other cultures, backed up as they are by "gringo" wealth, prestige, and authority, and other cultures have to fight to save their supposedly equal cultures from being symbolically "lesioned." They can't correct the "correct," because they can't correct inveterate self-righteousness. They can't be multicultural in the same way because they have to struggle just to maintain their own.

That these views have currency still in the "liberal" world doesn't mean for an instant that they are any improvement on the straightforward prejudices of the "conservative." The "Mexican" loses out to them both when they are both put in whatever scales weigh power. Little wonder that in the US Mexicans don't vote or "swing vote" the parties, seeking whichever "liberal" or "conservative" they judge represents the lesser evil. In American society they've learned about "lesions" just as incurable as they'd find in Latino society. They have to struggle with issues that the "correct" and "multicultural" have the luxury of avoiding.

"Menos mal..."

New Vocab: chablon, lesion. Use in complete sentences.

[Ben Round de Bloc]

[Patrocleides]

Something stuck in my mind about the "lesion-lesson" typo. In retrospect it seems the kind of "error" that shows up in the "bilingualizing" process.

I'm fond of encouraging students to use all the cognates they can find. Of course, I've warned them about "falsos amigos" (Echo la culpa a m�mismo. Estoy muy embarazado.) But, there maybe a catch to that. If you link two words, say "lesson" and "lecci�n," the processes that go on could produce a "compromise formation" especially in writing. "Lesion" would be a perfectly reasonable form to predict if a person is "bilingualizing" and something to look out for in student writing. Maybe using cognates no matter how closely related has a greater "falso amigo" risk inherent in it than I previously thought.

It's something to think about--suppose these compromise formations happen very regularly in such areas as word order in sentences or in, say, adjective-preposition collations. "Very difficult of access" is the kind of English phrasing that dropped out with the decline of Latin and French grammar generations ago, but it's just the sort of thing that a Spanish student is very likely to make--a compromise formation that can be produced in the process of "bilingualizing." More personally, that's the sort of thing that afflicts my anglicized French, Spanish and German, and leads to "hispanicized English" in my co-workers.

To stick to the "How long does it take to become 'bilingual'?" theme: learning another language is also learning another culture. Now that's a clich�, of course, but what's involved in school learning is language and what's involved in dealing effectively "on the job" with speakers of that other language is very much more learning "culture." The time taken to score well on TOEIC/TOEFL may be much less than the time taken to learn what's really in the mind of the foreign interlocutor and discourse easily with him.

If "bilingual" means test scores, then I've seen people rip through that stuff in a year, but if it means using that language in confident exchanges with a "foreigner," then--my guess--it's about the equivalent of two years of largely unconscious, heavy exposure learning how to deal with all the subtle and ambiguous judgments involved. The high-scoring student is simply not as "fluent" as the "learned it on the street" types whatever the scores involved. What are we evaluating and how are we doing it when we talk of the time taken to become bilingual?

What's marked as a "mistake" in classwork may well be a sign that the student is making progress that the student who gets a point on the quiz is not making because the latter is still doing nothing but showing a talent for doing homework and "translating." If bilingualism is the goal and not test scores in the "target" language, the the lower ranked student may be further ahead than his more scrupulous classmate.

I note that there's a kind of "culture-bound" quality to the thinking that's involved in using phrases like "target language." It's a bit like those pompous speakers who get up on a podium at US citizenship awards and speak about the "former country" that a newly-minted American is supposed to put behind him. That's like telling somebody he has a former self or a former history--pure nonsense--but it certainly makes clear what the speaker thinks about other countries and their value in America.

Classes produce, not people who were "formerly Spanish-speakers" and, now that they've achieved their target, are English-speakers--they produce bilinguals and that's what has to be aimed at and evaluated if we're not to leave students in much the same situation as the products of "grammar-translation" classes were a generation ago. Looking at "mistakes" we'd generally just mark as errors may not be the best sort of evaluation, if "bilingualism" is the value and the standard.

I don't see this kind of sensitivity in these EFL packages and "grammar manuals," but, perhaps I'm over-sensitive.

[Guy Courchesne]

Interesting thoughts...I'm enjoying reading your posts.

You're moving towards something I've wondered about and questioned in other teachers, both foreign and Mexican and this thread seems a good place to explore the idea. Who is qualified to make the determination of the 'bilingualness' of a student or person? If it is difficult enough as it is to decide on what bilingualism truly is, how is it gauged, under what circumstances, and who's doing it?

Let's look at two teachers. The Mexican teacher, who may or may not rely on grammar-translation and presumably has something approaching bilingual. The foreign teacher who is a native-speaker of English, but unilingual. If there is a bilingualization process, which would be better to judge it...the means or the ends?

[Patrocleides]

Mr. Courchesne, I really don't know at this point whether a Mexican teacher who's at the point of bilingualism or a unilingual native speaker is the better judge. The former knows where the student has started and how much progress he has made judged against the teacher's own experience of becoming bilingual and the latter knows just how much more work the student has to do before nothing the student does in English impresses the native speaker as "foreign."

I think in bilingualism those two different teachers really might be paying attention to two different states of affairs--the shared experience of Latinos learning English or the English in which the Latino student or non-native speaker do not fully share. An everyday example of this sort of thing is "in the street." If I speak, for example, French with others who've learned that language, I'm impressed (or not) by how good they've gotten at it, but if I speak French with a native speaker, I'm almost wounded by knowing how much of his language I don't share with him.

I once posted something off to a French debating forum and, interacting with my own stuff, I was much impressed with myself at how much of that language I was still able to use. My French interlocutor replied with pleasure and presented his perspectives, but...but...but, he added a polite quip, "Dois-je croire que vous �tes americain?" [Ought I to believe that you are an American?]

To me, acting as my own teacher and student, I was "bilingual," but to him, for all that I was "communicative," I was patently not a true bilingual at all. I would not myself have thought of such an elegant French way of phrasing the matter. I think that's the kind of situation we get into judging "bilingualism."

Maybe if we had some sort of flow chart with critical turning points marked on it describing the road from "no English" to "the equivalent of native fluency," we might have a better idea of how to go about the judging process.

(Incidentally, I loathe most of the "rubrics" that I run into, mostly because the ones devoted to writing and composition regularly relegate me to the bottom of the pile. Maybe they're another inevitable evil of evaluation.) strategies.)

[Guy Courchesne]

"Bilingualism is in the eye of the beholder" ? Being bilingual depends on who's listening? I'm going to title a class with that.

...therefore bilingual is irrelevant, really, or at least takes a back seat to successful communication, and the bias of the person with whom you are speaking. It reminds me of the many Mexican students I've met that obsess about accent reduction. Why, I ask? Trying to hide? The reason given is always some form of embarrassment or an experience in which they were not understood by a foreigner.