Job Discussion Forums

[MELEE]

Patro,
some interesting results, and not at all surprising for those of us who have learned foreign languages and/or really know about second language acquisiton.
But I wonder, in your opinion, what are the implications for Foriegn Language Teaching in general?

I think it's no secret that student X who know no English will not be "bilingual in a year" studying at any language school in Mexico. Not unless they stopped doing everything else (work, family time, other hobbies) and dedicated most of their waking hours to learning English.

I work at a university where 75% of the students come in with no English. We have 5 hours a week with students, and an exit requirement of Council of Europe B1 level. We have no illusions that that level is high enough to get our students the top jobs in Mexico. We'd love to raise the bar, but how? Intensive programs in the summer, content courses in English, summers abroad? Most of our students have extremely limited finacial resources, they are also in engineering programs with other important classes and projects that eat up all their free time. They are not learning only English. But we want to make sure they learn as much English as possible under these limitations.

[Patrocleides]

Melee said:

[Patrocleides]

Melee asked:

[Patrocleides]

I suppose it's just an obvious implication of my previous posts, but, given the dominance of an English-teaching-establishment linked to the publishers whose resources overwhelm the schools, and given that they are based in Britain and the United States, it's not surprising that materials produced to teach English, say, in M�xico, are not only blind to local culture and language, but blindly impose English as if everybody were in some ESL environment in Anglo-land.

I took a quick look at an upper-intermediate British-sourced text, looked at the "Student Opinions" expressed, and couldn't find one that did not presume that the student was sitting in Britain discussing British-American business. Every line would have required me to pause and to give some account of a culture and body of adult experience of which my young Mexican students couldn't possibly be familiar.

They don't have that experience and they don't yet have enough "diverse experience of English" background even to talk about it. I would have had to deal with "business content" and "business English" and English-language business environments at every other turn. That's not English for Spanish-speaking adolescents--it's acculturation of the sort that would happen if the students were wealthier, older, and working in England or the United States.

They're not. They are here and, outside the classroom, use Spanish for everything in their young lives. It's enough already to get them to use general purpose English without having to explain the business world to them when it's still a world away. This is ESL--not EFL!

And it's a burden for teachers already overloaded with package pollution. A decently bilingual Mexican teacher, already struggling with the subtleties of English, would simply not be able to explain the material clearly to students who never had a business job and certainly weren't living in England. Most Mexican teachers, besides occasionally floundering in English, would be required to go ahead and flounder as well in adult business culture--of which they probably have had little more experience than the students.

This is what happens when you get an establishment settled in an English-speaking country and linked to the corporate presses. Teaching English as a foreign language to young people who only encounter English in class gets crushed under the burden of presenting immediately the linguistic world that they might never even get to see. They'll get "competence" in communicative Spanglish and that's it. It makes life easier for people sitting in England or the USA to completely ignore the language, culture, and experience of students and local teachers...and more profitable.

I listened to a teacher turned salesman who blithely announced, "There's really not that much difference between EFL and ESL." If your students are not in Britain or America, there most certainly is! Just as one size-fits-all-books pushed communicative English that never acknowledged the unique relationships between English and any other language, or even admit that, say, Spanish-speakers had a unique set of issues in learning English, so now these "education establishments" push a "one culture is everywhere" piece of nonsense that will not deal with the obvious--that it is one thing to learn a language in class and another to take classes when you can walk out and use that language in a thousand different environments. Somehow these "multiculturalism"-inspired productions manage to force teachers and students to prematurely swallow a monoculture made in the Anglo world just as they've forced them into one-size-fits-all language boxes.

No, I'm not optimistic that this is going to produce independent students who can guide their own way to bilingualism. They'll never learn enough to learn independently and pick up this "business" stuff on their own as they need it and it becomes available. They'll be "competent" communicators but incapable of getting any further unless they find very different instruction or just pack the whole mess in and go to an English-speaking country (which is probably what they should have done in the first place.)

Establishments and publishers are not selfless, altruistic souls, you know. They serve their interests and tell you and your students what your interests are--and get paid for it. Teachers and students, the customers in the classroom, are never right. The students are too young to figure it out and the teachers are too weak to do anything about it.

[Patrocleides]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070509/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/reading_conflicts

Yes, it's journalistic, anecdotal, and such, but it's illustrative of just how far the classroom teacher is from making any professional decisions about what content and practices are going to be imposed by administrations, entrepreneurial or governmental, either in the USA or in Mexico.