Job Discussion Forums

[bearcanada]

Shan-Shan, I agree with your comments, and for sure few Chinese employers are competent to evaluate their English teachers. And in that context I suppose I wouldn't blame some English illiterati from taking advantage of that situation and finding a teaching job here.

But in my comments I wasn't thinking of them. It just saddens and disappoints me that university graduates with degrees in Education and in English figure so prominently in the substandard list.

It was an English teacher with two degrees who wrote, "I could of gone.....". She even went so far as to tell us in a thread that her teacher husband (also with a degree in English) saw her words and told her 'he thought it might be wrong, but wasn't sure'.

Do you laugh or cry?

.

[vikuk]

[Shan-Shan]

[cj750s]

[Shan-Shan]

[arioch36]

I had the same situation, two years ago taught grade 3 writing. I asked what they did grade 2 so I could build on it. They couldn't care less, or they acted like they didn't care perhaps to save face because they didn't know. But that attitude certainly doesn't help me help the students


My current college I consider okay. My third year here. i always ask to know what I am teaching for the next semester before the semester begins, so I can prepare. Never happens. Day before class ..."Here are your books" All the other Chinese teachers teaching english know well ahead of time. Part of the problem is that we are rarely included in their thoughts as teaching staff. Rather the Foreign Language Dep't sees us as belonging to the FAO and thus they develop a hands off approach

[11:59]

[mcl sonya]

One of my students actually had a talk with me today about how most Chinese people speak English with poor grammar and it's terrible, and my response was it's more important to just get your point across and to understand nuances than it is to be perfectly correct. I think a great example is my own Chinese, which (most likely) has shoddy, English-ized grammar but which I brandish fearlessly and which everyone hails as fluent. I don't correct grammatical mistakes if it's still understandable and not too major. I don't want them to feel like speaking English is like figuring out a grammatical puzzle, though I think they'd make my day if they started asking questions about English grammar. When I studied French and Hebrew I was always asking a million questions about the grammar.

I think in class, it's important to be able to, if not explain nuances, then give examples. I also think pronunciation is very important, perhaps because my only other teaching job was teaching music, but also because if you pronounce things well then people not only are able to understand you but also they'll automatically think you speak that language pretty well. At English Corner students were telling me that their friends in my classes were talking about how I force them to repeat things until they pronounce certain consonants correctly. I assume they complain it's annoying and boring (granted, it consumes a ton of time.. I don't do it every class, though I remind them all the time to pronounce things the way we learned before), but I think it's very important for a teacher to recognize pronunciation problems that hinder intelligibility and to know how to tackle them. All of my kids can say [v] now, as well as th, and know how to not do a Northern Chinese s instead of an English s, how to just do a schwa without making it an r, and how the plural -s should sound like. The word "thistles" sounded like "seashell" the way they pronounced it before. And, unlike the grammar thing, I think they're kind of proud when they pronounce things well. Some of my students sound really good right now: just saying certain phrases, in isolation, their accent is perfect.

I'm really kind of in the dark here as to how to teach too. I feel like I'm expected more to be a camp counselor than a teacher at times, and it's so ineffective to be teaching random subjects instead of building on what they're learning in their other classes.

[Lobster]

Well, thank you for that elucidation. I do, however, hold a degree in Applied Linguistics already, and am therefore quite knowledgeable about generative theory. I understand the authenticity of these forms and the nature of their origin. The same derivations allow for sentences such as "I don' give a f*ckin' f*ck about that f*cked-up sh*it; you f*ckin' f*cker!"" In addition, I agree that language is a thing in constant flux and development. Perhaps you don't like the term corrupt (sociological perception), and would prefer "non-standard contraction".

Now here's my point. I'm not here to teach American street English or casual conversational English. I teach formal and academic English writing. Of my six reference dictionaries, two do not have any entries for 'gonna', 'wanna' or 'hafta'. The others refer to it as an informal contraction used in spoken English or as American slang. Don't get me wrong, I teach my students these forms so that they can recognize and understand them in spoken English. As well, I find it's easier to explain the usage to my students by noting that 'gonna' can only be used in the sense of 'will', thus precluding constructions such as *He's gonna be gonna the doctor tomorrow. I do not allow them to write them unless it's a direct quote, as in "I don' wanna do it, and I ain't gonna do it", growled Mugsy defiantly. I certainly don't want them incorporating the speech patterns of the lazy and under-educated or the slang of inner-city gangsters into their written work. By the same token, I don't accept forms such as WTF, LOL or BRB in their writings even though these forms are also linguistically justified.

Whether the English language will formally adopt these written forms in the future or not is irrelevant. Contracted, elided and assimilated forms often do become standard usage. At this point in time, in my opinion, they remain unacceptable in academic English beyond the example provided above. Considering that the students are already struggling to speak and write at a level that would help them gain access to post-secondary studies, I consider it neither prudent nor responsible to delude them into thinking this form of writing would be acceptable because it can be justified by Chomskian theory. I suppose that, my dear colleague, exemplifies the difference between those focussed on Applied Linguistics and teaching and those who focus on Theoretical Linguistics.

RED

[arioch36]

MCL