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bearcanada
Joined: 04 Sep 2005
Posts: 312
Location: Calgary, Canada
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 Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 11:42 am Post subject: |
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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?
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vikuk
Joined: 23 May 2007
Posts: 1842
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| Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 12:32 pm Post subject: |
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| 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. |
If they can't read then how do they find out about these jobs - must be the jungle drums 
Bear these are teaching forums - so why not a bit of argument regarding how mistake riddled written English from FT's could indicate poor standards with regard to their teaching ability? Both Shan-shan and I have highlighted the fact that recruiting a cut-price workforce might lead to a bargain basement product - but you still seem to focus on perceived shortcomings of the western educational system for the literary failings of the certain China FT's.
A great deal of responsibility for any poor standards found in Chinese English classrooms, at the moment, seems to lie with Employers who don't invest enough resources in recruiting a suitably trained and motivated workforce. If those resources were made available - qualified FT's were recruited and the average FT job was transformed into a career suitable for a serious teaching professional - but standards remained at a low - then I'd have to change my opinion  |
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Shan-Shan
Joined: 28 Aug 2003
Posts: 1074
Location: electric pastures
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| Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 1:57 pm Post subject: |
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| qualified FT's were recruited and the average FT job was transformed into a career suitable for a serious teaching professional |
Chinese English teachers are seen in China as having an English teaching career. The FT, on the other, is vacationing, "learning the culture and language", taking a break between jobs, wrapping dumplings, running.
Before this semester began, I asked my "new" department what the expectations were for the third-year writing class, and what it was that I should build on from last semester. The head of the English department was stunned by my question, and told me to "just make them write stuff". I wasn't asking for a curriculum to follow, nor to be handed a weekly outline any schmo could follow. All I wanted were some guidelines, ideas of where third year students' writing abilities ought to be by the end of the semester as well as some examples of what went on in class last semester so as to avoid too much repetition. No such luck. (I was fortunate enough, though, to have the freedom to choose a decent coursebook which, unbeknownst to me, was promptly photocopied for the students. The lovely irony is the book costs 16 kuai; photocopied at even one mao per page, the students would have paid at least 20 RMB for the unbound copy!)
The FT who asks such niggly details about "benchmarks" or "goals" apparently messes up the concept of the FT as entertainer, the thing for students to laugh and practice with, and instead emerges as a creature who might demand a wage commensurate with their ability to teach. Scary stuff.
Mind you, I have had classes -- in private institutes -- where students bring clear goals with them, and do appreciate working hard on improving their foreign language skills. The void that is so many English classes at the university level (this year's English Literature majors have never heard of James Joyce) is not the entirety of the English teaching situation.
| Quote: |
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'.
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At least a flicker of something is oscillating in his head
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Do you laugh or cry?
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I just curse the damage contractions have inflicted on people's language awareness! |
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cj750s
Joined: 26 May 2007
Posts: 701
Location: Donghai Town, Beijng
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| Posted: Thu Mar 13, 2008 12:31 am Post subject: |
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| The FT who asks such niggly details about "benchmarks" or "goals" apparently messes up the concept of the FT as entertainer, the thing for students to laugh and practice with, and instead emerges as a creature who might demand a wage commensurate with their ability to teach. Scary stuff. |
I have a different view on this matter....perhaps the employer wants the FT to assess the situation themselves and determines the role the FT can play in improving the writing at what ever level exist. Generally, education wages are determined by level of education and years of service rather then English ability. Often times the administrator does not have intimate knowledge of his charges English ability and therefore has little information as to the writing ability of the classes in their school. |
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Shan-Shan
Joined: 28 Aug 2003
Posts: 1074
Location: electric pastures
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| Posted: Thu Mar 13, 2008 6:34 am Post subject: |
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| Generally, education wages are determined by level of education and years of service rather then English ability |
Depending on the institution, the range of the wage tends to be quite narrow, often only a difference of a few hundred RMB for greater experience/ relevant educational background. This we already know. English ability (i.e. can the FT speak/write well), something which should be a given, seems to be the determining factor for a lot a wages here in China. Experience and education, given how little they influence wages at a lot of institutions, appear secondary.
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| ....perhaps the employer wants the FT to assess the situation themselves and determines the role the FT can play in improving the writing at what ever level exist |
Quite possibly. Though for myself, it would still be nice to have a copy of the previous semester's syllabus (which in my circumstances does not exist) to help with creating some continuity for the students.
Another irony with my current writing classes: today a representative came by to ask that I "get my students doing a lot of conversation practice; help them improve their Oral English as much as possible". A writing class will obviously have activities which involve oral communication -- but a writing class which has a stress on raising the students' speaking level?
I am amused. |
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arioch36
Joined: 21 Jan 2003
Posts: 3589
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| Posted: Thu Mar 13, 2008 4:06 pm Post subject: |
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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 |
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11:59
Joined: 31 Aug 2006
Posts: 632
Location: Hong Kong: The 'Pearl of the Orient'
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| Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2008 3:45 pm Post subject: |
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| Lobster wrote: |
| 4. Don't write corrupt forms such as gonna, ain't or hafta. |
How is 'gonna' (or 'wanna', etc.) a 'corrupt' form (language has no Platonic Essence) and why shouldn't it be written? In fact, contractions such as 'gonna' are highly rule-governed and the underlying grammar is surprisingly complex, as those of us who have studied descriptive, structural linguistics well know.
I think contractions such as 'gonna' just appear odd in the written language, but that will change with time. Languages are after all far from static and are in fact in a constant state of flux (indeed, in computational models they are perched on the edge of chaos where there exists the most adaptive variation). Anyway, in normal run-of-the-mill spoken language native speakers of any language tend to produce between 10 and 15 phonemes a second and thus naturally occurring phonological effects will produce such contractions whether you like it or not (it is termed 'co-articulation').
You also seem to forget that much of contemporary language (presumably what you would call 'uncorrupted' language) is itself a contraction (or a 'corruption', if you will) of former separate items (wasn't 'tomorrow' originally 'to the morrow' or something of the sort?). In short you are being prescriptive and ignorant of diachronic language change, a normal yet poorly understood phenomenon. I think this is quite odd for a teacher of language.
As it happens, though, as I noted above the contraction you cite ('gonna') is highly rule based, and so does not in any way reflect 'sloppy' or 'lazy' (let alone 'corrupt') speech. 'Going to' cannot always be contracted to 'gonna' and 'want to' cannot always become 'wanna', at least not according to native speakers (you cannot, for example, say 'I'm gonna London'). Native speakers are of course often totally clueless about this, at least consciously, which of course is interesting in and of itself (at least in terms of psycholinguistics). You have to tease this information (declarative knowledge, not procedural knowledge) out of them through grammaticality judgement tasks and the like.
Contraction of 'want to' to 'wanna' seems to be prohibited where the words 'want' and 'to' are separated by a Wh-trace (let's symbolise it as t) that has been 'left behind' in the phrase marker grammar by the movement of an earlier constituent through the syntactic process of 'raising'. Not many teachers of English are trained in syntax (and especially not Chomskyan Generative Grammar or computational syntax) so let me explain.
Before I do though, I have to briefly explain the (Chomskyan) notion of D- and S-structure, that is D(eep) and S(urface) structure respectively. Long ago it was proposed that the sentences that we speak, hear, read, and write are but surface structures, and that they are the result of transformations from deep structures of which we are never aware. Some sentences can have two S structures but one D structure (or phrase marker structure), or vice versa. For example, 'I saw the girl with the telescope' is ambiguous as it has two wholly separate D structures, which in S-structures would be expressed with something like 'I saw the girl who had a telescope' and 'I used a telescope to see the girl'. Another example would be 'Washing machines can be dangerous' (i.e., you can hurt yourself when washing machines (of any sort), or, the machines we call washing machines can be dangerous - they often explode).
So what does the theoretical (and somewhat obscure and highbrow) notion of D- and S-structure have to do with 'wanna' and 'gonna'. Well, first, let's establish that these contractions are not always licensed by the grammar of English as (unconsciously) stored in your head. Take the following example:
1) Who do you want to kiss?
2) Who do you wanna kiss?
In this example there is no problem contracting 'want to' to 'wanna'. The same is true for the next example:
3) Who do you want to invite to the party?
4) Who do you wanna invite to the party?
So, again, no problem. But, now look at the following (an asterisk in linguistics means that when asked native speakers reject the sentence):
5) Who do you want to kiss you?
6)* Who do you wanna kiss you?
And:
7) Who do you want to invite Fred to the party?
8)* Who do you wanna invite Fred to the party?
Native speakers reject examples such as (6) and (8), though of course they won't be able to tell you why there are ungrammatical. Well linguists can, at least those trained in generative syntax.
The D-structure of (1), 'Who do you want to kiss', is said to be:
a) You want to kiss wh
Which becomes:
b) Who i you want to kiss t i
(i = index, i.e., wh is indexed to 'who', recall that t = trace)
The movement of the wh-marker leaves a trace (think of it like copy and paste). In other words, the wh-marker (wh) moves to the front and becomes (in this example) 'who' (but in other examples it could be 'what' or 'when' etc.), and after moving it leaves a trace of itself (t) behind.
We then insert the auxiliary 'do' for other reasons unrelated to this analysis:
c) Who i do you want to kiss t i
And then, in the written language, we add the question mark:
d) Who i do you want to kiss t i ?
So in the above example 'Who do you want to kiss?' can become 'Who do you wanna kiss?'. But remember that 'Who do you want to kiss you?' does not seem to be able to be contracted to *'Who do you wanna kiss you?'. If we conduct the same analysis we soon see why. The D structure of 'Who do you want to kiss you?' would be:
e) You want wh to kiss you
So we 'front' the wh-marker to make:
f) Who i you want t i to kiss you
Again, we add the auxiliary 'do' to make:
g) Who i do you want t i to kiss you
And again we add the question mark in the written language:
h) Who do you want to kiss you?
But, now let's put the phrase structure markers back in:
i) Who i do you want t i to kiss you?
We immediately see why we can't say 'Who do you wanna kiss you?'. The trace (t) 'blocks' the contraction of 'want' and 'to'. We don't see or hear the trace marker but it is still there in the deep structure and even though we are using surface structures our brains are only using them to express deep structures and so *'Who do you wanna kiss you?' is not permitted. It's simply a rule of English grammar and that's that.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that all because you are unaware of such things that they can't possibly exist. First, there seems little other way of accounting for native speakers rejecting such examples despite never having heard them before, and, second, there are a million and one things your brain does on a daily basis that you are not aware of.
It might all seem rather strange but in computational linguistics and natural language generation (NLG) that is how we avoid machines (Markovian or other finite state automata) generating sentences such as *'Who do you wanna kiss yo | | |
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