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womblingfree
Joined: 04 Mar 2006
Posts: 826
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 Posted: Thu Mar 09, 2006 1:41 pm Post subject: |
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| Mark wrote: |
There are things that I would have thought ungrammatical until I heard a native speaker from another country say them.
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What really frustrates me is that when native speakers make grammatical errors in speech (do they even exist? If a native speaker is saying it then it's English!), which lets face it all of of us do probably hundreds of times a day, it's put down to variation. Whan a student does the same it's called error. 
Sounds like your Scottish friend simply couldn't use commas correctly rather than any odd transatlantic comma variation.  |
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abufletcher
Joined: 14 Sep 2005
Posts: 779
Location: Shikoku Japan (for now)
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| Posted: Thu Mar 09, 2006 2:46 pm Post subject: |
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Of course for Chomskyans these goofs can just be written off a "performance errors" and are of little interest beyond their evidentiary value for this or that theory of speech production.
And with this simple statement, Chomskyans can write off the need to base linguistics on analysis of naturally occurring conversational data.
BTW, conversation analytic work on repair is interesting in this regard, for example:
Schegloff, E.A., Jefferson, G., & Sacks, H. (1977). The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation. Language, 53, 361-82. |
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Sweetsee
Joined: 11 Jun 2004
Posts: 2302
Location: ) is everything
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| Posted: Fri Mar 10, 2006 1:10 am Post subject: |
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| Me thinks Abu be AL forum. |
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womblingfree
Joined: 04 Mar 2006
Posts: 826
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| Posted: Fri Mar 10, 2006 3:49 am Post subject: |
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| abufletcher wrote: |
Of course for Chomskyans these goofs can just be written off a "performance errors" and are of little interest beyond their evidentiary value for this or that theory of speech production.
And with this simple statement, Chomskyans can write off the need to base linguistics on analysis of naturally occurring conversational data. |
It's these inadequacies that have led Chomsky to be sidelined as far as progression of practical language teaching and its research goes for the last forty years.
Chomskys mostly been replaced by notions of CLT ever since Del Hymes first sowed the seeds of communicative competence in 1966.
Del Hymes, Canale & Swain, Widdowson and more recently, Bachman are all far more relevant to the practical application of pedagogic methodology.
Still Chomsky is still quite rightly occupies a huge place in Linguistics but those studying TEFL or Applied Linguistics will often hear of him only as a footnote except when it comes to SLA & Universal Grammar. |
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abufletcher
Joined: 14 Sep 2005
Posts: 779
Location: Shikoku Japan (for now)
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| Posted: Fri Mar 10, 2006 3:02 pm Post subject: |
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| Sweetsee wrote: |
| Me thinks Abu be AL forum. |
Well, I've had a look at the AL forum and it looks mostly to be the same old tedious grammar discussions that occupy most EFL teacher forums. |
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D.O.S.
Joined: 02 Apr 2003
Posts: 108
Location: TOKYO (now)/ LONDON
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| Posted: Fri Mar 10, 2006 7:12 pm Post subject: |
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Is the TEFL market in trouble here?
No. It is simply becoming more cut-throat and realistic like other industries.
In similar fashion to the 5 foot gaijin male with a meek Bachelor degree coming to Japan in the 1980's was special and being swarmed with women and job offers will likely find himself very lonely and working at a conversation school now.
Read Darwin. Teachers here were in a 'bubble' like the rest of the economy! Now reality hits and only the 'best' will survive comfortably. If you don't measure up, you fall off the ship. Lookism, ageism, credentialism, it's real life again! |
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womblingfree
Joined: 04 Mar 2006
Posts: 826
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| Posted: Fri Mar 10, 2006 9:13 pm Post subject: |
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| D.O.S. wrote: |
| Is the TEFL market in trouble here?Teachers here were in a 'bubble' like the rest of the economy! Now reality hits and only the 'best' will survive comfortably. If you don't measure up, you fall off the ship. Lookism, ageism, credentialism, it's real life again! |
I think it's a combination of too many universities being built in the eighties and the withdrawal, or massive reduction, in government subsidies for office workers learning English. The eikaiwas are focusing more and more on kids these days in order to survive.
If the big eikaiwas don't survive it will be absolutely no loss and will perhaps initiate a long overdue overhaul of English teaching in Japan to bring it in line with the, often barely passable, standards in Europe. As it stands eikaiwa's are great for grads looking for a year out and great for Japanese students with money to burn to talk to foreigners.
But...
Pensioners, the unemployed and those desperate to improve their language skills in order to progress their careers or studies, are often coerced into handing over hundreds of thousands of yen, often on credit, to partake in classes that are of little to no use to them. Then are sleazily hard sold on worthless supplementary materials for all eternity. It brings out my inner Hulk 
In my experience students that go from an eikaiwa to a British Council school (for all their sins) or some other such school which only hires trained and qualified, experienced teachers suddenly realise just how much money they were wasting at Nova/Aeon/Geos etc.
My Japanese girlfriend was put on an English program at a well respected English school in Tokyo after previously being at an eikaiwa for a year. After a week she said:
Her: "Er..Are eikaiwa teachers...just..english speakers???"
Me: "Yep, usually."
Her: "I see. It's really obvious now."
I don't see why this situation should remain, I mean most of the Japanese English teachers at eikaiwas are all qualified so it just undermines what they do.
I'm not having a go at all the eikaiwa teachers here, I was one for long enough, it's the system itself that needs changing. Get everyone to do a TEFL and that'll be more worthwhile for students and teachers alike.
Last edited by womblingfree on Sat Mar 11, 2006 3:38 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Vince
Joined: 05 May 2003
Posts: 559
Location: U.S.
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| Posted: Sat Mar 11, 2006 1:04 am Post subject: |
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| womblingfree wrote: |
My Japanese girlfriend was put on an English program at a well respected English school in Tokyo after previously being at an eikaiwa for a year. After a week she said:
Her: "Er..Are eikaiwa teachers...just..english speakers???"
Me: "Yep, usually."
Her: "I see. It's really obvious now." |
One of my friends in Japan had the same realization when he went to an EFL conference. He taught at one of the big four for several years and, having been promoted to a sort of head teacher, thought his TEFL skills were in order. He came back from that conference devastated by how much of an EFL teacher he wasn't. The upshot was that he enrolled in an MA TESOL program, then went on to a PhD. |
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abufletcher
Joined: 14 Sep 2005
Posts: 779
Location: Shikoku Japan (for now)
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| Posted: Sat Mar 11, 2006 5:27 am Post subject: |
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| I remember what an eye-opener my first TESOL conference was. Just the sheer numbers of other EFL teachers there was mind-boggling. |
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D.O.S.
Joined: 02 Apr 2003
Posts: 108
Location: TOKYO (now)/ LONDON
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| Posted: Sat Mar 11, 2006 5:57 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
| He came back from that conference devastated by how much of an EFL teacher he wasn't. |
It is not the fault of people coming to Japan to teach, but there are very few "teachers" here.
Why? Because the Japanese do not want "teachers." Instead, they want their gaijin workers to fit into a system of being either a human tape recorder or a chat-friend.
Even the university positions (held up as the Holy Grail here by some) are a joke. Perhaps this is why people employed this way only receive three year contracts, as anyone can teach Interchange Book 1 and crack a few jokes (which is all that is required!) |
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gaijinalways
Joined: 29 Nov 2005
Posts: 2279
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| Posted: Sat Mar 11, 2006 6:18 am Post subject: |
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| Why? Because the Japanese do not want "teachers." Instead, they want their gaijin workers to fit into a system of being either a human tape recorder or a chat-friend. |
This is true to some extent, and sadly reinforced in junior high schools and high schools where communicative English usually doesn't receive a grade (hence it is thought of as more of a filler class and a possible advertisment for a 'international skill' class, but with no emphasis to see what students have learned).
| Quote: |
| Even the university positions (held up as the Holy Grail here by some) are a joke. Perhaps this is why people employed this way only receive three year contracts, as anyone can teach Interchange Book 1 and crack a few jokes (which is all that is required!) |
Sorry DOS, it is fairly obvious to the better trained teachers that some teachers can't handle the dynamics of uni group teaching that well and also don't know how to make material that complements the text as well as supplementary material for the gaps missing in books like Interchange. Some of the lower level unis and semon gakkos though, do sadly run classes that fit into the category of more 'entertainive' type classes. |
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abufletcher
Joined: 14 Sep 2005
Posts: 779
Location: Shikoku Japan (for now)
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| Posted: Sat Mar 11, 2006 6:41 am Post subject: |
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| D.O.S. wrote: |
Even the university positions (held up as the Holy Grail here by some) are a joke. Perhaps this is why people employed this way only receive three year contracts, as anyone can teach Interchange Book 1 and crack a few jokes (which is all that is required!) |
Sadly, there is a great deal of truth here. On the positive side though, most university general ed English programs are so unstructured that the teacher is free to do virtually anything he or she wants to -- well anything he or she can get 40-60 of the most hopelessly apathetic students on the planet to do.
I'm currently required to teach one of our L/S first year courses so I've been treating it as my own personal SLA laboratory. My current focus is on how I can promote the massive acquisition of chunks of "used language" (in Brazil's terms). At the moment this involves the use of lots of videos and a "used language journal." I'm also experimenting with ways to implement a conversation analytic approach to teaching conversation. No matter what I do it couldn't possibly be worse than pushing them through yet another page-turner course with a book like New Interchange. |
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womblingfree
Joined: 04 Mar 2006
Posts: 826
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| Posted: Sat Mar 11, 2006 12:34 pm Post subject: |
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| D.O.S. wrote: |
| the Japanese do not want "teachers." Instead, they want their gaijin workers to fit into a system of being either a human tape recorder or a chat-friend. |
The private language schools certainly want human tape recorder/chat friends, same could be said of many ALT positions although not all.
There are many students looking for a decent education though and sadly very few places where they can actually get one. |
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