Job Discussion Forums

[naf]

I've talked with many teachers and often fallen into the topic of how reading student papers has disintegrated their intuitive understanding of how to use the language. How many of you have, after teaching in a country for several years and reading thousands of student papers, found yourselves having to think twice about how to use your own language? Has the repeated input of misspellings, gammatical misusages, and all around redundancy of errors affected your usage of your own language? Have you experienced this and how do you compensate?

[dmb]

Happens to me every day. It does shock me. Very often I find that I know a Turkish word for something, yet can't remember the English equivalent.

[FGT]

Yes, it can sometimes make it more difficult to pick up on errors, particularly if one is tired or lacking concentration, but also it makes one more aware of the traps that Turkish students frequently fall into and better able to decode horrendous Turk-lish mistakes.

Ages ago I produced a piece of "homework" that was crammed full of typical mistakes. I gave it to relatively high level students to correct and got loads of useful language work out of it. If I hadn't seen those same mistakes over and over, I couldn't have done it.

One of the things I love about this job is that I'm still learning about English language. By and large my own appreciation of "correct" English has probably increased since I've been here. I enjoy reading books about language, for example "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves" is recommended for punctuation; never one of my strong points!

And yes, I've had the mental blanks about English words too! I remember an elementary class in my first year of teaching in Turkey asking for help in translating "torsu" and all I could do was say "I know that!" and jump around thinking "What the F*** is it in English?!". I think I've got better at dealing with the situation!

It's fun to be forced to think about what is correct and why; whether it is written by a student, a colleague, or an expert.