Korean Job Discussion Forums

Whiskey Samurai · Joined: 10 Dec 2005 Location: Korea

Shut up! Everybody!
English English (which I happen to speak) and all the other kinds - if the worst thing I have to put up with in my teaching career is to say"trash can" instead of "bin" then I can deal with that.

Natalie. Fair play - everyone else, teach what you know

gypsyfish · Joined: 17 Jan 2003 Location: Seoul

Whiskey Samurai · Joined: 10 Dec 2005 Location: Korea

All of them!

endofthewor1d · Joined: 01 Apr 2003 Location: the end of the wor1d.

Wangja · Joined: 17 May 2004 Location: Seoul, Yongsan

or even compatible? Wink

endofthewor1d · Joined: 01 Apr 2003 Location: the end of the wor1d.

ouch.

Porter_Goss · Joined: 26 Mar 2006 Location: The Wrong Side of Right

It's up to us to stop the Kiwis from teaching a generation of Korean youth that a kitchen counter is actually called a kitchen bench.

Yu_Bum_suk · Joined: 25 Dec 2004

I just finished invigilating a grade 3 listening test and was surprised to hear them using a number of non-American terms ('I'll ring you', 'mobile phone', etc.). I don't know if they're doing this on purpose this year or if the person they paid to make the questions is not American, but it does show that it's probably best to teach both, especially as foreigners our students may someday have occasion to talk to will probably not be American. ...not that we have time to teach either properly...

coolsage · Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2006 7:53 am Post subject:

It's not English English, it's British English, and there are many variations, from the Queen's, or BBC English, which is regarded as a standard, to Lancashire English, which almost nobody who isn't from there can fully comprehend. Similarly, the English spoken in the rural parts of Newfoundland and Cape Breton is frequently indecipherable without subtitles. Rural Australian qualifies as a dialect. Don't get me started on the English spoken in the 'deep south' ( there's an oxymoron; those people are anything but deep). And then there's Indian English, perhaps the most spoken variation of English on the planet. So what is the English that we impart? It's the kind we know, and our mandate is to serve it up the best way we know how.

Mr. Joe · Joined: 26 Mar 2006

[quote="keithinkorea"]I teach both British and American English when it comes to spelling, the differences are few and far between.

I would never, ever teach American pronunciation as it is often lazy and unclear,
I teach them for example to say 'Where did you go to?' rather than 'whereja goda?' which is encouraged in some American English speaking 'instructional' texts. (Those texts were written by Koreans!)

TEST:
(What University did you go to?) (Where did you go to?)
Which is correct?
ANSWER: NEITHER ONE!
Please don't tell me you teach students to end a sentence in a preposition?
"Which University did you attend?" seems appropriate. Rolling Eyes

Ya-ta Boy · Joined: 16 Jan 2003 Location: Established in 1994

coolsage makes sense, although I disagree with the portion about the accents of the Deep South. I think several of those regional accents sound sexy. IMO Mr. Joe just sounds like a language nationalist, probably the silliest and least thought-out kind of nationalism going.

Fat Sam · Joined: 05 Dec 2005 Location: Gyeonggi-do

coolsage · Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2006 9:12 pm Post subject:

To paraphrase Winston Churchill: 'Ending a sentence with a prepostion is something up with which I will not put.' Thankfully, we're not charged with teaching the Queen's English here, but functional conversational English. And while I discourage the use of the 'wannas' and the 'gonnas', I do make my students aware of them, because that's what they're going to be hearing when they get themselves to North America or the Antipodes. Very few native speakers enunciate as well as I do, at least while I'm on the clock.