Back to basics...

[fluffyhamster]

I attended an interview recently to teach at a small school where the majority of my students would be kids between the ages of 3 and junior high school age.

After some basic fact-finding Q&As, the manager of the school and her sole foreign teacher handed me a pile of food and drink flashcards (ice cream cone, slice of pizza, glass of OJ and the like) and asked me to demonstrate how I would "teach the difference between like and want".

Now call me a slacker and inexperienced despite my years in the "profession", but I must admit that I was a bit stumped (then again, what can anyone expect given zero preparation time? It's not like I don't usually prepare for my lessons!).

My initial reaction as I heaved myself up to do "something" (anything!) was that want is the far less appropriate or polite (at least in its probable relation to foodstuffs!) than like (and after a bit more thought, I think our wants are much "deeper" and not as easily or openly expressed as our likes). Anyway, in this context, I reckon like was by far the better thing to teach, why introduce want at all?!

I am sure we are all familiar with the "host offering refreshments to visitors" script:

H: Do you want/Would you like anything to eat/drink? (I have OJ, coke...or do you want a beer? etc).
V: Can I have... (?I'd like...; *I want...)

So, ultimately, I thought the demonstration question was more revealing of how my potential boss would teach it than how I would (or wouldn't) go about things. I could envisage the kind of lesson they wanted: me maniacally waving flashcards and shouting "I'm hungry! I like bananas! I want a/the (?) banana! NOW, dammit!!!". I won't presume to bore you with how exactly I winged my way through it before crash-landing (besides, I can't really remember much).

What do you guys make of this? Are we raising a whole tribe of pushy, direct little brats who just know what they want (or perhaps like) and who get it? Have I been teaching adults for too long? (I actually like teaching kids, but I am of the opinion that ironically, even less thought goes into what kind of English they should learn than with adult learners (if such a thing were possible). They are either treated like little adults, or taught stuff that will not serve them well when they are adults! It's not often that they are taught as if they were, well, just kids! Am I just being an*l about the language? Do English teachers have to simply get over their respect for/neuroses about the language to "successfully" "teach" kids especially?).

Can you, off the top of your heads (without rushing off for hours to pore over dictionaries etc), think of a lesson that would fruitfully (and appropriately) combine the two of those items, or would you only teach one of them at a time (or perhaps even add phrases like "Can I have...")?

Am I totally useless for not having got this "chesnut" (if that is indeed what it is) "down pat" by now? Or should I just "forget it" (not the question items themselves, but the question as a whole and why it was asked)?

[woodcutter]

Yes, you are completely rubbish. All you had to do was leap aroung smacking your lips and rubbing your stomach and prove what a big bag of fun you are.

Seriously though, I hate that kind of interview, especially when they come up with some kind of contrast like that. Who mixes up "like" and "want' anyway?

[fluffyhamster]

Who mixes up "like" and "want' anyway?

Kids, once I've taught them something like that school's syllabus.

[LarryLatham]

Hello there, fluffy.

I'm still tired (and maybe cranky) from my trip (just got in) so maybe I'm taking the wrong thing out of your post, but I'll let off a little steam here. Questions in job interviews like, "How would you teach...?" really piss me off. It's a stupid question, because it assumes that there is a correct way to teach it...to anyone. I couldn't really give a responsible answer to any question like that (meaning that I'd be stumped too, like you were). In every case, it seems to me, it depends on the particular students I'm working with, and my evaluation of their knowledge and skills at the moment. There are probably many ways you could approach like and want. I suppose you could suggest two or three of those for your interviewer, but even then that's merely material for your bag of tricks. Each situation is unique, and even to have several ideas at your fingertips totally misses the point that working with students is a personal and sensitive process that should begin with the students and your relationship with them, not with some clever technique. Having a bag of tricks may be convenient at times, and I guess I'll have to admit we all have them, but each time you dip into it you run the risk of blowing off the students because you aren't truly starting with their needs in mind. I don't believe the best teaching occurs when set methods or procedures are trotted out even if you've used them before with success. That particular procedure may not work so well with this particular set of students, and it's your responsibility to know that (with the exception of working with a brand new class, of course). Bosses who don't understand this shouldn't be supervising teachers.

Larry Latham

[fluffyhamster]

Hiya Larry, welcome back!

I don't think you're being cranky at all, the way my post is written (question upon question!) is enough to get any teacher's pulse-rate rising (kind of like a relentless zombie attack from Dawn of the Dead)!

I don't mind employers asking me these kind of questions if I think they themselves have a way that is worth considering (i.e. potentially better than anything I could think of) for the specific students that I will be teaching. In this instance, I have my doubts!

As I said before, declaratively, "want" and "like" are pretty different; in "offer" questions they are similar; and in answers neither is functionally appropriate for "getting food that has been offered actually handed to you without pause or incident". To my mind, we'd need to add, "Can I have..." to get what we would like to or want to eat and drink (and what about "please"?!).

It seems there must be classrooms full of kids intoning "I like bananas!" and/or "I want a banana!" (or even "I'd like a banana, please!"), but to what avail? Some would argue they are learning something...

Monkey see, monkey do.

[Stephen Jones]

"How would you teach this" is a question I ask all the time in interviews. You're not asking for one particular answer - you just want to see if the interviewee can give any answer at all.

The particular question you are talking is pretty crap. Tell the boss you need realia. Go to your nearest restaurant, tell him "I like champagne, and I'd like you to order me half a dozen bottles." Drink them. Then tell him "I really like champagne, and I really liked the bottles you've just bought me, but I don't want any more. Bye. I hope you like paying the bill."

[fluffyhamster]

"I don't want any more". Nice negative there. Now, does Little Lord Fauntleroy not want anything else?

The question now is, would you work for "such" a school if they offered you the job (unlikely though that is, on the basis of your poor demo)?!

[fluffyhamster]

Ooh, something just occured to me: do you reckon it could've been a trick question?! I would hope and guess not - what a waste of everyone's time that would be!

[revel]

Hey fluff, Larry, wood and Steven!

This thread may not get very far, as we all seem to be agreeing, what a silly thing to request in an interview. I'm with Steven, I would ask a teacher how he/she teaches, but not how he/she teaches a specific thing. I was asked if I could teach the three plus zero conditionals to teens with low exam scores and, wanting and needing (and even liking) the job offer, I naturally said "yes", though I qualified it with a nice "though I'd have to brush up on that artificial ESL construct before doing so." To the question posed to you, Dunc, I would have been smart-mouthed and would have asked "How do you teach such things? I don't teach vocabulary through contrast with other vocabulary, have to teach such one item at a time."

If the boss wants to see how you teach such, then he/she should put you in a classroom and observe your teaching for an hour. Niether the boss, nor his/her "head teacher" are ESL students and their feedback to your performance would prove to be poor in developing strategies for teaching this silly compare/contrast. Except for the very little ones, I've not got a single student who doesn't know what "like" means or when to use it, as it is pretty well battered over their heads in all the beginning books they use. Want falls into the "be, want, go, do, get, have" list of essential verbs, which is a totally different set of concepts being taught.

Finally, I would certainly take Stephen's advice on the restaurant situation. That was, indeed, a trick question and has no place in a serious job interview. Like the test they give you that says at the top "Read the entire test before beginning to answer questions" and says in the last question "Don't answer any of these questions, turn the test in unfinished." Sounds like that boss has had too many training courses on how to hire an employee.

Take the job, do the job to the best of your ability, always say "yes" to the boss, finish your paperwork on time, collect your paycheck and hope that the boss does what most bosses do in the end, ignore the teachers totally except as means of making him/herself money. If the students are happy with you then the boss will, in general, be happy with you. The next boss might not offer you flash cards, but might ask you another silly question. Use the k-word (Krashen) or the C-word (Chomsky) and he/she might just shut up, just the other day my boss demonstrated his ignorance by asking me what I meant by L1 and L2 in a document I had offered him on teaching adults....sigh!

Good luck in the job hunt! You'll find one, ESL teachers, good ESL teachers are not a dime a dozen (or maybe they are where you are?)

peace,
revel.

[fluffyhamster]

If the boss wants to see how you teach such, then he/she should put you in a classroom and observe your teaching for an hour.

Actually, I was fine with just the quick interview and demo early in the day, when the school was quiet!

Niether the boss, nor his/her "head teacher" are ESL students and their feedback to your performance would prove to be poor in developing strategies for teaching this silly compare/contrast.

The boss had studied in the UK for some time and had pretty good English; and doubtless the native teacher also had some foreign language learning experience, and thus a student's perspective too.

I presume the only reason that they dreamt up this dubious lexical "minimal pair" was that they hadn't thought/weren't thinking enough about the language as teachers, much less linguists.

I sometimes wish I didn't think so much about things...oh how easy it would seem, and how happy I would be-ee (laughing all the way to my non-Swiss, non-special deposit, bank account).

[revel]

Hey fluff!

Let me be a little more clear on my comment about the boss or head teacher being ESL students. I wouldn't doubt that either or both had been through language courses, especially if one, the non-native, was speaking English. What I meant was, in the circumstances you mention (job interview), they would be worse than giving a demonstration to a video camera. At least the camera sits there silently, unjudgementally, recording your performance. The boss and ht are actively evaluating your performance while leaving out the most important factor of ESL teaching, which would be the student. Naturally, the objectives differ between boss/ht and student, and in the interview you would be trying to walk with one leg in a cast where the only crutch they have offered you is "like vs want" and a few food flash cards. I've seen teachers try to explain their techniques in the same way, trying to pretend that other teachers are actually students, and I've seen such presentations as artificial, though much can be gleaned if those attending are able to imagine that they are in a classroom and don't know beforehand what the teacher is trying to teach them.

A couple of years ago my boss asked another teacher to give him lessons. For one trimester, this teacher photocopied articles from his favorite English newspaper and they read the articles and discussed the topics presented therein. Then the boss decided to try me on for size. He and I had three classes before we mutually decided that my classes were not of use to him. He just wasn't in need of what I offered and I wasn't willing to offer him what he thought he needed. And, despite both of us telling him repeatedly "Explain to me" not "explain me", he continues to use the latter. I haven't put much thought into it, but suppose that he was actually trying to evaluate our teaching through these classes. Consequently, that other teacher does a lot of private classes (something I abhor) and I do group adult classes. The groups get bored and frustrated with that other teacher while in my classes we sing and dance (yes, we actually learn basic tap dancing) and laugh and practice. This boss has learned that the evaluation of a teacher should be done either by the students or through observation in a real teaching situation. All the rest is just "how would you..." situtations.

Don't lose sleep over it, I have, and it's a b*tch having a "job" that interests us so much that we spend our "free" time thinking about it, and more, thinking about those who employ us to do it. I've been trying to think about the guitar again, better use of my time when not in class I think!

peace,
revel.

[fluffyhamster]

I've been teaching (having to teach) elementary school kids recently, so my mind returned to this thread...

Taking "another" crack at the original task, I see the following underlying language:

Qs: Do you like bananas? ("Establisher") > Do you want/Would you like one? (Offer)
As: Yes (I do) > Yes please/OK, thanks! etc
(Decontextualized statements: I like bananas > I want/would like/fancy/am gonna have etc a banana)

The offer seems more central (without it the askee will be left wanting!), and an affirmative answer would of course establish that the person indeed liked bananas without them needing to be explicitly asked (about).

The above would be tackling the flashcards one at a time. Slightly more ambitiously, Wh- Qs could be asked of the whole group of food and drink available; this would blur the line between establishing likes and making offers (What would you like/do you like/do you want?), but it would also mean that plurals could be avoided (there would however probably be a need to refer to the featured - and limited, supply-wise - items using the definite article).

But who knows if the boss or teacher at that school were thinking along these lines. I guess their bare minimum lesson would be offers (using 'Do you want' rather than 'Would you like'...a banana, a/some coffee etc) and perhaps full-sentence replies ('Yes, I want a banana, dammit'), and/or (then?) sentences expressing hunger or thirst ('I want a... - I like -s/, as if you wouldn't be able to guess that!'), to which 'like' somehow got added and opposed, but like I said before, who knows (and by now, who really cares, right? LOL).

[abufletcher]

Qs: Do you like bananas? ("Establisher") > Do you want/Would you like one? (Offer)
As: Yes (I do) > Yes please/OK, thanks! etc.

Whoa! Watch out! You're getting dangerously close to doing conversation analysis here! As came up in another thread "Do you..." questions are quite regularly implicated in turns which serve as what CAists refer to as "pre-sequences" (pre-invitations, pre-requests, pre-offers, pre-announcements).

You might want to try to get a hold of the following:

Davidson, J.A.  (1984).  Subsequent versions of invitations, offers, requests, and proposals dealing with potential or actual rejection. In  J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (Eds.), Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis (pp.102-128). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pomerantz, A.  (1984).  Agreeing and disagreeing with assessment: some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes.  In J. M. Atkinson & J. Heritage (eds.) Structures of social action: Studies in conversation analysis. (pp. 57-101).  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Terasaki, A. (1976). Pre-announcement sequences in conversation. Social Sciences Working Paper No. 99, Irvine, CA: University of California. [Edited version in Analytic Sociology, (1978), 1(4), C11-G13.  Reprinted in G. Lerner (Ed.) (2004).  Conversation Analysis: Studies from the first generation.  (pp. 171-223).  Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Schegloff, E.A. (1980) 'Preliminaries to preliminaries: "Can I ask you a question?"', Sociological Inquiry 50: 104-52

Schegloff, E.  (1990).  On the organization of sequences as a source of ‘coherence’ in talk-in-interaction.  In B.  Dorval (ed.) Conversational organization and its development.  In the series Advances in discourse processes.  Vol. XXXVIII.  Norwood, NJ:  Ablex  51-77

All this SHOULD be required reading in any MATESOL program but for some bizarre reason is not. I guess they're too busy teaching "grammar."

[fluffyhamster]

Well, it's nice to have a reason for opening one's mouth, other than to drool. One thing that drives me a bit crazy sometimes, though, is the tendency for Japanese to say 'May/Can I ask you a question?' (the title of one of the papers you've listed) - I often just wish they'd ask, get to, the main question itself, especially when it turns out to be a very innocuous or boring one.

[abufletcher]

Of course the way "May I ask you a question" and other "pre-pre's" work in native speaker talk is that this question (the the "go ahead" that ok's it) are regularly NOT followed by the question itself but rather some preamble.

A: Can I ask you a question?
B: Sure.
A: The other day I was walking around in downtown Tokyo and I saw this guy walking a really REALLy big dog, you know.
B: uh huh.
A: And like he's walking this dog through this really crowded area and the dog is really scary looking.
B: Yeah.
A: Well what I was wondering was, it that legal?

These sorts of pre-pres are designed to mark the following projected action (these are also sometimes called 'action projections") as in some way delicate from the speakers perspective.