When you're teaching a foreign language, explaining why pronouncing a word correctly is important is often a rather abstract concept for students. Often, they think you're being overly fussy or pedantic. The truth is that this impression is not always a false one. I've heard teachers who are from other countries go out of their way to correct an accent because it represents the pronunciation of native speakers from another country. Particularly, a lot of British people want to "correct" North American accents when the student's speech patterns would be comprehended just fine anywhere in the world.
My feeling has always been that, as long as what you say can be understood, it doesn't matter if its the pronunciation a native speaker would use. However, sometimes it's very important to get it straight so that you are not a laughing stock. If one ever needed a more perfect example of this, one need only turn to the very well known (amongst expatriates) Japanese Self Defense Force Navy commercial:
The words on the screen are telling you what they mean to say, but what you hear if you're not reading along is "semen sip for love." Seeing a bunch of dancing, prancing sailors say "semen sip for love," does not conjure up the intended image of peace-loving protectors so much as gay sailors who enjoy nothing more than some round robin acts of fellatio.
So, if you ever need to prove how important it is to get the pronunciation of words correct, you can just show this video to the students and explain the meaning a native speaker is going to get.
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Monday, September 22, 2008
Rosetta World
Lately, I've been seeing a lot of commercials on Japanese cable television for "Rosetta World" software. If you don't know about Rosetta, better known as "Rosetta Stone" in America, it's software which teaches you languages through "dynamic immersion." That is, they attempt to teach you through pairing words and phrases with pictures rather than translation. The idea is to simulate the way we learn our native language rather than laboriously learn to translate our native language into a new one.
Seeing commercials for language learning software or programs is certainly not a new experience. I've seen one for something called a "chatty parrot" for awhile which is a type of recorder which you listen to and record yourself back into in order to learn English. The commercial for that particular product was singularly unimpressive as the woman they used to display her prowess spoke in grammatically incorrect ways and often in heavily accented English. This is what happens when you don't bring in a native speaker to evaluate the actor's ability and rely on the perceptions of Japanese people who can't tell when someone speaks well or not.
The reason that the Rosetta World commercials caught my attention was that the ads are new to me and their timing is coincidental with an experience I have had lately with the Amazon Vine program. For those who don't know, the Amazon Vine sends some people free items in exchange for reviews. I'm one of those lucky people who has the opportunity to take part in the program. Recently, I was even more grateful because the Vine was offering up a plethora of Rosetta Stone software including Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, German, Italian and French. Since the software costs somewhere on the order of $500 to buy, anyone who wants to learn a language and can get it for free is in for an unparalleled treat.
At the time that the software was offered, I was shocked because of it being such a high value item. Now, I rather wonder if the Rosetta company is pushing to increase brand awareness and create positive buzz about their product. The infusion of commercials along with the generous parceling out of their software to Vine members seems quite coincidental if they aren't working on increasing their name recognition.
I've been using the Rosetta software for language learning for nearly 2 months now and I really like the way in which it teaches you. In fact, I have found it considerably more effective than other types of study including face-to-face teaching. Part of this is the immersion, but part of it is also the repetition and structuring of the content. As a language teacher, I can really appreciate the effort they made to program in reinforcement and timed review of past lessons. In particular, I think it really helps you get into a language's basics if you're one of those sorts who feels uncomfortable flailing around in front of others trying to stutter out a few words.
While I wouldn't say it's a complete solution as I think the software can only take you so far, I'm happy to see that they're marketing in Japan as I have greater faith in their teaching method than I do in most other software techniques I've seen for English study. I also believe that most young people would be a lot better off using the software than learning from a Japanese English teacher as I used to teach such teachers at Nova and most of them were very poor at English and taught incorrect grammar and pronunciation. The errors they teach people at a young age become so ingrained in students that we can rarely get them "unstuck". If you've every taught a student who said, "I have ever been to (name of place)," you've experienced the fall-out from one of these teachers who taught their students that "ever" and "never" are opposites.
One of my students is actually taking the on-line version of the courses which you can do for a certain duration (3 months for 30,000 yen). I recommended it to her because I think the technique might help address some of her persistent problems with grammar and sentence structure. One good thing about such software is one is encouraged to say it again and again until one gets it right. If a face-to-face teacher does that, the student can become embarrassed or frustrated, but the software doesn't carry any sort of fear of judgment.
Seeing commercials for language learning software or programs is certainly not a new experience. I've seen one for something called a "chatty parrot" for awhile which is a type of recorder which you listen to and record yourself back into in order to learn English. The commercial for that particular product was singularly unimpressive as the woman they used to display her prowess spoke in grammatically incorrect ways and often in heavily accented English. This is what happens when you don't bring in a native speaker to evaluate the actor's ability and rely on the perceptions of Japanese people who can't tell when someone speaks well or not.
The reason that the Rosetta World commercials caught my attention was that the ads are new to me and their timing is coincidental with an experience I have had lately with the Amazon Vine program. For those who don't know, the Amazon Vine sends some people free items in exchange for reviews. I'm one of those lucky people who has the opportunity to take part in the program. Recently, I was even more grateful because the Vine was offering up a plethora of Rosetta Stone software including Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, German, Italian and French. Since the software costs somewhere on the order of $500 to buy, anyone who wants to learn a language and can get it for free is in for an unparalleled treat.
At the time that the software was offered, I was shocked because of it being such a high value item. Now, I rather wonder if the Rosetta company is pushing to increase brand awareness and create positive buzz about their product. The infusion of commercials along with the generous parceling out of their software to Vine members seems quite coincidental if they aren't working on increasing their name recognition.
I've been using the Rosetta software for language learning for nearly 2 months now and I really like the way in which it teaches you. In fact, I have found it considerably more effective than other types of study including face-to-face teaching. Part of this is the immersion, but part of it is also the repetition and structuring of the content. As a language teacher, I can really appreciate the effort they made to program in reinforcement and timed review of past lessons. In particular, I think it really helps you get into a language's basics if you're one of those sorts who feels uncomfortable flailing around in front of others trying to stutter out a few words.
While I wouldn't say it's a complete solution as I think the software can only take you so far, I'm happy to see that they're marketing in Japan as I have greater faith in their teaching method than I do in most other software techniques I've seen for English study. I also believe that most young people would be a lot better off using the software than learning from a Japanese English teacher as I used to teach such teachers at Nova and most of them were very poor at English and taught incorrect grammar and pronunciation. The errors they teach people at a young age become so ingrained in students that we can rarely get them "unstuck". If you've every taught a student who said, "I have ever been to (name of place)," you've experienced the fall-out from one of these teachers who taught their students that "ever" and "never" are opposites.
One of my students is actually taking the on-line version of the courses which you can do for a certain duration (3 months for 30,000 yen). I recommended it to her because I think the technique might help address some of her persistent problems with grammar and sentence structure. One good thing about such software is one is encouraged to say it again and again until one gets it right. If a face-to-face teacher does that, the student can become embarrassed or frustrated, but the software doesn't carry any sort of fear of judgment.
Monday, September 8, 2008
I only make it look easy
Over the past month, I've been teaching a woman who will soon head off to a European country for an extended period of time to work in the head office of her company. To prepare for this time, she is taking a series of 5 intensive lessons with me. We spend two hours on Sundays practicing possible real life conversations.
When I say "real life conversations", I don't mean small talk or actually having a chat, I mean short exchanges at the drug store, train station, office, etc. If you've ever taught from the plethora of textbooks on the market for learners of English as a second language, you know that these are the least popular lessons in the books. In fact, when I used to work at Nova conversation school 18 years ago, teachers would repeat the same lessons 6 times over with students before teaching the lessons centering around pragmatic exchanges at the market, a hotel, etc. While the content was useful, it was often a teaching cul-de-sac for the teachers and repetitive and uninteresting for the students. Even doing the dialog once where you're essentially saying, "Hello, I've got a headache. Could you recommend some medicine?" and getting a response and thanking the other person isn't all that interesting. Doing it enough so the student gets it down and can say it correctly is a slog through deep mud.
My particular student is advanced in level, but imperfect in her speech patterns. That is, she's too high level to need a textbook to tell her what to say in a particular context, but her grammar is sloppy enough that she needs to practice. That means we really couldn't use a book. The lessons have been just me using all the power of my brain to continuously come up with new scenarios to practice until she grew weary of that one and wants to move on to another. Imagine if you will how many one to two minute exchanges I have to take part in to fill up 120 minutes of time. Add into that that she wasn't even interested in any preamble to the lesson with chat. She just wants to dive in.
I'm sure from the student's viewpoint that I seem to be effortlessly tossing out scenarios and taking part in practice, but I only make it look easy. I was really exhausted by this as it's been a lot of improvisation. I had a fairly long list of real life situations and she had 4 that she had come up with, but I still was almost out of steam by the end. There just aren't that many things you need to do and she rejected some of the scenarios I had written down (like going to the bank).
People think teaching is easy because all you do is follow a book or just make small talk. It's not in the least like that. Books offer frameworks which you have to expand upon. Smalltalk only gets you so far, and it takes you a shorter distance the better you know someone. Students have goals and you have to be able to make a plan to meet them. It's not throwing things at a wall and hoping they stick or flying by the seat of your pants. You have to be able to think on your feet and make sure you're smoothly traveling down the right roads. You also have to make it look like you had the route perfectly mapped out all along or the students lose confidence in you or don't respect you. If you stumble, pause too long or lose your focus, the students know you don't know what you're doing at that moment.
Anyone who thinks that teaching is easy should have to sit through the same sort of grueling 2-hour sessions of short, pragmatic conversations I've been going through. Their opinion would change less than halfway through the lesson. I guarantee it.
When I say "real life conversations", I don't mean small talk or actually having a chat, I mean short exchanges at the drug store, train station, office, etc. If you've ever taught from the plethora of textbooks on the market for learners of English as a second language, you know that these are the least popular lessons in the books. In fact, when I used to work at Nova conversation school 18 years ago, teachers would repeat the same lessons 6 times over with students before teaching the lessons centering around pragmatic exchanges at the market, a hotel, etc. While the content was useful, it was often a teaching cul-de-sac for the teachers and repetitive and uninteresting for the students. Even doing the dialog once where you're essentially saying, "Hello, I've got a headache. Could you recommend some medicine?" and getting a response and thanking the other person isn't all that interesting. Doing it enough so the student gets it down and can say it correctly is a slog through deep mud.
My particular student is advanced in level, but imperfect in her speech patterns. That is, she's too high level to need a textbook to tell her what to say in a particular context, but her grammar is sloppy enough that she needs to practice. That means we really couldn't use a book. The lessons have been just me using all the power of my brain to continuously come up with new scenarios to practice until she grew weary of that one and wants to move on to another. Imagine if you will how many one to two minute exchanges I have to take part in to fill up 120 minutes of time. Add into that that she wasn't even interested in any preamble to the lesson with chat. She just wants to dive in.
I'm sure from the student's viewpoint that I seem to be effortlessly tossing out scenarios and taking part in practice, but I only make it look easy. I was really exhausted by this as it's been a lot of improvisation. I had a fairly long list of real life situations and she had 4 that she had come up with, but I still was almost out of steam by the end. There just aren't that many things you need to do and she rejected some of the scenarios I had written down (like going to the bank).
People think teaching is easy because all you do is follow a book or just make small talk. It's not in the least like that. Books offer frameworks which you have to expand upon. Smalltalk only gets you so far, and it takes you a shorter distance the better you know someone. Students have goals and you have to be able to make a plan to meet them. It's not throwing things at a wall and hoping they stick or flying by the seat of your pants. You have to be able to think on your feet and make sure you're smoothly traveling down the right roads. You also have to make it look like you had the route perfectly mapped out all along or the students lose confidence in you or don't respect you. If you stumble, pause too long or lose your focus, the students know you don't know what you're doing at that moment.
Anyone who thinks that teaching is easy should have to sit through the same sort of grueling 2-hour sessions of short, pragmatic conversations I've been going through. Their opinion would change less than halfway through the lesson. I guarantee it.
Friday, August 8, 2008
You Just Know
I never taught anyone back home, but I have to imagine the experience is very different from the one I've had in Japan. For one thing, I don't believe there are as many people who pay a decent amount of money to study as adults. Since language lessons are big business, a lot of places will try to entice students into taking lessons by offering a freebie of some sort. When I worked at Nova in what feels like another lifetime, these freebies were called "demo lessons" and were supposed to take about 10 minutes. My husband's school offers them as a means of checking a student's level and they take 20 minutes. The agency that sends me students gives away a full one-hour "trial lesson" on occasion, though I get paid for such lessons so the company absorbs a loss.
Most of the trial students will take the lesson and consider whether they feel comfortable with the teacher's character and teaching style as well as the atmosphere or environment. Once in awhile though, I'll get a student who I can tell never had any intention of continuing with a full course of lessons and I just know won't be back. I imagine these students are scoping out a variety of ads for free lessons and go around using them up one at a time to avoid the relatively high price of lessons.
Of course, I cannot know for sure that these students are doing the language equivalent of eating the free sample with no intention of buying the full-size product, but there are some signs which indicate someone may be such a student. The most objective indication is that, after the trial lesson, the student never communicates with the referral agency again. The agency repeatedly contacts such students and leaves messages, but they never get a "yes" or a "no" about continuing. While I know the Japanese are reluctant to refuse, I also know that it's easy enough to make up a reasonable excuse to say "no" (and to e-mail that answer to avoid an uncomfortable phone call). At the very least, a student can claim their beloved dog died and they're too sad to study now, or they think they'd do better in a group lesson instead of a one-to-one lesson.
Beyond the lack of contact, I can sense something during the lesson which is different. I've had three students who I suspect were freebie hunters and that's been enough to make a pattern clear to me. I should note that the lessons always went well with these students. They were engaged and appeared to enjoy themselves. They took notes, responded assertively to questions and paid attention. The atmosphere around such students is different, however.
There is a razor thin bit of nervousness which I presume comes as a result of feeling they're doing something "wrong" ("stealing" a freebie with no intention of following through). I would consider this nervousness part of speaking English except that the sense is different and I've asked these students (as I ask everyone in the first lesson) if it's their first time in a foreign person's home and if they are nervous. For the record, if a Japanese person is nervous and you ask, they don't lie and say they are not. They always admit it if they are nervous.
The other thing which I notice is a lack of desire to "connect" with me. Students who are in for the duration have an air of eagerness to create a certain relationship with me. The energy of someone reaching out to you is discernible, and when that energy is absent, particularly when you have plenty of experience with it being present, you can detect it.
It's actually rather reassuring being able to "read" the intent of a student who is taking a trial lesson. When you're in a position where you're being evaluated, it's nice to know that sometimes you're not going to keep a student no matter how well things go. It's does a good job of mitigating any feelings of failure at not scoring a new "regular".
Most of the trial students will take the lesson and consider whether they feel comfortable with the teacher's character and teaching style as well as the atmosphere or environment. Once in awhile though, I'll get a student who I can tell never had any intention of continuing with a full course of lessons and I just know won't be back. I imagine these students are scoping out a variety of ads for free lessons and go around using them up one at a time to avoid the relatively high price of lessons.
Of course, I cannot know for sure that these students are doing the language equivalent of eating the free sample with no intention of buying the full-size product, but there are some signs which indicate someone may be such a student. The most objective indication is that, after the trial lesson, the student never communicates with the referral agency again. The agency repeatedly contacts such students and leaves messages, but they never get a "yes" or a "no" about continuing. While I know the Japanese are reluctant to refuse, I also know that it's easy enough to make up a reasonable excuse to say "no" (and to e-mail that answer to avoid an uncomfortable phone call). At the very least, a student can claim their beloved dog died and they're too sad to study now, or they think they'd do better in a group lesson instead of a one-to-one lesson.
Beyond the lack of contact, I can sense something during the lesson which is different. I've had three students who I suspect were freebie hunters and that's been enough to make a pattern clear to me. I should note that the lessons always went well with these students. They were engaged and appeared to enjoy themselves. They took notes, responded assertively to questions and paid attention. The atmosphere around such students is different, however.
There is a razor thin bit of nervousness which I presume comes as a result of feeling they're doing something "wrong" ("stealing" a freebie with no intention of following through). I would consider this nervousness part of speaking English except that the sense is different and I've asked these students (as I ask everyone in the first lesson) if it's their first time in a foreign person's home and if they are nervous. For the record, if a Japanese person is nervous and you ask, they don't lie and say they are not. They always admit it if they are nervous.
The other thing which I notice is a lack of desire to "connect" with me. Students who are in for the duration have an air of eagerness to create a certain relationship with me. The energy of someone reaching out to you is discernible, and when that energy is absent, particularly when you have plenty of experience with it being present, you can detect it.
It's actually rather reassuring being able to "read" the intent of a student who is taking a trial lesson. When you're in a position where you're being evaluated, it's nice to know that sometimes you're not going to keep a student no matter how well things go. It's does a good job of mitigating any feelings of failure at not scoring a new "regular".
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Profanity
One of the things newcomers who end up as teachers in Japan love to do is teach profanity to their students. They justify it by claiming its "real" language which students need to know. This is 98% bull cookies. The 2% which is valid applies to people who are interested mainly in consuming entertainment from other cultures which happens to include profanity and those who are going to live in an environment where they will certainly be exposed to "curse words".
The latter is a far smaller portion of the English language studying Japanese population than immature teachers who focus on the profane and scatological would care to recognize. The vast majority of people who interact with foreign culture have no need for such words as they tend to move about in a limited (vacations), official (business), formal (ceremonies), or sheltered (home stay) capacity while abroad. For this reason, I have rarely taught or mentioned such words in my lessons. I think most people teach swearing because it's far more interesting for the teacher to talk about "bad words" than to teach how to use articles or verb tenses. It's also a lot easier for the untrained teacher to prattle on about the "eff word" and it's gang of lesser pals than to learn to teach textbook content.
For the first time, I think I've got a student who actually needs to have knowledge of baser English vocabulary. This student is headed for a university in northern middle America and I'm concerned that she won't be able to relate to college-level pop culture. Her interests lie more with Disney sitcoms that are targeted at pre-teens than in college humor.
Since I'm 43 years old and college was 22 years back for me, I am not sure what college kids are into in this day and age. I asked my much younger friend and partner in pop culture inanity, "the wombat stuffer", as he not only graduated about 2 years ago and is more in touch with what college kids may talk about, but is vastly less mature than me in the best way possible. Anyway, he told me that Comedy Central fare is still valid including South Park, the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. Since my student can't possibly grasp social and political commentary because the context is too broad, I directed her more toward South Park as a means of dipping her toes in the icy water of adult-oriented pop culture.
The main problem with South Park is that it is rife with the kind of language you don't want to teach a Japanese person for fear that they'll use it wrong and look really stupid. Worse yet, they may use it correctly and end up offending someone because they don't grasp appropriate context even when they use proper grammatical usage. This is something I've heard and read on more than one occasion. English colloquial expressions do not flow trippingly out of Japanese mouths. My students are often writing "oh my Got!" I've also read and heard "fack" on multiple occasions. I've have never experienced a student who could use obscenities in a way that didn't make me want to laugh in his face.
The best I can do for my student is send her to the Comedy Central site and recommend she watch a few episodes. Fortunately, I'm also able to direct her to a script site so she can read the English as she can't understand it because it's delivered at lightning speed. Even this is complicated by the fact that dictionaries often do not include the zestier definitions of words. In trying to explain that she'd likely see Kenny (in South Park) die again and again and hear the same lines repeatedly and one of those lines included "bastard", I discovered that the Japanese translation that came up was "unnecessary".
So, if she's hearing, "oh my God, they killed Kenny!" followed by "you bastards!", she's hearing 'oh my Got, they killed Kenny...you unnecessary'! That's not quite the impact the line is supposed to have.
While my intention is to help my student find some cultural touchstones with the college juniors and seniors she'll be associating with, I can't help but feel like I'm corrupting a minor. She's so innocent and clean-minded. I'm rather torn between the feeling that it's "wrong" to expose her to such "impure" influences and the idea that it'd be far worse to send her off to the U.S. in a month with no understanding of the sort of rough talk that she'll no doubt be exposed to. When it comes down to a choice between sullying her with the sort of talk in English that she doesn't use in Japanese or allowing her to end up possibly looking and feeling like a clueless dork, I guess it's better to choose the corruption.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
