|
|
|
|||
|
|||
|
What is correct English? -
10-02-2010, 07:44 PM
some of us are disagreeing over the usage of the English Language. Maybe we could sort our differences and thoughts in this thread rather than overtake a thread for YURI which unfortunately some of us have done.
Too many of us eager to help then getting ourselves tangled in a twist. I personally feel that teaching English as a foreign language makes the process more difficult than it needs to be. How do most of us learn our own language? isn't it by copying what we see and hear and young children have rhymes that rhyme which aids in memorising. THe "cat in the hat "books by Dr Seuss were great for young children weren't they? singing is another way of remembering words and rhymes also. What thoughts have some of our experts on this subject? Not all of us have degrees in the language but that doesn't mean that we are not capable and can communicate well in both spoken and written language. 
|
|
|
||||
|
||||
|
10-03-2010, 12:16 AM
Quote:
1) Learning a second language is not AT ALL like acquiring your first. It's incomparable, especially if you're an adult at the time of learning. Children approach language differently, and after a certain point you get a lot of interference from your first language and it's harder to differentiate sounds or make sense of grammar without help. It takes a lot more overt study and effort, unfortunately, or else we wouldn't need to bother with teaching languages; people could just pick them up by simple exposure. Sadly it doesn't quite work like that. 2) Immersion is of course great for learning a language, and many people can learn a language to a workable level by this method alone but it's not ~practical~ for many learners and can usually only take you so far. 3) Children parrot sounds, of course, but they also usually have some idea of meaning and general syntax. We spend several years as infants before even beginning to speak absorbing intonation patterns from our surroundings. This is a) impossible for an adult learner and b) also highly impractical. Who wants to spend a year or so just making da-da noises to learn stress patterns? 4) There is definitely a musical element to english which is helpful for sentence stress and so on, but look at children's songs; most of them incorporate idioms and vocab that for an adult learner are really useless or difficult to understand in the first place. "Hey diddle diddle the cat had a fiddle." 'fiddle' is advanced vocab; it's a synonym of the more common 'violin' which any sensible teacher would teach FIRST and 'hey diddle diddle' are really just meaningless nonsense. A native speaking child KNOWS this. An adult non-native speaker has to LEARN this. It's too difficult and a waste of time when we rarely use 'hey diddle' or 'fiddle' outside of the context of a nursery rhyme. 5) I think you misunderstand the english language teaching process. To a native speaker it seems over complex, with lots of technical terms and strange processes, and in-detail looks at structure, drilling etc, but actually those precise elements are a simplification of one of the world's most complex languages. This kind of teaching actually makes it EASIER for students to learn accurate English quickly. Look at it in reverse; non-native speakers of Japanese are taught explicitly how to differentiate between verb forms in a way that native speakers never are. Because we need that bottom-up information to actually move away from our native tongue to use the foreign one. Without learning about the rules at single word level, it's harder to build sentences properly. You can endlessly learn to repeat whole sentences off by heart, but you still won't sound native; then you're just stringing disjointed phrases together, not making flexible conversation. There are also many elements of english that simply DO NOT exist in other languages, and to understand the language students have to learn these completely alien concepts from scratch, without a pre-vocal infant stage of absorption. Often this means paying attention to the little words. Think of a stereotypical asian accent; much of its character comes from losing or altering phonemes, prepositions and articles, or getting the tense wrong. Knowing all those tiny building blocks makes a big difference to your fluency. So you have to be a little pedantic because English is strange. I mean, jeez, we can use a present tense to talk about the future, how confusing is that!? 6) Native speakers break the rules. They break the rules a lot but at the same time, even when breaking rules we still stay within certain perimeters for the sake of making sense. For a non-native speaker, this is incredibly difficult. You absolutely need to know the correct language first before you can start using 'incorrect' grammar that is still fluent, natural and coherent. 7) You may not have a degree in the language, and you may not be always word perfect but as a native speaker you are guaranteed to have a massive advantage over an ESL student in that you will have had your whole childhood to perfect it, be corrected, learn the rules on a subconscious level and learn how you can break them in an acceptable way. This is practically a degree in English comprehension in itself. This doesn't mean that you consciously understand the rules of your own language with ANY accuracy whatsoever, only that as a native speaker your gut-level knowledge will mean you will generally make more comprehensible speech than someone who doesn't know the rules ~at all~. Non-native speakers make more mistakes and they tend to make much bigger, fundamental mistakes in understanding. 8) and finally, kindly do me a service and not confuse a need for technicality for a heart closed to the wonders of the English language. I really object to that. English language teachers aren't all sterile lingual mechanics and I for one fully appreciate Shakespeare thank you very much. Many ESL course books include poetry and songs along the way too, only JF isn't a good medium to use these. Also, as with nursery rhymes, there's often not much of a practical application. Not everyone learns English just for fun; many people have a real need to be able to communicate accurately and more at ground level. Shakespeare's works are beautiful, but being able to declare that I 'hath a mint of phrases in my brain' is not going going to help me deal with the practicalities of living a daily life or working in English. And, honestly, we wait until our own children have had 12 years intensive native-level study of English before introducing them to that caliber of language appreciation, and even then they need coaching through it. For an ESL student, that's pretty much flying before you can walk.
|
|
|
|||
|
|||
|
10-03-2010, 11:54 AM
ah alecture from the heart-- thats great.
8) and finally, kindly do me a service and not confuse a need for technicality for a heart closed to the wonders of the English language. I really object to that. English language teachers aren't all sterile lingual mechanics and I for one fully appreciate Shakespeare thank you very much. Many ESL course books include poetry and songs along the way too, only JF isn't a good medium to use these. Also, as with nursery rhymes, there's often not much of a practical application. Not everyone learns English just for fun; many people have a real need to be able to communicate accurately and more at ground level. Shakespeare's works are beautiful, but being able to declare that I 'hath a mint of phrases in my brain' is not going going to help me deal with the practicalities of living a daily life or working in English. dear Columbine----- I was actually answering Jambo when I referred to poetry-- so please get your facts right. I added poetry because I was sick and tired of the arguments about "TO and INTO. I had replied but it will be better to restrain my thoughts. Please tell me: what is a "GERUND?"
|
|
|
||||
|
||||
|
10-03-2010, 12:20 PM
Quote:
Don't you just have to click "Quote" at the bottom right corner of any post, to quote someone and reply to that thread, at the same time?  By the way, you may find this "gerund" helpful. I'd rather this forum not have any quibbles, nitpicking, hairsplitting, hyperbolizing and the likes; this is part of forum rules, too, but I guess we can make an exception for threads like these. Play nice, guys. There's no such thing as happy endings, for when you find true love, happiness is everlasting.
|
|
|
||||
|
||||
|
10-03-2010, 12:24 PM
Quote:
A gerund is a present continuous verb being used as a noun. IE I swim (infinitive/simple present verb) I am swimming (present continuous verb) Swimming is good for you (Gerund) You can make short quotes by clicking the quote button on a post to get the type box. You'll see at the top a bit of code with the user name of the previous poster and a string of numbers ie [QUOTE = columbine;XXXXXX] (there shouldn't be any spaces). For every small quote you want to make you have to copy that code, leave the words you want to quote and then type [/quote] after the words. so If I wanted to short quote 'gerund' i'd put [QUOTE = columbine;XXXXXX] gerund [/quote]
|
|
|
|||
|
|||
|
10-03-2010, 06:29 PM
thank you Columbine plus the tip for taking sections of quotations.
English language schools are in great demand here I know. I was looking at a COURSE to study EFL but the cost is almost £2000 so way out of my league. I have been warned that the TEFL weekend courses are not good enough. I am glad to hear that creativity is part of the teaching Courses.
|
 |
| Thread Tools | |
|
|
