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Learning and teaching English in the Netherlands

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Learning and teaching English in the Netherlands

Category Archives: foreign language teaching

And the First Prize in Chinglish Goes to…

08 Wednesday Jul 2020

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in Chinese speakers of English, English teaching, foreign language teaching, language learning, language teaching

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China, education, mistakes in English, Translation

… Carole!

Well, I’m a fan of English mistakes made by Chinese people. They’re amusing and, with some experience of teaching English in China, understandable. We can’t reverse the effects of our mother tongue just like that. What’s more, such features make the world not only funnier but also more interesting and varied.

Now, as my years as a translator have been accumulating, I sometimes have new contacts with Chinese companies, mostly in the Guangzhou area. Now another one has emerged from Zhejiang province, where I used to teach English. But said Carole is already a Project Manager, not a student. She’s supposed to write reasonably. So what message have I seen from her?

The elevation of the meaning of Chinglish to a new, shining height! She’s advertising for a Dutch<>English translator. The culprit is her requirement, “Preferred native language: English Middle (ca.1100-1500)”.

First, what does English Middle mean? If she means Middle English by the phrase, why reverse the word order?

Second, she seems to require somebody to speak Middle English. Really? As a native language? Looking for somebody whose mother should be dead for more than 500 years! Or much longer, perhaps since “ca. 1100”.

Congratulations for winning first place at the stupidity race among project managers! All, not only Chinese. Well done!

By P.S.

 

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Good books to learn from

22 Sunday May 2016

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in education, English teaching, foreign language teaching, language learning, language teaching

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authentic listening material, English as a foreign or second language, learning to communicate, students books, Teaching English as a foreign language

The chance visitor who honours my blog with his/her interest may wonder why I have written so little over the last couple of years. I have to apologize but the reason is that I changed course: I’ve been a full-time translator for more than 3 years now. Or sometimes not absolutely full-time: I’ve been having a student for several months now, who enjoys our lessons so much that she hopes to be able to come back after the summer. Before her, I also had a young man for a number of English lessons, who also enjoyed working with me and is now working over in the States on a contract.

These two experiences have drawn my attention again to the nature and state of English language teaching in the Netherlands, where a large majority of people profess to be able to speak very good English, although this often seems to be an exaggeration to me. With young people, there seems to be less of a problem because they are mobile, outgoing, and often decide to have time (and the means) to travel or live abroad extensively, and they pick up excellent English on the way, whatever teaching they were given at school before.

However, getting over that ‘intermediate plateau’ in English is a completely different problem for those older people who still have children to bring up and/or job commitments to fulfil. Often, it is precisely that job commitment that would make it imperative, or at least very advisable, for them to speak better English than what they remember from their school days. With the Netherlands being what it is, that is, a trading nation, most of such people are in professions and those professions are mostly in trade. A seemingly sweeping suggestion but I have no doubt they are a large part of learners on the market. Several people have approached me from my profile still present on the national “Marktplaats” web-site over the years and they always claimed having received little or too distant education at school.

Such people are, however, very particular in their (real or perceived) needs. They do not want to learn any English – they want to learn English that is useful for them in their profession, however limited in scope that may be. This poses the question of material to be used with them. And there is the rub, as I already pointed out much earlier in this blog: because schools find it easier to order students books en masse from publishers either from specialized Dutch publishers (at orbital prices, but who cares about that when they’re convinced they get the best stuff?) or from British (or, perhaps, from American) publishers.

Students only stand a chance of getting authentic material in the latter case, but from experience I know that even listening materials published in GB are lab-recorded and I’m sorry but I can’t consider that authentic in the sense that reading out a script can’t ever sound the same fluent language as that spoken in reality, in the street, shops, over the telephone talking to clients or talking to colleagues or bosses in the staff-room etc. A point in case is that when I and a few other colleagues had recorded several interviews of students and teachers in British schools in the late 1990’s for a group project with the BC, the publisher of the book later decided to script some of it, re-recorded the interviews in a lab and only published that version. They were scared to publish the originals, claiming they would not be marketable as they contained too much noise. The noise was actually the same anybody present at the recording would hear and which is a natural circumstance in all cases when one speaks to anyone anywhere. But to use it for teaching? Oh, no, that’s impossible, they said. Even though several of the group of teachers in the project did exactly that in their own classes, with success.

But back to the issue of specialised material. Older professional people here have to hear how it is spoken in their reality. And they insist that they learn what they need in their profession, not elsewhere and not what people speek while shopping, let alone in their kitchens. They don’t want to talk about music, or films, or politics, they want to talk about their own industry or trade and only or at least mostly use the vocabulary pertaining to their own area. They do not “have all the time in the world” for that, as young people tend to believe they do. But how can a teacher get such materials in the Netherlands?

Sadly, no market exists in the Netherlands for language learning materials because of the behaviour of schools. A teacher faced with such needy students have to find material abroad, taking a chance at buying perhaps unfamiliar material over the net or travel to GB if they want to sample the listening material for the book or peruse that one book that looks suitable for the needs of the student. I am fortunate: I only had to travel back to my home in Budapest and grab what I used to teach to professionals on various courses. I had bought them quite cheap back in the late 1980’s and the 1990’s, when the market really opened up in Hungary. Back then, numerous and various course books appeared in excellent quality and with reasonable listening material already on CD’s that are still useable. Unfortunately, cassettes are out of fashion by now so only the most staunch conservatives would still use cassette players, but I have to admit that I have the best listening material with the closest sound to authentic only on cassettes – this is no place for advertising, especially because my guess is that the material is already off the market, but I have to extend my thanks to the authors and publishers of the books called ‘Notions in English’ and especially ‘Functions in English’. I don’t mean it in the way you get it googled (in the best of cases you get to this page (for teachers), or to this page, or to this page, which, in its first group, actually lists those functions addressed and tackling of which students get to fluency in the easiest possible way), but the books so called and issued some time in the late 1970’s in GB by OUP, if I’m not mistaken. Well, these two books don’t appear on the net any more so I think when I retire, I’ll sell them on “Marktplaats” to somebody who can really teach. Or rather, in Hungary, where I’m sure young, enthusiastic teachers would be glad to acquire them and digitalize the cassette materials.

As to the professional materials (about business and trade) I’ve already brought over here, I’ll try to sell them to the only bookshop worth its mettle I know, one in Amsterdam, which seems to lay an emphasis on promoting books imported from abroad. But for the time being, I’ll still go on using them with this one student. The CD’s to go with them are good enough.

by P.S.

Teach Dutch to refugees

17 Sunday Jan 2016

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in applying for a job in the Netherlands, Dutch culture, education, European Union, foreign language teaching, immigration, learning Dutch, refugees in Europe

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Dutch, Netherlands

Lots of talk has been going on in all forums and media about the refugee crisis in Europe over the past months. A major problem for people who can actually have a relevant effect on events seems to be having to navigate between the Scylla of generous humanitarian help and the Charybdis of strict rejection.

As far as I know, the Netherlands is fairly quiet about the matter as the brunt of the problem seems to have to be borne by Southern- and Eastern-European countries, Austria, Germany and Sweden, but I know of situations where the “my home is my castle” notion has already come to work at a few places here where real refugees in actual neighbourhoods were planned to be lodged.

The Netherlands has been one of a few countries, in my view, which has a history of taking perhaps the singularly most important helpful action in the event of receiving refugees, the importance of which Germany has just been getting acquainted with: teaching the language of the host nation. When I was young, geography classes dealt with how many Turkish temporary workers were employed in Germany. Since we were informed that they actually remained in Germany for a long time and took over jobs that Germans themselves were loth to do, I’ve always thought they were integrated into the society. In the political turmoil of recent months, I’ve been proven wrong.

Well, I’m one of the beneficiaries of Dutch efficiency about teaching Dutch to foreigners as I’ve already described earlier. In line with that system, the other day I received an invitation to help teach Dutch to refugees in Gelderland here as I’m still registered with a number of intermediary organizations. Here is the text of the letter:

“U staat bij ons ingeschreven en momenteel zoeken we naar meerdere docenten NT2 voor diverse locaties en dagdelen. Het gaat om lessen NT2 aan vluchtelingen.
We zijn op zoek naar ZZP-ers, met een CRKBO erkenning (of in ieder geval BTW vrij factureren). Ik benader u nu via een algemene mailing, dus indien u geen ZZP-er bent dan alvast excuus dat ik u deze mail en vacature heb gestuurd.”

Being a language teacher to the core, a ZZP-er providing BTW invoices, and a sort of “economic refugee” myself, and having passed the NT2 exam, I jumped to the occasion. I can at last do something in return for what this system has done for me and a lot of my friends, one of whom, out of Iraq, has just received his PhD at Utrecht University as a microbiologist, so the investment into the language first and foremost may pay off wonderful dividends for those concerned.

Under the link provided in the e-mail, the important points concerning the jobs (needs!) are as follows (I’m not translating this text either – it doesn’t matter for those who don’t understand it, but those who may actually be interested in trying to take one of these positions have to understand it anyway):

“Voor onze opdrachtgever, met diverse locaties in het land, zjin we met spoed op zoek naar ervaren docenten NT2 voor minimaal 3 dagdelen per week. Het betreft een reguliere vacature.

Voor de vacature zoeken we docenten (ZZP-ers met een CRKBO erkenning) die ruime ervaring hebben met het geven van NT2 lessen en ervaring heeft met meerdere niveau’s in 1 groep.
Hieronder een overzicht van de locaties en de dagdelen:

  • Culemborg – exacte lesdagen en tijden nog niet bekend – Startdatum 18-01-2016;
  • Epe – lesdagen: woensdag en vrijdagochtend – Startdatum 20-01-2016;
  • Schijndel – lesdagen: maandag, dinsdag en donderdagochtend – startdatum 26-01-2016;
  • Ede – exacte lesdagen en tijden nog niet bekend – Startdatum 08-02-2016;
  • Wageningen – exacte lesdagen en tijden nog niet bekend – Startdatum 15-02-2016;
  • Zutphen – lesdagen: woensdag en vrijdagmiddag – Startdatum 24-02-2016;
  • Ede – exacte lesdagen en tijden nog niet bekend – Startdatum 14-03-2016, 2 groepen van 2 of 3 dagdelen

Heb je ruime ervaring met het verzorgen van NT2 aan vluchtelingen, ben je langere tijd beschikbaar voor een groep op de bovengenoemde locatie en dagdelen? Ben je ZZP-er die BTW vrij kan factureren? Dan ontvangen wij graag jouw motivatie en cv!

…

De docent die we zoeken:

  • beschikt over een Post HBO NT2, een certificaat NT2 of;
  • beschikt over een Bevoegdheid Basiseducatie of BVE
  • heeft ruime ervaring met het verzorgen van lessen NT2;
  • is ZZP-er en in bezit van VAR WUO of DGA
  • heeft een CRKBO erkenning en/of kan BTW vrij factureren;
  • is beschikbaar voor minimaal 3 dagdelen per week
  • heeft bij voorkeur ervaring met de methodes 7/43, Taalcompleet (Kleurrijker) , Op maat sprong en De Finale”

Here is the link to the site with this and more information, for example about fees offered.

If you consider applying, beware: you really have to fulfil ALL of the above conditions! Consider this: after being invited and having applied, I received no answer for a few days, but a repeat of the invitation (“Wellicht is deze mail aan uw aandacht ontsnapt, vandaar dat ik u nogmaals aanschrijf”). In answer to my second letter reinforcing my intent, I received a flat rejection saying that they are looking for people who fully comply with the requirements.

And here I see a sort of a problem with the system. They are intent on setting up courses, but a week before some of them (are planned to) start, they’re still short of teachers. I doubt again that there are a lot of teachers around who are actually free several mornings of the week and have nothing better to do in the middle of the academic year, and who, further, have not only the enthusiasm but also ‘a lot of experience teaching refugees’ with the particular materials and can provide invoices as ZZP-ers. Most teachers are not ZZP-ers. They teach at schools. They are the ones that taught me and my friends. Those who are ZZP-ers here teach English, not Dutch, and to all kinds of Dutch people at companies and businesses, not to refugees. And quite some of them (hope I’m wrong) actually do not agree with helping refugees in the first place. I mean they are probably British people with a certain degree of notoriety about rejecting foreigners settling down in their country.

So, despite the nice idea, who are going to teach a few hundred refugees in East Netherlands? Not me – I haven’t got the experience, and as a result, never will acquire it, however much I’d like to. Perhaps you? Don’t hesitate, apply if you’d like to do something for a better, still peaceful Europe.

by P.S. 

Send Dutch applicants … no. 2

13 Friday Mar 2015

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in education, foreign language teaching, Netherlands, work in Dutch education

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education in the netherlands, European Union, Teaching English as a foreign language

I’ve just received a very derogatory message to my earlier post which may or may not be right. However, this coincided with a few calls I also received these days from a few job agencies and schools enquiring about my availability, although I stopped applying or advertising myself as a teacher of English more than a year ago. I’ve amassed perhaps 250 refusals over the six years I’ve been living here, how could I go on living on teaching without teaching? Yet, this remark bills my earlier post as judgemental, probably meaning biassed, and based on stereotypes.

As to judging the Dutch education system as a whole, I can’t have anything to say. I have no overall picture. It seems to work and do its job. As to working for me as a teacher, it clearly is judgemental, i.e., biassed against anyone not yet having experience working in it. I have worked in it once for a small project. However, when I told the job agency person that my experience was with a military facility, she clearly changed her mind and didn’t come back to me about the open post she may have had for me. That wouldn’t count for a school job was the meaning.

So, after teaching English in two other countries for 30 years counts nothing in this country. If it doesn’t, if being a top professional means nothing in the Netherlands, I can only say the system is biassed against everybody from outside here. They say, “Have you experience in the Dutch education system? No? Then you won’t ever have it. Bye-bye!”

It’s not my stereotype, not my judgement. If the Chinese can accept that an expert teacher may not be from an English-speaking country, but this country can’t, that’s a judgement against foreigners, based on the stereotype: only English people can teach English! Right? Then which English people? A poor under-educated chap from Detroit? Or Glasgow? Someone who couldn’t even get his or her GCSE? So: wrong!

The other part of my criticism in the above-mentioned post was to claim that if this is the opinion of the system about foreign experts, then they should not advise anyone to employ Dutch people abroad. How dare they? They aren’t willing to employ anyone here without Dutch experience, so how could Dutch work abroad without having any experience working abroad? It’s simply the other side of the same coin. Nonsense. Their practice is against EU laws about free movement of workers claiming a possible exemption in educational matters. They should be exempted in the same way when trying to get employed outside. They should let others with experience there work there. Or even those without it. Or allow others to work here as they are meant to instead of wasting the talent they have to offer them.

by P. S.

English testing issue in Hungary

13 Tuesday May 2014

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in education, English teaching, foreign language teaching, Hungary, language learning, language teaching, language testing, teacher training

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English as a foreign or second language, Hungary, Language education, limits in class, Secondary education, teaching foreign languages

Last week, students sitting for the school-leaving exams in Hungary were up against the English test on the higher level. This test is something the results of which count towards university entrance exams, so naturally, perceived or real trouble about it counts a lot more than that on the normal level tests. Internet news about the issue with the listening part can be read in Hungarian here. I hope that my interpretation of the situation may be useful for English teachers in other countries as well and may help students understand some features of the situation.

In short, of the 9809 exam takers, in one day, more than 2500 joined a facebook group (though this could be misleading, seeing that parents also joined the group) and submitted a petition to the relevant government agency against the quality of the listening material as they thought the material couldn’t be heard properly because of distortions of sound in classrooms. Some actually claimed the original sound already had echos. We can also listen to it in the middle section of the article, right next to the link to the pdf of the task sheet involved. As my listening to the published material reveals no distortion problems to me on my computer, the story reveals a lot of problems in the Hungarian education system.

Admitting that the inclusion of several French and Spanish words was not exactly fair, I still wonder if that may have disturbed takers. Not only in my teaching practice but also in all teaching materials, there are lots of names from other languages recurring all the time. How can one learn a language without mentioning outstanding people from history, science, the arts etc.? English doesn’t distort foreign names like Chinese does, so this can’t really have been a problem for trained examinees. Trained, I’m saying, and I’m returning to this a bit later.

Another problem claimed was the extreme distortion. The article claims many schools use ancient portable tape-recorders to play … what exactly? The listening material was issued to schools in two copies of the relevant CDs, so no tape-recorders could have been involved. Such a distortion is, to my mind, indicative of the quality of … the Hungarian media. Other than that, CD players may have been of dubious quality, in bad repair, I had already met a number of such equipment 10 years ago. However, if a CD player doesn’t work, it is taken away to be repaired or thrown away and is exchanged to a better one. Some people actually claimed that they didn’t hear the sound sitting in the second row and they have good listening abilities. To my mind, it is doubtful that the teacher administering the test purposefully brought in a bad player with bad loudspeakers to disturb her/his own students. Claiming that the loudspeaker had to be turned up too strongly in the big rooms is also strange: the same students had been sitting in the same rooms for four years listening to the same players at similar intensity. What may have been new, pray?

However, this point only in itself brings the technical background for schools in Hungary in the limelight, and probably deservedly. This in turn underlines the poor financials of the same for extended years. While in my study years we only had really ancient big tape-recorders to listen to the one set of intermittent pre-recorded (that is, unnatural, carefully read-out) listening material, the 21st century makes it necessary to expose students to realistic listening in countries, like Hungary, where English-language TV-programs are practically unavailable and dubbed films prevail in the cinemas. This practice is also in need of changing, but the poor general financial situation makes it very difficult for any broadcaster to buy the rights of contemporary TV programs and air them as they are. And what would be their incentive? That change nowhere to be seen in the pipeline, it is the schools’ duty to provide ample practice for listening. If they can. But that is only one side of the equation.

And that brings me up to my next point. As I said, it is up to schools. But schools consist of not only teachers, there are, in the majority, students as well. Meaning, the vast majority of people in a classroom are the students. Have you ever stood in front of a large group of people who resist all your efforts to bring them together and make them quietly learn something instead of their own will? It’s a lot easier for a party leader to speak to a huge crowd from their own party – they want to hear what he wants to say. Try doing it in front of the opposition. And that is still only speaking, not making them practice performing skills. My experience shows that during the last 15 years the willingness of most students in Hungarian schools to learn has been nose-diving. You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink, as the proverb goes. More and more students do not want to drink from the fountain of knowledge, so to speak, but weep and wail each time listening is brought in – I faced this reluctance increasingly myself.

I’m not saying it happens everywhere, but that it has been increasing dangerously. Now, if the teacher doesn’t want to antagonize her/his students all the time, she/he yields and there goes the listening practice. This may turn into a general tendency because it is easy to neglect something once again what we’ve already neglected a couple of times and yes, listening is not easy and also not easy to teach. With a decrease of quality students, teachers’ average levels of quality and professionalism may also decline, and in a culture growing towards accommodating the perceived ‘needs’ of the customer (the students), teachers get used to catering to what students ‘want’. And that can be dangerously close to very little. This based on the majority will. And the majority is always right, right? At least before Copernicus …

That said, I’m not saying those students hadn’t practiced listening – I’m saying, what they had done was far from satisfactory, far from enough.

Learning a language has nothing near to the logic of developing mathematical or historical knowledge. It is not even only knowledge, it is rather a huge set of skills. It is a lot more complex than other subjects except for learning a musical instrument, and contrary to beliefs, but due to the complexity as well, there are very big differences in learning abilities, especially if we consider the time constraints. Hence the complaints in the complaining group on facebook, demanding logical, rational answers. No, there may not be logical, rational answers. No, the way we learn languages is next to impossible to follow with logic. Yes, intelligence may have a limited part in it. Yes, it may also be due to psychological barriers, individual learning styles, short- and long-term memory differences, methodological differences on the part of the teacher as well as on the students, to name a few problems. And listening is an area where a lot of those factors converge for many as there is no possibility for individual speed, time to stop to consider and the like. It is thus very tiring and also difficult to really assess. I am next to stating that teaching a language is an instinctive art, with an instinct not easy to develop. So many colleagues in the classroom may give up on trying and practicing listening. It is easier to resort to a dry, seemingly logical structure of what happens easily each time: turn to page … read and answer the questions. Choose … fill in … let me see … correct … incorrect because … (grammar explanation following). Satisfaction – duties have been fulfilled.

Of course, students wanting to take the higher-level test are the cream of the classes. Why couldn’t they perform at the test without problems? Well, it’s because they are a minority of the communities they had been brought up in to be the best. To be the best among a general decline may mean very different from what it meant for us 40 years ago, or for my first groups 30-or-so years ago. Those communities are the real initiators of this protest and the real cause of the problem. They may be the reason why the best may think they are good listeners. Among whom?

Parents seem to subscribe to the general mood of protest. I have seen and felt this too. Parents have become more and more defensive of their children based on the perception that they know their kids better. Parents’ perceptions have been shifting towards seeing, if not the school, then at least the ‘problem’ teacher as the enemy instead of the ally in improving their children’s capabilities and thus future chances. Unfortunately, this perception has been spreading among the student community as well. And this has been happening in a country and culture where parents are more and more inundated with their own work. Before I forget, there is also the other side, the group of parents who can provide their kids with everything they wish for. As one student explained to me a few years ago, “I don’t need to speak English, I’ll have my father’s business and I’ll employ interpreters.” Well, yes, that seems easy for some. If that’s the image they make fashionable, what are the chances for the meek not to follow in laziness? However, that’s already a social problem that I can’t address here. But that’s another reason for the students to consider the teacher the enemy – she/he, the ‘loser’, seems to be powerless against the ‘mighty’ parents, so what do they want? Reminiscent of the situation in Chinese private schools. Does it also remind you of “another brick in the wall”?

I see one positive. And that is that the tasks are still given in English at an English test, something that may often not be the case in the Netherlands, or Italy, or China, for example. I can feel, however, that this may also change as so many other things have changed in the course of the last couple of years in the Hungarian education system. It is always easy to take the easier path. But that is going to be the subject of another article next time.

A few days after I posted this article, on 14th May, what do I see on Dutch TV? Mass protests on the net by Dutch takers of their respective school-leaving exams against the time constraints they thought was too short … while in Nigeria, where more than 270 girls were earlier kidnapped to prevent them from going to school and punish them, people are still hoping that there may still be a future for girls’ getting a profession.

by P. S.

Effect of Grammar Teaching on Learners and Translators

04 Friday Apr 2014

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in education, foreign language teaching, language learning, language teaching, language testing, translation

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Grammar translation, grammar-translation method, language correction approaches, tests, Translation

I have been relatively new to translators’ sites, but on a discussion forum, I’ve already come across a lot of very professional explanations of problems in English. Translators are language experts after all.

However, I’ve recently seen a question that, surprisingly, at first sight, veiled the sight of professionals as well. The question was about how to translate the following part of a test into another language:

“Q X. The School of Art is
a. moving to a new site in the near future
b. lifting to a new site in the near future
c. sending to a new site in the near future”

The asker (somewhat grammatically incorrectly) said “I think that answers B and C are not grammatically corrects” but asked for other people’s opinion.

My feeling is that the foreign language teaching which we all underwent at a young age left an indelible mark on us to an extent that most of the best language professionals still think in terms of grammar when faced with wrong language items. They clearly identify what is wrong language, but when the question referred to wrong grammar, they left it at that and were mostly busy discussing how strange the idea is to translate a language test into another language. That is also a very valid question, but at the same time, of the 5 or 6 people involved in the discussion, only one pointed out that it is not the grammar which is wrong, but “it’s a problem of vocabulary — simply the incorrect choice of verb”. And this amazed me.

I suspect that language teaching that focuses on grammar leads to a tunnel vision of languages with most of us, and we accept all, or most, language mistakes to be those of grammar, the rest being allowed for spelling and punctuation, but which are almost never pointed out to fellow professionals for fear of being called impolite.

In this particular case, what was really important was indeed the incorrect two choices. But, though asked about grammar, some people may have also been afraid to correct the conceptual mistake. Yes, grammar is usually to blame. To a language teacher, this indicates that treating vocabulary, or lexis, as increasingly referred to at least since Michael Lewis’ ‘lexical approach’ appeared in ELT, is still the basic concept we deal with about language. His work has apparently not gained enough kudos to counteract the good old reference to ‘grammar’, whatever is understood under this umbrella term.

Besides, one other very valid point was also raised, namely, to what extent wrong language can be called incorrect. It often happens in language classes that teachers (or native voluntary helpers here in the Netherlands) jump on any mistake learners make. Besides possibly intimidating most learners, this also overshadows the fact that language is for communicating ideas even through mistakes. Haven’t we all, as babies, started out making millions of mistakes, and yet, our families understood us the way we intended? There was correction, too, but it was not only patient, it also accepted the extent the faulty language was still communicative enough.

Besides, it was all done without reference to ‘grammar’. I increasingly suspect that the concept itself is to blame for the mere question. If it is enough for language professionals, and indeed all native and high, or even mid-level speakers of the language to identify a mistake as wrong, is it necessary to call it a name and thereby fall back on falsely trained concepts? If we have to teach along lines of concepts at all, then teachers and learners should learn to call a spade a spade and call a wrong word a mistake of lexis, and not grammar. Or abandon ‘grammar’ almost completely.

It is also time to point out to language learners that when they make lexical mistakes, they may be grammatically correct, but most lexical mistakes are completely wrong because of the meaning, and often simply because of general usage. In schools, the stress is on grammar, whereas the most urgently necessary material to be learned is vocabulary, and in the proper usage. Without lexis, grammar is dead, but proper words have a meaning even when ungrammatically used. “Papa, rug pein?” with good intonation is completely understandable from the toddler, although an applicant at a Dutch language exam would fail. “Kici, nagyi?” is completely wrong Hungarian even on pronunciation level, yet all Hungarians in Chinese take-aways understand this in Budapest and react without problems. This importance of lexis is perhaps most apparent using Chinese, a language rather void of grammar, when, for example, politely asking someone to “Qing zuo ba” would become wrong if we changed the declining voice pattern on ‘zuò’ to ‘zuǒ’ (as in 坐 v. 左). Of course, the context helps, and in the case of Chinese, due to the characteristics of the language, phrases with wrong tones are still understood. But a mistake is a mistake, but it is almost never one of grammar, especially in writing.

This all shows as well how mistaken language testing itself could be, and that language tests should not be translated. Language tests are to measure the level of use of language of learners based on the characteristics of the given language, not of another one. Also, tests do not provide context, even for grammatical correctness. Thus teachers and then tests end up having to transcribe active sentences to passive “equivalents”, which, in the vast majority of cases, cannot sensibly be done. What would be the active version of “The last member of the family could not be rescued from the burning house”? An accusation against whom? The normal British press item “Our government has failed to realize the threat involved in allowing hedge funds to ….” would be completely unheard-of if translated into Hungarian without using an impersonalized kind of language reminiscent of passive voice, but such a Hungarian item would lose all its usual critical edge translated into English in the passive, as a result of the fact that no acting party would be mentioned as subject. Languages have their internal characteristics besides and above mere ‘grammar’. But when the question turns to ‘correct grammar’, even a native language professional suggests, however tentatively, that in sentence C above, the passive would be more correct. Except for the meaning involved.

by P. S.

Translation in the extreme

16 Saturday Nov 2013

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in foreign language teaching, translation

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Consonant, English language, Vowel, Word, Word game

Baybayin: The Vowels

Baybayin: The Vowels (Photo credit: anetz)

This blog seems to be becoming something more about translation than about teaching, but I can’t resist sharing some of my most interesting experience as a translator with whoever is interested. I hope it proves the futility of trying to translate literally well enough, and thereby can serve as a means of stopping teachers from demanding too much translation from their students. It is hopefully also a proof that at least as far as grammar is concerned, terminology of a target language can under no circumstances be explained in terms of the mother tongue.

Not long ago I was asked to translate an introductory text to a book of anagrams from English into Hungarian. After explaining the benefits of unjumbling the puzzles, the text turned to giving advice on how to best solve them. And here I met some advice that I considered best not to translate. I suspect that speakers and translators of most other languages would also find it absurd to try to do so, not only word for word, but even the most general terms. Actually, as far as this text is concerned, there’re no general terms. Let’s see the original.

Vowel FTW

Vowel FTW (Photo credit: timbrauhn)

“You can use the following methods if you find the solution not readily available.

Work with Vowels

  1. If there are many vowels (a, e, i, o, and u) in the word, there is a possibility one of them might be the first letter of the unscrambled word.
  2. Next, try putting one of the vowels in the second place with a consonant in the first position. Try this with each vowel and consonant pair. Sound out different possibilities. Rearrange your word scramble so you create several different versions of the scramble, each with a vowel as the second letter. This may be enough of a hint to trigger the correct word.
  3. Remember that vowels often appear in combination like au or ea in many unscrambled words. Try combining vowels, again placing a consonant in front of each vowel pair.

Work with Consonants

  1. If you have an r, try it as the second letter.
  2. If you have two consonants the same, such as s or l, try putting the two consonants together. Try the double s at the end of a word, and the double l in the middle.

Try Blends

  1. If you have blends like st, br, or ch, try words starting with those consonant blends.
  2. If your Scramblex contains an e  and a r, r”, think of words that have er as the last two letters and a vowel as the second letter.
  3. Try different letter combinations as the beginning and end of an unscrambled word. Sometimes the beginning and ending letters are enough to trigger recognition of the correct word.

Veteran word puzzle solvers also use some other skills to provide success.

  • Prefixes and Suffixes

Search the letters you are trying to unscramble for common prefixes (beginning sections) and suffixes (ending sections). Look for common prefixes such as un, up, and re within your Scramblex word. Also, look for suffixes such as ed, ion, and ing to find possible word endings.

  • Alphagrams

An alphagram is a word arranged in alphabetical order. For instance, the word tar as an alphagram is art. Learning and applying alphagrams of words can act as a key for a Scramblex puzzle. The longer the alphagram, the more likely it will be useful in solving the puzzles in this book.

  • Word Lists

Becoming familiar with lists of common words by word length can assist you, as many longer words begin, contain, or end with smaller words. For instance, betrayal, contains the words be and tray. Also, read lists of uncommon words, such as those beginning with q or z.

If you still cannot solve the Scramblex, you can take the sets of letters arranged with a consonant as the first letter and a vowel as the second letter and look in the dictionary for words that have each of your first two letter combinations. Simply scan the page to find words that begin with a selected two letter combination and use the remainder (and the same number) of your scrambled letters.”

For a start, I don’t know much about other cultures, but in the Hungarian culture, it is not usual for families to have a dictionary even if somebody is an addicted puzzle solver, so the first thing I added to my version was to tell the user of this game to buy one, otherwise no reference to “the dictionary” would make any sense.

After carefully reading the various pieces of advice, we can find that most of them only work in English, and not in any other language. For example, the advice to start working with the five vowels should completely be scraped – in the case of Hungarian, there are fourteen of them, “y” discounted, as it is never used to start a word. But some others are also very rare in initial position, so I would have to list those that can be starters, otherwise, everything is useless.

Well, lists of common words grouped according to word length is no way of finding out anything about Hungarian words. As a general rule, they are often a lot longer than English words, just like in Italian, though there are similarly short ones as well. It stands to logic, too, that consonant or vowel clusters are absolutely different in different languages. The rules governing grammatical forms are also a lot more complicated in Hungarian than in English, just like, for example, in Slavic languages or Finnish. We don’t have prefixes, but what we have instead, at the beginning of verbs, are equivalents of phrasal verbs and very similar to what German or Dutch has, as in ‘aankomen’, ‘voorkomen’, ‘uitkomen’, ‘bekomen’, etc. On the other hand, we have various types of suffix-like additions to all sorts of words, but there can be several of them together, quite unlike in English, some expressing what English prepositions do, others expressing cases and aspects and other qualities of words. It wouldn’t be as simple as the advice above describes to find a pattern to a word from its elements. Translation of such original material would be useless. It would also be completely impossible to explain in English what those parts of words are in the Hungarian language. They simply do not exist in English.

So what can the translator do? He/she can leave out most of the text and start doing phonological research, or make up some of his own based on his/her general knowledge of his/her own language. The first option is very time-consuming and thus expensive for the client, so I was told to stick to the second option myself.

The point of the matter is that if we translate such text, the result will be completely embarrassing in the new language for whoever needs it. The other solution is to do something about it in the direction the original text was aiming at, far beyond the field of translation, even further than usual adaptation. A very special case indeed.

by P.S.

p.s. For those interested in my translation to Hungarian, here is my version:

BEVEZETÉS

             Amint az a borítón látható, ez a könyv ötezer Scramblex-rejtvényt tartalmaz. A Scramblex-rejtvények olyan szórejtvények, amelyekben szavak összekevert betűit, anagrammákat kell szavakká visszaalakítani. Az egyes szavak összes betűjét megadjuk, de összekeverve. A cél, hogy visszarendezzék a betűket és kitalálják az elrejtett szavakat. A Scramblex-rejtvények könnyű, közepesen nehéz és nehéz rejtvénykönyvekben növekvő számú betűket tartalmaznak. Minden oldalon húsz rejtvény található, a megfejtéseket az oldalak alján fordított sorrendben és hátulról betűzve lehet megtalálni.

Szórejtvények megoldásának általános haszna

Javuló hatékony IQ

            A cím jelzi, hogy ezeket a Scramblex-rejtvényeket úgy terveztük, „hogy fejlesszék az ön IQ-ját”. Az intelligencia-hányados – IQ – az intelligencia tudományos mérésére szolgáló eszköz. Az ön IQ-ját úgy állapítják meg, hogy mérik problémamegoldó képességét, memóriáját, általános ismereteit és térbeli tájékozódó képességét. Egy felnőtt ember átlagos isten-adta IQ-ja 150. Ezt az agy mikrobiológiája miatt az orvostudomány nem tudja javítani. Fejleszteni azonban lehet. Az átlagos hatásos (naponta használatos) IQ csak 100-110, aminek leginkább az elhanyagoltság az oka – az agy-gyakorlatok hiánya. Ezért, ha gyakorlatoztatja agyát, emelheti hatásos IQ-ját. Szójátékokkal, mint amilyen a Scramblex, elérhetjük a szükséges szellemi aktivitást.

Szellemi gyakorlat

            A szójátékok segítenek gyarapítani szókincsünket, megerősítik a szavak felidézésének folyamatát és javítják a memóriát. Nem érzékeljük, hogy amikor rejtvényeket oldunk meg, a gondolkodási képességünket használjuk. Agyunk egész életünkben új készségeket tanul. A rejtvénymegoldó készségek elsajátítása fejleszti a gondolkodásunkat.

            A Scramblex rejtvényei javítják koncentrációs készségét és figyelmét. Amikor ön egy rejtvényen dolgozik, olyan környezetre van szüksége, ahol viszonylag kevés a figyelemelterelő körülmény. A rejtvényfejtés magányos tevékenység. A Scramblex rejtvényeihez szükséges koncentrált figyelem kiváló készség, amely életének számos területén segítheti önt.

            A következtetések levonása fontos kritikai gondolkodásbeli készség. A Scramblex rejtvényei lehetőséget nyújtanak arra, hogy szervezési készségeket tanuljon, amikor különféle megoldási módszereket alkalmaz. Amikor a lehetséges válaszok keresése és megtalálása során kizárásos megoldásokat alkalmaz, az szintén a következtetések levonását teszi szükségessé.

            A Scramblex rejtvényei olyan tevékenységet nyújtanak önnek, amely nem csak élvezetes, hanem szellemi kihívást is jelent. Agyunknak szüksége van a rendszeres játékidőre ahhoz, hogy új gondolkodási mintákat és összetett idegkapcsolati szerkezeteket természetes módon alakítson ki. Az ön elméje ugyanúgy megkívánja a rendszeres karbantartást, mint a teste. Végül is, az edzés nem csak bakugrásról és szabademelésről szól. Mind a testnek, mind a szellemnek szüksége van ingerekre és gyakorlatozásra. A rejtvények remekül megfelelnek arra, hogy ön karbantartsa elméjét és stimulálja szellemét.

Szórejtvények megoldásának haszna

Nyelvtanulás

            A Scramblex rejtvényei fejleszthetik szókincsét. Mindig vannak új, megtanulandó szavak, miközben szellemi erőfeszítést tesz arra, hogy kibogozza az összekevert betűrejtvényeket.

Szellemi ösztönző

            Az Alzheimer Társaság szerint “. . . a jelek szerint a magasabb szintű neveltetésben részesült emberek némileg védettebbek az Alzheimer-kórral szemben, valószínűleg azért, mert agysejtjeik és az azok közti kapcsolatok erősebbek.”  A Scramblex rejtvényei éberen és aktívan tarthatják az agyat.

Figyelemelterelés

            Egy kellemetlen helyzetben a Scramblex rejtvényei kellően elterelhetik a figyelmét, ami segít az idegesség elkerülésében. Ezért van az, hogy gyakran láthatunk embereket repülőtereken, orvosi várókban és kórházakban (betegeket és látogatókat is), amint rejtvényt fejtenek.

Szórakozás

            A Scramblex rejtvényei szórakoztatóak. Könnyen találja majd magát a szórejtvényekbe belefeledkezve, amint keresi a lehetőségeket és igyekszik minden rejtvényt gyorsabban megfejteni, mint az előzőt.

Hogyan oldjuk meg a Scramblex rejtvényeket

            Elméje mintákat keres. Amikor ön egy Scramblex-rejtvénnyel szembesül, elméje azonnal megpróbálja a betűket ismert szavakká rendezni. Próbálja a betűk hangja alapján rendezve megoldani a szavakat; ez gyorsabb módszer, mint ha leírná a betűket.

A következő módszereket használhatja, ha a válaszok nem adódnak könnyen.

Szerezzen be szótárt

Dolgozzon a magánhangzókkal

1.     Ha sok egy szóban a magánhangzó (a, á, e, é, i, í, o, ó, ö, ő, u, ú, ü és ű), valószínű, hogy egyikük a megfejtendő szó első betűje, és gyakran ez egyben egy igekötő része. Azonban nagyon ritka az ö, ő, ü és ű szó elején.

2.     Ha ez nem vezet eredményre, próbálja az egyik magánhangzót egy mássalhangzó után a második helyre tenni. Próbálja ezt végigvinni minden magánhagzó-mássalhangzó párral és figyeljen, hogy a különböző lehetőségek hogyan hangzanak. Rendezze újra az összekevert betűket, hogy a keverés különböző változatait hozhassa létre, mindig úgy, hogy a második betű magánhangzó legyen. Ez elég kulcsot adhat ahhoz, hogy rávezesse a helyes szóra.

3.     A magas, vagy mély hangrendű magánhangzók hosszabb együttese valószínűleg toldalékolt szót rejt, és a toldalékhoz már nem is kell a maradék betűket figyelnie, azok szinte már csak az ellenőrzéshez kellenek.

4.     Ha szerepel s és z, vagy s és c is a rejtvényszóban, azok nagy valószínűséggel együtt fognak előfordulni (sz, zs, cs alakban).

Dolgozon a mássalhangzókkal

1.     Két azonos mássalhangzó, általában a t, n, d, de gyakran mások is párban fordulnak elő, de ez a három általában közvetlenül a szavak vége előtt.

2.     A dupla vagy szimpla n, a g, t és az l valószínűleg együtt fordul elő az y-al, ha az is szerepel.

3.     Próbáljon ki a kitalálandó szó elején és végén különböző kombinációkat. Néha elég egy szókezdet, vagy szóvég ahhoz, hogy rátaláljon a megfelelő szóra.

4.     X-el, ty-vel, ly-vel, q-val, w-vel és y-al csak nagyon kevés szó kezdődik, és elég ritka a j is.

Tapasztalt megfejtők néhány más módszert is sikeresen alkalmaznak.

  • Igekötők és toldalékok

            Az összekevert betűk közt próbáljon igekötőt, vagy toldalékokat találni. Előbbit megtalálva igét kell utána keresnie, és ha ragot talál, az biztosan a szó vége. Bár sok igekötő létezik, a messze a leggyakoribb a meg-.  

  • Alfagrammok

            Az alfagram olyan szó, amelyben a betűket abc-sorrendben kapjuk. Például az apám szó alfagrammja aámp. Alfagrammok megtanulása és használata segítheti a Scramblex-feladványok megfejtésében. Minél hosszabb egy alfagram, annál valószínűbb, hogy hasznos lesz az ebben a könyvben található rejtvények megfejtéséhez.

  • Szólisták

Azonos hosszúságú gyakori szavak listájának alaposabb megismerése sokat segíthet. Érdemes ritka szavakból is listát összeállítania.

             Ha még így sem tudja megoldani a Scramblex-rejtvényt, próbálja a betűsort úgy elrendezni, hogy első betűje mássalhangzó legyen, a második pedig magánhangzó, és így keressen olyan szavakat a szótárban, amelyek hasonló betűkombinációkkal kezdődnek. Nézze végig a szótár oldalát, hogy olyan szavakat találjon, amelyek a a választott két betűvel kezdődnek, és használja a maradék betűket hozzájuk.

            Gyakorlatot igényel annak megtanulása, hogyan találjuk meg az összekevert betűkből az eredeti szavakat. Ne adja föl, mert gyakorlattal már könnyen meg tudja majd oldani a Scramblex rejtvényeit. Ha nehézségei vannak, használja a fentebbi ötleteket, hogy újratréningezze elméjét arra, hogy felismerje a gyakori mintákat, és azokat már ismert szavakkal társítsa.

Hogyan használja ezt a könyvet

            Ezt a Scramblex rejtvénykönyvet azért készítettük, hogy felnőttek számára anagramma feladványokat nyújtsunk az elme élénkítésére és szórakozásképpen. A feladványok nem nehezek, nincs szükség hosszú, bonyolult szabályokra sok példával. Arra sincs szükség, hogy a rejtvényeket bármilyen megadott sorrendben oldja meg. Tökéletesen megfelel az is, ha bizonyos szavakat, vagy akár lapokat is kihagy.

            Ne feledje, hogy a Scramblex-rejtvények haszna leginkább a szórakoztatásban rejlik. Tehát próbálja az általunk javasolt eljárásokat kihasználni, vagy alkosson magának saját módszereket. Bárhogyan is használja, az itt közölt ötezer rejtvény bizonyára sok órányi értelmes szórakozást nyújt majd önnek.

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Life is looking up at long last

04 Friday Oct 2013

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in English teaching, foreign language teaching, language teaching, work in Dutch education

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

adult teaching, education in the netherlands, English as a foreign or second language, English language, grammar-translation method, Teaching English as a foreign language

For the sake of those friends who have been following my blog regularly and may be in the same shoes, I’d like to let known that I suddenly got a freelancer’s job to teach for money. It is adult teaching, which suits me really fine.

I have also got into a fruitful relationship with a translation agency outside the Netherlands, and the two kinds of work combined give me enough to do, enough to live on and stop me feeling frustrated. With the teaching I also hope that, whatever happens, next time nobody comes back to me saying that I have no experience in this country and I haven’t been teaching for a long time. I’m doing it, and it’s good.

by P.S.

Werkloos = waardeloos, i.e., jobless = worthless?

27 Monday May 2013

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in education, English teaching, foreign language teaching, joblessness, Netherlands, work in Dutch education

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

education, job application, job market, joblessness, Labour economics, Netherlands

In connection with most recent developments in my teaching career in the Netherlands, I’d like to muse over a couple of disturbing questions that relate to wishful colleagues, and perhaps practically everybody who has been out of jobs for a while, especially those who are a bit advanced in age.

First, let’s see a recent letter I’ve received, in my translation. The original, in Dutch, can be read here: afwijzing.

Dear Sir,

Thank you very much for your application. Unfortunately, we can’t work with your application any further. We have rules regarding applications, and the focusing on further handling of applications and enrolling in connection with the huge numbers of people looking for work. From your CV I can see that your most recent experience finished in 2009, and you don’t have recent experience with teaching in the Dutch public education system. Therefore we can’t use your application any further in the selection procedure for this vacancy. Afterwards, we can’t use you actively now for other vacancies because of your recently broken work experience.

If you don’t want your data to stay registered with us, we ask you to make this known to us by e-mail. Then we shall erase your data.

I hope to have given you proper information. Should you have any more questions, we kindly ask you to contact us.

We wish you a lot of success finding a proper job.

Best regards

Well, this is not a typical refusal. I have amassed more than a hundred, perhaps two hundred rejections by now (I’ve been trying to get a teaching job for four years), but this is only the third one that explains the decision of the school.

I would like to draw the attention of my readers first to the fact that, this one excepting, we almost never receive reasons why our application is refused. This is perhaps usual in other countries and in other professions as well, especially with the popular places where hundreds of applicants litter the way of the one and only successful applicant. But I don’t live in Amsterdam, not even in one of the ten biggest cities, and most of my applications have been sent to small towns around here. Although a couple of rejections mention a very large number of applicants (one international school replied with these very words: “We received a very large response to our advertisement and have employed someone who particularly fits our profile,” (my italics) – they use English like this but I am not suitable for them!) one school in a small place mentioned 75. Well, in the four or five cases when I actually got to the selection procedure or was given an interview, I had one or two competitors – Dutch ones, of course. At one well-known school, there were of course a lot more, but I am beginning to doubt the honesty of some places about this. This is not Spain. Jobless figures stand around 4.5% in the Netherlands after all, there can’t be dozens of applicants for each teaching job in small places in such a country. I find it hard to believe.

But my main, and possibly most general, problem with this answer is the one which is probably the most honest reason: the one about the broken experience. I know that joblessness is a huge problem at these times in Europe and hardest hit are the young generations. Among young adults in most countries, jobless rates are double (or nearly treble) that of the average. Yet, there are lots of middle-aged people with degrees between jobs not only in Spain, or France, or Greece, but also in Hungary, or Bulgaria and the like. This is a trend which firms dealing in the career advice business attest to. Who cares about us? What can we expect if we get such an answer?

Age in itself is a problem when you have to look for a new workplace. For a while you can see that experience is required, but after that while you are soon found too old. Not officially. But, if advice bureaus are to be believed, do not lose your job and get on the dole over 40. My question is, how can you stay in your job until you get 65 years old. Because that is the target according to most governments in Europe. And then you see university professors, teachers, doctors and judges thrown out of job at 62, at least in Hungary. What is going on?

Once you are out of your job, you have to get back into another very-very quickly. Otherwise, expect to get into the situation in this letter, which suggests that anyone a few years out has to hang himself.

Because following this logic, you can never get back into work. The writer of that letter supposes that I have forgotten my skills within a few years. I haven’t driven a car for a number of years now, third time in my life – does the writer suppose I can never drive again? Does he/she think that once you don’t use your bicycle for a while, you can never get on it again? Does he/she honestly think that after 30 years and more than 3000 students, many of which I brought up to university from zero, I have forgotten how to teach? That I have forgotten the skills?  Or I can’t adapt to a third culture after the other two where I have given classes? I have actually given a couple of lessons at my Dutch language course, so those skills are transferable to a new language as well. To give some more examples, I have not played the piano for 30 years, but now I can accompany my singer friend and can play my own pieces at small concerts, and that requires a thousand times faster reactions than teaching. Or does the writer think that I’m too old a dog to be taught new tricks? Haven’t I learnt Dutch over 50?

Obviously, the answer to all, or most, of these questions seems to be unfavourable to us in most workplaces, by most bosses. Has the writer ever thought about these questions? He/she should know that a teacher always stays a teacher. It has become second nature at least. It is in our blood. Perhaps that person is too young to understand this, or has only met bad Dutch English teachers.

Last, but not least, a few pieces of advice to you people. Do no stay at home with your kids, especially not with several, because you will never get back on the job market. If you think that it is not necessary to consider this because your partner has a stable and well-earning job, think twice: can’t your partner ever lose his/her position? Even secure Dutch families should be aware that nothing lasts forever in this world.

Young people in cultures where wandering a bit around the world before starting work should think twice. By the time they return, they may be deemed too old for a starter on a market where experience, or a very young age with high qualifications are favoured.

Next, do not leave your job if you already have one, except if you are directly invited to another place. Even with a good history of achievements and recommendations, you may not be able to get to a new job from the market. Except, of course, if you are aiming to become a postman, or the like.

Last, do not leave your country if you are not a hundred percent sure that your experience and expertise is welcome in the new place without further requirements, and it does not break your career in any way. It has happened to me, not only self-inflicted, or by the pressure to speak Dutch for an English-teaching job, but also through illness, which can break anybody’s career at any time. Don’t challenge Lady Luck. Except if you are young, adventurous and fortunate with some excellent background, and you don’t want, or have to work anyway.

Other than these, as my uncle would say, don’t get old. (But he was 25 years older than me when I last heard him say it. So how old is old?) For that, as the letter originally suggests, I’d better go hang myself.

by. P.S.

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Grammar of the ‘grammar-translation’ method

21 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in English teaching, foreign language teaching, language learning, language teaching, translation

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Audio-lingual method, Foreign language, grammar-translation method, Second language

It’s been quite a while since I last wrote about the ‘grammar-translation method’, and I’ve had to realize that I’ve neglected the first part of the equation: I haven’t tackled the way grammar plays a part in this approach to teaching a foreign language.

For those who need some brush-up on the most famous language teaching approaches, I’m providing a link here to the same material that I linked to my first post about the matter in January. In that post, and in a few more later, we have seen that this method has several shortcomings mainly attributable to differences of meaning of words and phrases, and cultural differences among languages, shortcomings of dictionaries that are sometimes also a consequence of those differences, and the fact that concentrating our methods on translation, we slow down cognitive processes of the learner. But if the overwhelming use of translation is detrimental or at least very problematic for learning, what is the value of concentrating on grammar at the same time, or perhaps at different times?

The first further problem with the method is that classes are taught in the students’ mother tongue, with little active use of the target language. How can proponents of the method justify this? How is it possible for the learner to speak the foreign language without speaking it? First hearing it, and then trying it, that is. As I have pointed out earlier, this method harks back to early times of the school system, in most parts of Europe no later than the 1930’s, when Latin, and to a lesser extent, classical Greek, was widely taught without a view to speaking it. The aim was to understand the wisdom of the thinkers of old, not to converse with them, not even about them. Students had to take the wisdom as it was.

Is this possible in today’s world? Obviously, language teachers in the Netherlands and in China still think so. In the Netherlands, learning Latin and ancient Greek is a tenet of the best education, and modern languages are sometimes still taught with similar approaches, as I pointed out earlier. In China, the approach is still prevalent in English teaching due to a lack of sufficient exposure to native speakers and media, which are in abundance in the Netherlands, which in the latter accounts for acquisition of English after and outside school.

The main problem with mother-tongue instruction and omission of the target language is that without sufficient oral input, and then practice, no language habit can be formed properly. The development of understanding written texts and writing skills are hindered by the lack of general language skills and are thus unduly slow, and without a sizeable oral pattern to follow, speech production becomes distorted and often very different from native patterns. This is coupled with a lack of attention to pronunciation practice. In short, the learner becomes, or stays for a long time, incapable of taking part in conversation with skilled speakers of the target language, let alone native speakers.

Sadly, this is coupled with little attention paid to the meaning and content of texts. This seems to be nonsense, because the application of this method concentrates on texts. However, as the focus is on translation, discussion is beyond this approach. No wonder – discussion is next to impossible in the target language, and why should the students discuss a text the understanding of which they already proved by translating it? The purpose has been reached, and it was not internalizing, or evaluating the meaning: it was translation.

Of course, translation is not bad per se, but in a modern language class, it could still be followed by discussions, couldn’t it? This depends on who applies the method, but whoever it is, s/he has to speak himself/herself and make the learner speak too. Not within the proper tenets of this approach.

On the other hand, elaborate grammar explanation, providing rules for putting words together, emphasizing the correct forms and inflection of words can be considered a clear strength of this method. Indeed, learners usually demand for more, or clearer grammar, parents ditto, and if something is unclear about what they consider grammar, there is trouble for the teacher responsible. And with good reason.

One reason is that most learners have to sit for a language examination sooner, or later, and such an exam consists to a large part of manipulating sentence patterns. How can the learner do that properly if s/he does not receive proper grammar explanation? On the other hand, proponents should be warned that a number of international tests for English, for example the TOEFL test, cannot be taken on grammar – these tests try the candidate on their oral skills. The oral part of the Dutch test for foreigners is another such example. However, the grammar-translation method does not per se deal with oral skills, and not at all with listening, originally.

The trouble is that teachers applying this method rarely go further than explaining grammar extensively. Grammar input is fine, but being satisfied with grammar is not enough at all. Grammar explanations are followed, therefore, with pattern practice if the teacher is somewhat familiar with the somewhat later audio-lingual approach and behaviourism, probably concentrating only on writing tasks, as it lends itself most easily to correction.

A teacher applying this approach tends to believe in the importance of his/her authority and his own knowledge of the language, and feel safe when s/he can come up to all students to point out problems. It may sometimes be a result of his own educational background, but as a result in his turn, he may find it difficult to face students with their own opinions, which he would have to, should he apply parts of other approaches and allow for discussions, or even oral practice.

The great problem is that most teachers applying this method attack the first, and then every grammatical mistake committed by the learner. A lengthy revision of the rules may follow, perhaps not in order to drive home the notion that the faulty student was lazy, or inattentive, or, god forbid, stupid when s/he did not follow and apply the original rules, but it may all lead to this feeling. Besides, there is little time for follow-up activities, with which the teacher would feel uncomfortable anyway, but s/he can finish the lesson with a good feeling of accomplishment because he can’t be accused of not properly explaining the grammar points of the day. But his approach severely hinders practice vital in approaching the desired skills, behaviours, listening and understanding, pronunciation, thinking, evaluating, debating, and fluency in general.

Compared to this, where do we stand with respect to accuracy, which adherents to this method strive for?

When it is time for some practice, the method originally allows for drills which are exercises in translating disconnected sentences from the target language into the mother tongue, and vice versa. I believe that most teachers of today are beyond using this approach, though it can’t be discounted. But most are already tainted with behaviourism well enough to apply pieces of the later audio-lingual method. This is where the four skills have originally become well-known from, and this is where habit-formation really began.

Well, teachers of this mixed kind have no problem with audio-lingualism as that method also emphasizes minimalizing errors, disregards content which the grammar-translation teacher is uncomfortable with, and emphasizes structural practice on a determined sequence based on reading texts, all of which bodes well with him. What does not, viz. pronunciation and use of target language, is conveniently overlooked in preference to first giving detailed grammar explanations, which the audio-lingual method overlooks, but has still become the buzz-word since. I advocate a mixed approach, so why cannot grammar-translation teachers do so?

Because one-sided use of the familiar and prevalent grammar practice books is boring, time-consuming and superfluous. However, testing even today often makes it the only valuable option for teaching. The only problem is, the learner is cheated of his/her time, even if s/he plays along.

As to drilling, if we come to think about it, a 20-item oral drill takes about a tenth of the time required to write the same amount of fill-in sentences and checking them with everybody around class. Yes, the teacher should have good ears to follow most sentences pronounced, but everybody has the chance of uttering target-language sentences and still practicing grammar. To achieve that, though, we have to start practicing. Don’t overdo explanations, but go over to practice quickly even if you consider yourself a conservative. Written fill-ins can easily be done at home and be checked only if necessary, but after ample oral practice, it won’t often be.

Naturally, this can only be done after we have started to speak the target language in our instructions and expect same from the learner, helped with occasional pronunciation practice if necessary. After several rounds of oral manipulation and similar exercises aimed first at accuracy and grammar, students will achieve bouts of enhanced fluency with certain structures they have practiced. With more confidence and different grammar points following, the range will widen.

Of course, grammar and practice of grammatical differences between the given languages is important. Unfortunately, several dozens of authors have long inundated the international market with hundreds of grammar guides and grammar practice books, thereby reinforcing the importance of this trait in language classes.  This overshadows the fact that, even done in the very best ways, sheer grammar practice is utterly boring in itself and is met with hostile resistance in the class sooner or later. It can only form the basis of some degree of accuracy. Today’s learner does not care very much about that, however. Most people find it sufficient if they are understood and they understand others, even if they can’t recognize when this urge leads them to misunderstandings. Fluency is far more important than accuracy, and grammar practice itself can’t yield good listening and understanding, and can’t lead to successfully expressing ourselves. This, on the one hand, may force changes in the language. It may still, on the other, lead to good levels of language use. There are several ways leading to heaven – accuracy can also be achieved by exposure to good language use. And because oral language use leaves room for far quicker exchanges and far more exchanges of ideas among people than grammatization, it can lead to the same level of language use in a couple of years as grammar practice in a decade, while far more ideas and a wider understanding of the world are used than with grammar.

It is thus the communicative approach which the teacher should embrace more. Not exclusively, but if he/she pays attention to oral patterns, meaning, task-based practice aimed at achieving certain results in discussion, culturally defined differences of meaning, and to thinking in the target language with a view to exposing various opinions of the students about the world, foreign language production will speed up enormously. This will lead to more confidence in the learner’s own language use, faster development and to better overall language levels.

Now, if this has not been convincing enough for the conventional teacher, let me add that usual grammar practice does not cover what is most important in many languages, and that is vocabulary. It does not explain why certain words are used in certain contexts and exchanges, but others are not, why certain words are used together, while others are not. Only precious few course-books make it possible for learners of English, for example, to understand and practice in which order adjectives can be used, which emphasizers can be used with which which adjectives, what is the system of and how we can use phrasal verbs, just to mention a few problems which remain outside the scope of most grammars and course material. But word partnerships remain seriously outside most course materials even in the British publishing industry, not to mention ways of making the learner think about other cultures, other learners and the world in terms which they understand and find interesting.

Such materials, kinds that ask the proper questions, make the necessary challenges suitable to our times, use authentic materials in an effort to enhance native-like understanding and cross-cultural understanding, are very hard to come by. Authentic listening materials, kinds that the Dutch can come across every day on television, cannot be used in international publishing, because copyrighted material costs would drive prices to near Dutch levels, which only the Dutch can afford to pay. This way, most of the world can only buy cheap, commercialized material which make twelve to the dozen, in which the listening material is read out by actors, and the teacher can only dream of and strive for providing suitable pattern for his/her students with that.

But then he/she had better use better and faster approaches than the grammar-translation method on his/her own. Unduly concentrating on grammatical correctness, neglecting oral communication and interaction may lead the learner to a prolonged period of fumbling uncertainty in the language class, and could ultimately lead him/her to completely losing interest in the target language, unless he/she otherwise finds interest from elsewhere. Grammatical accuracy practice is a necessary part of language development, but if it overwrites oral communicative competency, it takes time away from fluency practice, often completely, and that is detrimental. On the other hand, developing fluency fosters confidence, and provides opportunity to recycle and strengthen the old and newer language patterns, grammar among them. Who would like to overlook this chance? It is also a lot more interesting.

Beware – in the American system of education, there have already huge paradigm shifts taken place towards i-learning, which almost only the most adventurous are ready for in other parts of the world. But it is coming, and you may not be willing to be left behind. How is a teacher prepared to take that step, and to what use, if he/she still bases his/her instruction and methods on age-old, more-or-less discredited paradigms?

My readers may find that my opinion is not based on research. Agreed. I am not a linguist myself. The opinions expressed above, however, are based on my long professional experience. Never being very communicative as a youngster but brought up on grammar, translation and grammar tests, I found my way to university easily based on the written entrance examination at a time when about one fifteenth of the numbers of today made it to higher education in my country. However, I then struggled for a couple of years in surroundings where translation was not used at all; instead, we had to discuss loads of literature orally, for which I was not really prepared enough.

My co-author on this web-site, Ms. Shen has received very little English and Dutch grammar, never learned a foreign language at school in China, yet, she is quite fluent in oral interaction in both languages through her communicative efforts after a few years. Far from being among the best writers, but that aspect is also improving for her.

As a teacher, I have used various materials in increasingly communicative ways and I have always found that those who only concentrate – insist on concentrating – on grammar practice, are soon left lagging behind more adventurous types, those who try to creatively and bravely use even the little that they already have up their sleeves from the beginning. For the latter kind, accuracy has come a bit later, but it comes much earlier than fluency for the grammatically oriented. It may be almost unnecessary to add that when my students were later asked to translate, their production did not depend much on their grammatical, or often not even on their communicative competency – it depended largely also on their native language competencies, the students making all kinds of mistakes in their mother tongue that showed understanding, but an incorrect use of their vernacular.

by P.S.

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A criticism of translation methods from the point of view of dictionaries

22 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in English teaching, foreign language teaching, teacher training

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Dutch dictionary, Grammar translation, Van Dale

In this post I’d like to provide further basis for the discredit of the grammar-translation method through looking at the possibility of misinterpretation based on dictionaries.

Lots of English linguists insist that there are actually no precise synonyms in a language, and I can just copy that in my mother tongue too, but even if we allow for synonyms encompassing words meaning almost the same as another word, no wonder that dictionary translations to another language rarely meet the criteria necessary to achieve successful word-to-word translations. Unfortunately, I’m not skilled enough in Dutch so that I can give you convincing examples in the field of meanings, but I face the problem daily if I get near a Dutch person who I could ask. “Yes, what you say/write is ok, I understand more-or-less what you mean, but this is not exactly how we would put it in Dutch.”

Besides this fact, there are probably hundreds and hundreds of cases when the meaning of a word can be completely misinterpreted using the exact foreign equivalent a dictionary uses. This is simply the result when dictionaries don’t bother to give details for exact meaning of the foreign equivalent, and sometimes even failing to mention which part of speech they are quoting. Often there is a mistake to the extent that the purported foreign equivalent doesn’t even exist.

My examples come from two bilingual dictionaries I have, the ‘Kramers handwoordenboek/Engels-Nederlands/Nederlands-Engels’ and the ‘Van Dale Studiewoordenboek/Nederlands-Engels’. When necessary, I check the real meaning of the words with the help of ‘Kramers woordenboek Nederlands’, where English is not used. I know for a fact that smaller dictionaries in the Netherlands are just as often void and useless as in Hungary – I’ve tried to use one or two, then quickly got rid of them. I don’t suppose that the lot of other two-language dictionaries found in abundance in the country are any better – the small Hungarian dictionary is definitely not better, why should the Farsi-Dutch, or Russian-Dutch dictionary be any better? So, here is a bunch of problems I’ve discovered over the last few months in the two large dictionaries, where Dutch learners of English are also likely to look up meanings of Dutch words.

Het weer is omgeslagen – the weather has broken, or Het weer slaat om – the weather is breaking? The clouds, but not the weather. Medemens is frivolously turned to be a fellow man, which would be a fellow creature if used at all by Englishmen. Handelen over iets is correctly given to mean deal with, but to treat (of)? What were the makers thinking of?

Bonenkruid is given as savoury, which is fine if one notices that it’s a noun. Most learners wouldn’t notice the small ‘o’ after the headword, which means it is a genderless, so-called ‘het-word’, and because ‘savoury’ is very rarely used as a noun in English, an unsuspecting learner-translator would be likely to use ‘bonenkruid’ as an adjective, or ‘savoury’ as a noun after encountering the word.

I owe gratitude to the dual-language ‘Kramers handwoordenboek’ that it doesn’t include ‘beamer’ in either the English, or in the Dutch section. This widely-used Dutch word represents the wide-spread misunderstanding that it is an English word, which the ‘Van Dale’ includes, but which the single-language ‘Kramers Woordenboek Nederlands’ excludes. Rightly so.

It can also happen that after the foreign equivalent is given, the headword is put into phrases as examples of use. This should always be part of a good dictionary, though, sadly, it never makes into smaller dictionaries. However, what can a learner do with entries like the following:

eigen 1 own, private, personal met de hem eigen bescheidenheid with his characteristic modesty; dat is hem eigen that is typical of him, (inf) that’s him all over; zich iets eigen maken (ook m.b.y. taal) make o.s. familiar with sth., (m.b.t. taal ook) master, pick up …

I personally appreciate the effort that the makers of the dictionary took pains in this case as in numerous others to supply an appropriate translation to the whole phrase. But shouldn’t there be at least one example where the translation conforms to the given English headwords? In all the three expressions with ‘eigen’, there’s not one which contains the three originally given translations. How is the student supposed to learn the meaning in English if he is to use the grammar-translation method for his own sake? Besides, I can also call it typical that, for the sake of a foreigner studying Dutch, the necessary preposition in the Dutch phrase equivalent with ‘familiar with’ is blissfully missing: “zich iets eigen maken” – van? met? aan? over?

In some cases the translations in the two dictionaries don’t match enough for a learner. ‘het gedrang’ is correctly interpreted as jostling, pushing from the original meaning of the stem-word, dringen, but it’s very likely that the other dictionary is closer to normal use translating it to be crowd, throng. However, even this second one creates problems with giving crush, which lots of young learners must be all too familiar with here from British soaps. Further, if one needs the meaning of in het gedrang komen in his translation, which meaning shall he/she choose: 1. get in a crowd 2. fig. be hard pressed, suffer from one, or (fig) get into a tight corner or be liable to be pushed aside/to be postponed (???)/to suffer from the other dictionary?

In other cases there is simply the danger that the learner can’t find which meaning quoted under the headword is the one he/she needs at the place and moment required.

Bent is given as set, clique, party, which together may vaguely indicate what the word means. Still, one keeps wondering, what if the meanings are apart? Then which meaning of set, or party is to be understood out of many?

Het voorbehoud is translated as reservation; which meaning of reservation? It is a bit hidden among other information that this is not about booking a flight, but about partial disbelief, a restriction.

Summier is defined as summary, brief , and only bn(=bijvoeglijk naamwoord) shows that these are meant to be adjectives (and summier is also an adverb according to the big ‘Kramers’), although ‘brief’ is often used as a noun or a verb, ‘summary’ is mostly used as a noun in English, and neither can function as adverbs.

Het vermoeden means suspicion, surmise, supposition, presumption, still, this word doesn’t mean mistrust as we could also deduct from suspicion. It’s not really a synonym of argwaan as the synonym section in the big ‘Kramer’ lets us believe.

There are similar problems with words like boorijzer bit (which meaning?), zijgen strain (which sort?), solutie solution (to a problem, or chemical?), soos club (a meeting-place, or a bat?), spaander chip (a piece of wood given for a silicon chip in the computer age?), keuvelaarij and keuvelen given as chat (in the internet age, when the meaning is restricted to broken speech of toddlers?), most given as must (when neither culture is used to what steps grapevine-making goes through until wine, the odd learner may be enticed to take it to be a form of the auxiliary – this translation misleads even a wine-savvy Hungarian where the exact same word must is used, with a difference of pronunciation).

I’m not sure that very many Dutch teachers of English are capable of explaining the subtle differences in the fields of meaning of English words in English – one can’t really suppose they can maintain their level of English high without speaking English in class to their students in the first place. Then, if they manage to maintain their English, they can mostly do it with dictionaries. They don’t have so much time to immerse themselves in life in Britain with all those teaching hours over the year. But they should remain the main source of vocabulary input, what with the quality of dictionaries as we’ve seen it, and the probably short hours students invest in studying outside class.

I’m not saying that all my examples play a big part in learners’ experience either. But there are lots of similar examples wherever I look. One can meet these problems in Hungarian, Sino-English or other dictionaries as well. But to do it only in Dutch seems to be just as weird as it is in Chinese or in Hungarian. Sometimes it may lead to situations similar to having to explain to a Beduin what ‘snow’ is like in Arabic, or to a North-Korean what ‘democracy’ means. Or to explain to a Chinese, or a Dutch, for that matter, what the difference between adjective and adverb is. There’s no distinction between the two in those languages …

by P.S.

Examples for translation difficulties

31 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in education, English teaching, foreign language teaching, language learning

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

grammar-translation method, Language education, teaching foreign languages, Translation

As I promised in my previous post, I’m presenting you with a list of examples that is intended to prove how difficult, mostly impossible it is to translate among languages texts which contain idiomatic language. But I’d like to begin on the level of phrases, which is the first level that may present such problems, like with the English phrasal verbs.

Dutch to English

Two of my favourite Dutch verbs are something I find very amusing word-for-word:

‘slagen voor het examen’ and ‘zakken voor het examen’

The first means to pass an exam, the second means to fail an exam. The problem comes with ‘voor’, which means that I can pass or fail before the exam.  Which will happen to me if I don’t go? But I shouldn’t go because I’m going to pass or fail before it anyway – the only question is, which?

One thing the Dutch can’t translate to English is “Eet smakelijk!” or “Smakelijk eten!” simply because the English don’t say much before eating. Some may occasionally wish “bon appétit!” with the French, which is equivalent to the very rarely heard Dutch “Goeie eetlust!” but then again, how to translate the jovial “Tuck in”? The translation of the Dutch phrase to English would be to wish “Eat tasty!”, which sounds completely ungrammatical, and may also question the quality of what we have just received in front of us. Hungarians at least regularly wish “jó étvágyat!” Good men! But to wish for what the reason is for sitting down to eat is also not very logical. Still, there it is.

The Dutch word ‘stom’ has, strangely, two meanings, one being ‘mute’, or ‘dumb’, but the other one seems to associate muteness with stupidity, meaning ‘stupid’. People in the Middle Ages may have considered this correct, thus the word meaning ‘fall silent’ became ‘verstommen’ in Dutch. Not very nice, as if stopping to talk automatically meant a mental disorder. In interesting comparison, the Hungarian word for ‘falling silent’, ‘elhallgat’ associates stopping to speak with listening. It’s a nicer way of looking at it I presume when we suppose that the silent one isn’t speaking because he is listening, that is, paying attention to us. Perhaps Chinese concert audiences fail to fall silent during a classical concert also because they’re afraid of being accused of becoming stupid. Chinese?

The Dutch ‘heeft verkering met dit meisje’, but if they informed their English friend translating this as ‘I have courtship with this girl’, they would get strange eyes. The English ‘go out with a girl’, or ‘pay courtship to a girl’ if they want to be very high-class, which they don’t really. Actually, this Dutch phrase is also going out of use and a teenager would speak about his ‘vriendin’, just like the English about their girlfriends, but then there’s no expression for ‘going out together’ in Dutch.

Other examples of phrases that are directly not translatable are:

‘iemand een optater verkopen’ = to sell a punch to someone (sell?)

‘een knal verkopen’ = to sell a clap on the head (?) = kupán vág valakit (Hongaars: ’kupa’ means a cup)

‘vriendschap sluiten met iemand’ = make friends with sb; what do we want to close in translation? (the Hungarians ‘tie’ a friendship, but the same word – ‘köt’ – is also used for ‘embroider’)

‘zo te zien’ = so to see? no! = evidently, apparently

‘het zwaar te pakken hebben’ = heavily have it to take? = to love s/b badly, or to have big problems

‘het schip ingaan’ = enter a ship? no! = something goes wrong, to have big difficulties

‘iets onder de knie hebben’ = have something under the knee? no! = this idiomatic phrase means ‘to have mastered something’ – the problem with the Hungarian ‘elsajátít’ is that is means ‘making sg his own’, but it also has a very close connotation to sealing

‘een appeltje te schillen hebben met iemand’ = instead of an apple to peel? = to have a bone to pick with s/o – the Hungarian ‘elszámolnivalója van valakivel’ makes it akin to paying the bill but it doesn’t expressly say who has to pay, so it’s also difficult to put in English

‘weten hoe de vork in the steel zit’ = to know how the fork sits in the stalk (of a flower)? handle (of a hammer)?= to know the ins and outs of the matter = ‘ismeri a dörgést’ in Hungarian, but that sounds like ’he knows the sound of lightning’.

On idiomatic levels we can almost always see the problem, usually in all ways.

English to Dutch

To begin this section, phrasal verbs offer themselves the best. We’re not always so fortunate with them, like in the case of ‘to be cut out for’, which is ‘geknipt zijn voor’ in Dutch and is directly translatable. Not so in other languages. Surprisingly, the Chinese ‘当… 能力’ (dāng … nénglì) is simple and only suggests the power to work as someone, or to bear some responsibility for something, so you don’t have to be cut in any shape. The Hungarian ’erre van teremtve’, on the other hand, has a very strong connotation with being created for something by god. But it wouldn’t really be appropriate to translate it back as ’to be created to do s/g.’

We could go on with phrasal verbs infinitely to prove the point. But I deem it unnecessary, as most people learning English find this area very difficult. I’d like to go on with other kinds of differences instead.

When friends are already inside their homes, the English make you ‘feel at home’ or ‘make yourself at home.’ The Dutch invite us with ‘Com even binnen,’ and rarely wish us “Moge het je bekomen”, so it may surprise many Dutch how often they may encounter it in English.

When two people regularly quarrel, the Dutch may say ‘elkaar altijd in de haar ziten/haren zitten’. Try translating it to be ‘to sit each other always in the hair’ or something, and you’ll make people’s eyebrows rise really high. Why would such people ‘sit’, we may ask. The Hungarian ‘marakodnak’ is suggestive of biting each other or burning material in a caustic manner, for which English has no verb.

How does a ‘queer fish’, or a ‘strange customer’ become a French bean? But here it is = ‘een rare snijboon’ (and ‘snij’ is also not French!)

One thing the poor Dutch can’t translate, probably don’t even know exist, is how to ‘go Dutch’ ??? They may sometimes share the bill, but other than ‘verdelen’=’share’, there’s no idiom to this effect. But the phrase and the practice is very popular among Australians and Americans teaching in South China, perhaps an excuse to again exploit the poor Chinese.

It mostly happens with proverbs and proverb-like phrases that translation may become completely funny. Because of the different symbolism and different metaphorical world of each culture, word-for-word translation would often sound stupid. The English ‘don’t count your chickens before they are hatched’, while Hungarians say ‘előre iszik a medve bőrére’, which is not a warning, but a fact, but the Dutch may find it a lot more familiar, except that instead of drinking for its hide, they wouldn’t like to sell the hide of the bear before it is shot in ‘niet de huid verkopen voor de beer geschoten is.’ The reason for the use of the bear in Dutch is very surprising, given that bears may have been last seen in their area some two thousand years ago, unlike in Hungary, but if the Dutch wanted to ‘shoot the chickens’ or ‘hatch the bear’ instead in translation, English people would only scratch their heads bloody in wonderment.

Of course, if the metaphorical viewpoints of different languages are similar, translation becomes a lot easier on the phrasal level. This happens, for example, with relationships viewed as journeys. As a result, two former lovers may ‘go their separate ways,’ which is exactly what two Hungarians may do when ‘elválnak útjaik,’ but the Dutch say ‘ze gaan van elkaar,’ or ‘ze scheiden van elkaar,’ only the second of which is interesting, with reference to being cut away from each other.

Of course, with a lot of interest and also time, good teachers, good dictionaries and interested friends, all of us could make up much longer lists to prove how difficult it is to translate. Unfortunately, most dictionaries have shortcomings on the phrasal and idiomatic level, and smaller ones don’t even deal with such parts of the languages concerned. Besides, they contain the occasional errors, of which I have a gradually lengthening list. One such mistake, only for proof, is that for ‘zij hebben verkering‘ one relatively good dictionary gives ‘they are walking out.’ Out of a shop, may I ask? Are the authors of the dictionary aware that ‘walking out (on somebody)’ is the opposite of expressing love to the other one, or going together? Which, actually, is the meaning of the Dutch phrase …

It is also a matter of fact that highly qualified translators and interpreters of both languages in question are fully capable of doing this correctly. But to learners, these strange differences create a situation in which being asked to translate among languages they don’t possess appropriately may become insurmountable. More dangerously, it becomes a source of failure which impedes the learning process very strongly. Teachers in their right minds wouldn’t like to create failures, would they?

by P.S. and Z.J.S., with help from E. van Rossem

As a refreshing change from my own diction, let me encourage you to click on this link to an article by a teacher in Amsterdam explaining in his own manner why he thinks translation does not work with learning Dutch – with any language if you ask me.

Related articles
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A criticism of the grammar-translation method

26 Saturday Jan 2013

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in English teaching, foreign language teaching, language learning, language teaching

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

grammar-translation method, Jiaozi, Language, Language education, teaching foreign languages, Translation

Quite recently, I taught English to a Hungarian born in Slovakia, who also speaks German and some Polish, so when he had told me his level in English was around advanced, I believed him and started to deal with him with that in mind. Well, as it turned out, he was anything but. His grammar had a lot to be wished for, he seemed to lack vocabulary, and often seemed to suddenly become very reluctant to speak. It may have been a case of bad chemistry between us, but because we seemed to hit it off really well in our mother tongue, I lowered my expectations of him and waited for results. Then, in the middle of our short course, he admitted that he had studied English with translation at school a few years before. I was very surprised, because I know a few colleagues from Slovakia who really avoid this method. I tried to give him more help with what to say, but with the short time on our hands, he developed very little in fluency.

Although he knew his profession and the vocabulary for it in English well, he fell short when it came to discussing topics loosely related to it, sometimes even when closely related. His thinking processes were seriously impeded and prevented him from talking about what he knew well. He represented a huge failure of the ‘grammar-translation method‘. It’s because of this experience why I’ve decided to try and summarize some of my ideas about the deficiencies of this method.

Translation Process

Translation Process (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My ideas are not based on research, only on experience and the common sense of a teacher and language learner. I’m unwilling to completely dismiss this method, I was originally brought up into the English world through this method, and I understand the need of learners to resort to ‘what does this word mean’ from time to time. I still use dual-language dictionaries as well as the single-language Dutch dictionary on B2 level. But I’m not as flexible of mind as a young learner either. I believe, as a learner and as a teacher as well, that the sooner someone gets rid of the shackles of translation towards speaking a new foreign language the better. It reduces the time of understanding others and expressing ourselves greatly, and anyway, imagine what level of proficiency it would require to constantly translate while listening to the 200-words-per-minute prattle of some Italians, Chinese or Dutch speakers.

In normal language, on a beginner’s level, where we meet mostly factual vocabulary, translation may be applied. A ‘table’ is ‘tafel’ in Dutch, ‘asztal’ in Hungarian, ‘桌子’ (zhuōzi) in Chinese, just like a ‘man’ is ‘man’ in Dutch, ‘férfi’ in Hungarian, or ‘人’ (rén) in Chinese. These are easily translatable, so my guess is that this is why those insisting on the grammar-translation method may keep using it and honestly believing that this is good basis for its application. However, because this is the case with lots of factual, palpable language, they should be aware that for exactly the same reason, that is, palpability, factual language lends itself most easily for doing exactly the opposite in class: we can avoid translating concrete words simply by pointing at them and forming a new habit in learners of using a new name for familiar objects, thereby saving a lot of precious thinking time on word level. Language, and most notably names of objects are the result of consensus, so the task of the teacher is simply to create a new consensus about the naming of things and stuff. Once the consensus is firmly built, thinking and speaking will speed up considerably. I consider this to be a very important aspect of foreign language teaching because it gives invaluable confidence to the learners and a solid basis for further development.

There are sometimes difficulties even at this level though. Let’s remember the classical example of the forest. Can we all understand what kinds of different perceptions this word evokes in the middle and west of Europe compared to Siberia,  the mangroves of the south of the USA, or the bamboo forests of south Asia? Or in rain forest regions, for which English has the good sense to use ’jungle’. But then again, how can Portuguese learners of English in Brazil really grasp the word ’forest’ if not with a lot of photos? I bet that quite a lot of other object-words carry similar difficulties, some of which are ‘music’ (what differences in the world! compare classical, rock, pop, classical Chinese or Indian, or Arabic or African), ’church’ (try to explain a gothic one in France or England to Latin-Americans or Muslims), ’house’

Houses in Koprivstica, Bulgaria

Houses in Koprivstica, Bulgaria

Houses in Szentendre, Hungary

Houses in Szentendre, Hungary

Historical houses in Riga, Lathvia

Historical houses in Riga, Lathvia

Windows on a Chinese house, Dongshan

Windows on a Chinese house, Dongshan

(compare the differences between mediterranean houses with the upper floors being the widest, a ’normal’ West-European house with several floors and a one-floor building in Eastern-Europe or Africa), ’fireplace’ (made of what? what shape?), ’horse’ (the heavy Irish or middle-European plow-horses, or the race-horses of the Arabs and anything in between), ’telephone’ (which is fast becoming obsolete), or ’window’, which reminds me of the time when a Chinese host suddenly realized in the middle of winter that they had no glass on their windows — glazed windows simply don’t exist like that in that area, there is complicated and carved old latticework instead of the open space in the wall to let in light and air.

Slovakian dumplings

Slovakian dumplings

A special non-translatable category of words consists of nouns denoting things non-existent in the target language culture. A large section of food vocabulary belongs here. You can’t translate the Hungarian ‘pogácsa’, or ‘főzelék’, or the now omnipresent ‘curry’ to other languages as the things don’t exist elsewhere. A favourite with me are ‘饺子‘ (jiǎozi) and ‘包子‘ (bāozi) in China. Before I was given them for the first time (and sometimes even afterwards), people speaking some English tried to convince me that I would be given ‘dumplings’. Being a Hungarian, I have a very strong sense of our ‘dumplings’, which are quite different from the English kind, so I asked if they were sweet, contained milk-curd or something, cooked in boiling water and then covered

Shaomei, a kind of jiaozi in Beijing

Shaomei, a kind of jiaozi in Beijing

with breadcrumbs and sugar, and they were very surprised, saying no, none of those, and especially when I said that then theirs were not dumplings at all, because dumplings are all the above. I call that kind of food ‘jiaozi’ and ‘baozi’ for want of anything better, and especially because they are also very different from each other. At this point we should also remember that there were reasons why lots of languages picked up ‘loan-words’ from other languages, and not only in the field of food. Just a short list in English should include ‘igloo’, ‘wigwam’, ‘mosque’, ‘kangaroo’, ‘cockatoo’ (from Malay through Dutch), ‘tobacco’ (from Spanish), or ‘biro’ and ‘coach’ (the wagon, not the trainer), both, strangely, from Hungarian.

in the Durmitor mountains in Bosnia

in the Durmitor mountains in Bosnia

Some adjectives may also carry the danger of misunderstandings. What I may mean by, for example, ’tall’, ’high’, ’long’, ’wide’, ’fast’, ’big’, or their opposites and the like, may seriously be misunderstood elsewhere, depending on the original surroundings of my listener. Can we always rely on experience from the media for a Dutch child to understand what is meant by high mountains, when the highest point in the Netherlands is around 400 meters above see level? Of course, on beginners’ level, it’s not a source of concern for the teacher – he/she just translates and relies on the original notions of the pupils. Is that always right?

high ground and forest in the Netherlands

high ground and forest in the Netherlands

Abstract nouns obvously have an even greater chance of carrying differring fields of meaning, but also obviously, most teachers of lower levels of a foreign langauge neglect such possibilities simply for the sake of simplicity, and rightly so up to higher levels, when, however, high achievers may suddenly face the strange fact that their mental pictures should often be re-evalutated. But if they have never used methods of understanding other than translation, how can they grasp explanations that also obviously suddenly require explanations in the target language? And this was only the level of words.

The fact that in lots of languages, simple words can also converge to form compound words makes the translation process a lot more complicated, however. How can we understand that if the Dutch speak about ‘doodslag’, they actually mean ‘manslaughter’? Where is ‘man’ in this compound word when ‘dood’ actually means ‘dead’? In the Chinese ‘杀人’ (shārén) the order of the compound is opposite to that in the English compound, ‘man’ being the second member, and the Hungarian ‘gyilkosság’ has nothing to do with the word for a person, but is a reference to the murderous object. Both of the two latter words omit the aspect present in English, that is, that the action was not premeditated. The jargon of law has a word for it, but it’s not used much in ordinary language. It would also be un-expertly overdoing it if one translated ‘szándékos emberölés’ to be ‘premeditated murder’, ‘murder’ being enough to express the intention.

The fact that the English-Chinese dictionary omits the word ‘manslaughter’ may represent a lamentable omission from “The World’s Most Trusted Dictionaries” by Oxford, but I also suspect that the Chinese may not make a difference between pre-meditated and incidental homicide. They may think perpetrators of both deserve to die. Which is already a cultural issue, the enormous impact of which could take up volumes about language use. I guess that in a country where language teaching is still seriously influenced by the teaching of Latin and Ancient Greek as it is in the Netherlands, culture may not be at the forefront of teaching considerations. Who knows exactly what the ordinary culture and language of the Latins or Greeks was, one and a half thousand years after they became extinct, from writings of ancient members of the upper classes? Ask a Hungarian teacher of Latin for comparisons …

All this already illustrates the point well that translation is often difficult directly to be done even on the level of what most people call words, usually from the level of compound words upwards. It regularly happens, however, when we try to translate idiomatic language, or proverbs, so I’m going to present, in my following post, a small collection of such problems, mostly between Dutch and English, as I suppose most of my readers don’t really want comparisons with Hungarian or Chinese, and some of my readers may come from the Netherlands anyway. We may suppose that similar examples may be derived in comparison with German too. My readers who speak German would like to add their own such examples, but I don’t speak German myself.

Before I go on to the list of examples, I’d also like to point to the fact that on the level of sentences and texts even much more difficulties and differences exist. Whoever tries to translate sentences to Russian, French, or Hungarian, for example, or to other languages using inflexion heavily, is up to a very big task, especially if they try to use translation software. In very many cases, the teacher has almost no recourse even for grammatical explanations, mostly to learners of languages, like Chinese, in which even most of the grammatical categories do not exist — a word in Chinese may usually stand in the role of noun, adjective or adverb, often even that of verb. The grammar method also almost breaks down with languages using inflexions heavily, like with Hungarian, that express several dozens of aspects mostly inexpressible in grammatically simple languages like English, Dutch, or Chinese.

Chinese Parliament

Chinese Parliament

And once again, we still haven’t mentioned most differences coming from the cultural point of view, which lead lots of Chinese learners to be non-plussed by the ideas around ’elections’, ’parliament’, ‘representative’, and the like. When they push for a translation (the dictionary contains these words, after all), they don’t realize the world of difference between what is meant by the original and the translation.

British Parliament

British Parliament

With this and the following post I wouldn’t like to redeem the profession of language teaching, or the worlds of language learners. But I do hope that I may cause a shift away from the situation of my sorry student from Slovakia and similar learners who can’t learn to speak a second language well because of the exclusive use of grammar and translation.

There are a lot of different Methods-of-language-teaching (downloadable), like the direct method, the audiolingual method, community learning, total physical response, the communicative method, or the lexical approach, which may be far preferable. Role-play may also be regarded as almost a method, at least an approach to letting learners learn from their own behaviour. I recommend a good article about role-play here.

See my next post with examples if you’re interested. You can read about the grammar side of this approach in a later entry here.

By P.S.

On goals, limits and neurology

15 Saturday Dec 2012

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in English teaching, foreign language teaching, language learning, language teaching

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

education, freedom in class, limits in class, teaching foreign languages

One thing I’d like to mention connects to how much freedom of choice a teacher should give to his/her students to make their learning more effective. I’ve seen a number of young teachers or tired older ones come into class asking the students, “what would you like to do today?” and the like. Occasionally, such offers may create wonders, but has the teacher ever thought about, let alone tried to verify, how much those students actually learned?

I’ve also seen teachers who go into class and start talking about what interesting things come into his/her minds, or asks the students whatever has happened to them since they last met or during the weekend and so on. All this is first intended to be an introduction, a warm-up, to let students quietly get into the mood of learning and activate their curiosity and involvement, but very often, these introductions take up most of the lessons, become a lecture by the teacher, or a series of anecdotes by anyone inside the room and don’t lead anywhere. The involvement and curiosity wanes after ten or fifteen minutes, and the teacher doesn’t realize it, because the faces still show interest. Out of politeness perhaps. But the class has already turned into a Chinese-style language class.

Some of my readers may still remember the four vultures in the wonderful “The Jungle Book” cartoon of a few decades ago. They’ve had flown into the burnt-out wilderness, landed on the skeleton of a tree and started considering, “Whaderwe gonna do?” “Ah dunno, whaderwe gonna do?” “Ah dunno …” which goes on for some time, clearly showing that they have no purpose any more. They obviously can’t do anything more. I consider this lack of focus a danger to a language class. If a teacher goes in and expresses indecision in his actions, the result is inevitably a lack of learning.

The same danger is similar when the teacher asks the students to “write a text about something.” This means limitlessness, which is also a lack of focus. Full freedom is not appropriate for school. We have to have goals, short-term, mid-term and long-term purposes for our students so that they have an idea where they are expected to be progressing.

Out in society, limitlessness, even in less severe cases, may lead to unruly gang activity like from events in Romeo’s Verona to ‘favelas’ in Rio, or slum disturbances in any ‘developed’ or less developed country. Let’s not imagine that school activities cannot end up like these. I’m convinced that it is the teacher’ task to train students to concentrate their energies when in school. In most cases I can identify with film examples of taking children off streets to learn even martial arts and the like. These imaginary examples are pedagogically sound. They put the role of pedagogy in a wider context, the context of society. Teachers may not be able to teach high science to everybody, but they can turn pupils from even the worst backgrounds into useful and contented players in the world, according to their own abilities.

My other topic today falls into the category of limits as well. I’ve read a debate about using the 5-paragraph academic essay in schools, many doubting its role on the basis that in real life there’s no such thing. I agree with this latter. But we have to be aware of other connections as well: school and classes are not exactly what in real life happens – they are meant to introduce it. A class lasts for 45 or 50 minutes, life begins afterwards. Children go home after school to their own lives and may start their own mental adventures. Teachers also have lives outside schools. If we don’t bear this in mind and give tasks to our students simply ‘to write an essay’, students may write three lines in three different paragraphs, or write five pages according to how interesting they’ve found the subject and how much they have to say. The first remains nonsense and useless in pedagogical terms, and doesn’t help the student to acquire any sense of structure and supporting ideas at all. The second becomes fluid, also unstructured and so unreadable. It also requires incomparably long time for the teacher to assess it, not to mention provide advice on improvement. It’s also the case when a teacher tells students to ‘talk about something’ in class, ‘which interests you’ implied, but most students’ minds simply stop at this asking. Wouldn’t yours? Remember the advantages and application of task-based learning.

This said, I’d also like to draw attention to the fact that in real life, imaginative writing also requires structure, support to ideas, a balanced flow of events and so on. A present-day English poet once told a group of interested teachers at a short course on using poetry that looking at poetic inspiration with awe is nonsense. Anyone can become a good poet through practicing doing it. Musical geniuses also go through the process. They assign ‘opus 1’ to their first composition which they think is worth it. But they do a lot of work before too, for practice. My advice is for the teacher to teach students to focus, and limit verbiage to manageable amounts both for student and corrector. Afterwards, in real life, if things went well in class, some of the students may develop to be writers.

StateLibQld 1 113036 Cartoon of students recei...

StateLibQld 1 113036 Cartoon of students receiving the cane, 1888 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Finally for today, I’d like to mention that I’ve read a very good article and listened to a brilliant lecture embedded into it as a video on how the human brain processes information flowing towards and through it. The pedagogical implications that are described are enormous, as it is pointed out first of all that any information that represents danger, or is not appropriate to learning something new and important is blocked out automatically by certain parts of the brain dependent on its own state.

Apart from the fact that I’m glad I won’t see the day when scientists will be able to stimulate or manipulate the sequence of neurons necessary to program the brain, I’ve found this article and the video inside it very-very useful and interesting. I consider it a must-see for boring, bored or tired teachers who’ve already given up on certain students or on improving their work and impact. And for anyone going into class. The teacher-scientist speaking also means to say that the main way of learning may not be among the traditional four skills. Thinking, which some educators, including me, think is the fifth skill, is the key to acquiring all the other 4 skills, not vice verse. What she presents also quite contradicts the traditional learning-style categories (auditory, etc.), while introduces something different and much more efficient. Besides, it points to the shortcomings of the communicative method of language learning, exposing the weakness in that if somebody speaks, he/she also learns something. Much more learning can take place simply while the student is allowed to reflect, take notes, exchange a remark with someone, besides full discussions or writing essays. Of course, a well-though-out argument presented to peers may be the best.

The article and the video can be accessed here at Classroom Aid.

by P.S.

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I’ve found a solution … sort of

03 Monday Dec 2012

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in English teaching, foreign language teaching, language teaching, language testing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, education in the netherlands, Language education, Second language, teaching foreign languages

They’ve never told me about it, because they’ve never suspected it could be otherwise … I’ve never asked about it because I’ve never suspected it could be so …

But here it is. There is a possible solution to the problem of why an English teacher can’t get a job without talking superb Dutch. I’ve uncovered it through my efforts to get that elusive job, and voilá! The other day, I received a sample of the kinds of tests secondary pupils face while being tested at a VMBO-school. Here is the beginning:

Tekst 1

(1p) 1 Wat vindt Katie het engst aan de gebeurtenis die hieronder beschreven wordt?

A dat er mensen zijn die haar bang willen maken

B dat het horloge na een jaar opeens weer opduikt

C dat het kennelijk echt spookt in hun huis

D dat hun huis inbraakgevoelig blijkt te zijn

And then comes an English text to go with this item. The test goes on like this, and even when one of four choices needs to be supplied into gaps of another text, the last question is of the translation/interpretation kind:

7 Geef van elk van de volgende beweringen aan of deze juist of onjuist is op grond van de alinea’s 6 en 7. Omcirkel ‘juist’ of ‘onjuist’ in je uitwerkbijlage.

a Bij een half uur joggen verbruik je meer calorieën dan bij een half uur touwtjespringen.

b Bij touwtjespringen worden alleen de benen goed getraind.

c Touwtjespringen is volgens veel jonge mannen typisch iets voor meisjes.

d Sommige vechtsporters trainen ook door touwtje te springen.

Which means, of course, that not only do the students have to translate for themselves all the time (I’ve already written about the drawback thereof), but the teacher also has to understand and be able to explain why some answers are incorrect and others are correct.

On top of this, the final year of the lower-high and upper-high-school is a test-year, which means students are given test practice throughout the year. I can’t imagine how much drilling of grammar and translation goes on there because I’ve always worked on the principle that if the language is well-based and fluent and assured enough corresponding to the level of the applicant, the test won’t be a problem. If students converse and read and write freely on, let’s say, B2 level, passing a test on B2 level will also be easy for them with a minimum of test preparation, which I consider a very ineffective and time-consuming way of language development itself. It is necessary to give such practice for the sake of understanding what the testers want from them and how.

As far as I remember – which is more than 40 years ago, when I began to study English at grammar school – our books and tests were written by the Hungarian authors and our teacher in English. I’ve done state examination training, corrected university entrance tests and the like, but I’ve never seen a test given in the students’ mother tongue … well, perhaps there were a few in China, but as far as I remember what they showed me there, they were tests written in English. The student has to understand the task in English. This is simply a reading task, also measuring in itself the understanding of the target language, full-stop. I can imagine no reason why the Dutch have to make it extra complicated for their children by making them translate even if they have a chance of understanding it in English – and that’s the point of the test, isn’t it?

It makes me a bit more optimistic that others tell me students at the higher-level theoretical schools, like ‘gymnasium’ and the like, get tested by English-language tests. But I’ve also got insider information which suggests that that the level of English of even some HBO-groups are so shaky that students need Dutch-language instruction and testing.

My other discovery is connected to one school’s brochure, which states that

De docenten van de moderne vreemde talen van het … College hebben de afgelopen twee schooljaren gebruikt om de lessen, de toetsen en de schoolexamens aan te passen aan de kwaliteitseisen die aan het ERK zijn verbonden.

English: CEFR and ESOL examinations correspond...

English: CEFR and ESOL examinations correspondence diagram (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Which is to say that the school’s teachers of modern languages have been adjusting their classes, tests and examinations to the Common European Framework of Reference for the last two years. Which is to say … two years. The first draft of CEFR came out in 1997, although it is true that the Reference Supplement came out in 2009.

I have very big doubts about the application of the CEFR in the Netherlands. Although a Dutch committee prepared the Reading/Listening Grid, I doubt that the team-leader, J. Charles Alderson of Lancaster University would really have advocated the use of the mother tongue with these items, and because the committee had members from France, Germany and Finland, I don’t think they all used their mother tongues while formulating the common reference points. Saying this, I have to admit that I haven’t read CEFR and I’m not intending to in the short term, so I could also say, anything goes. But then, why do they have CEFR? And if they do, how could anyone not speaking Dutch solve such a test? Does this conform to CEFR?

English: Map of the Council of Europe members ...

English: Map of the Council of Europe members and other European countries with their population figures. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My personal feeling is that most of the earlier tests were not re-written in the Netherlands, although some texts are said to be from sources around 2009. Also, this is how they’ve been making tests for as long as they remember … And see, even the Council of Europe deems Dutch test-makers to be worthy of preparing a large chunk, so it must be alright. Nobody thought it could be otherwise, as I pointed out above. Also, two years is not a long period, they may be waiting for what’s happening in the longer term.

In the Netherlands, testing is in the hands of the highly-regarded CITO, the Central Testing Agency, and they don’t expect any primary pupils to understand tasks in English or other respective languages, so all their all-important final exams for primary education have Dutch instructions for foreign languages. So that’s what teachers have to prepare their students for, obviously in Dutch. By extension, logic dictates that, if test solutions have to be discussed in Dutch, teachers have to explain grammar and other stuff in Dutch during preparation to tests, so the language of instruction is also Dutch. And if the system doesn’t change for secondary levels, nobody is going to complain there, right?

For me, though, Dutch foreign language education does not seem a jot better than its Chinese counterpart, as long as I can’t see it from inside. What makes the two systems very different in terms of efficiency is the social and economic system surrounding them in general, and the outside-school possibilities for learning in particular.

Some professional opinion points towards change, though, saying that in the very last few years there seems to have begun some tendency to implement target-language instruction in language classes. I dearly hope that the ‘Age of Latin’ is on the wane here too, at long last, and I may ride a wave of target-language instruction to my first teaching job in the country. Touch wood …

by P.S.

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Make mistakes … ?

24 Saturday Nov 2012

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in English teaching, foreign language teaching, language learning, language teaching

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

education, English as a foreign or second language, language correction approaches, Language education, learning to communicate, Teacher education, Teaching English as a foreign language, teaching foreign languages

My thoughts have been a bit stirred up after reading a little bit more than usual of colleague opinion and political opinion on teachers’ learning processes of teaching behaviour, on language learners making errors and on how to deal with the latter. The following article here is a very good description of most people’s opinion:

  • Anton – Classroom experience was the key to training to be a teacher (and part-time pirate) (getintoteaching.wordpress.com)

What I find outstanding is that almost everybody praises making mistakes. As to me, I can go along with Anton’s and others’ view that we may learn more from our mistakes than from our successes. The logic is actually based on our inner monitoring system that praises us for our successes, which may often have no lasting effect other than magnifying our ego, but if not that bad, at least lets us fairly swiftly forget about what was actually successful. Let me see the next … On the other hand, for most people, especially with self-monitoring types of teachers, partial or larger failures don’t leave us alone, keep our minds working on our memories of what may have caused the problems, and even keep us awake for some nights. Man is basically a problem-solving creature, we could say.

As a result, we go on experimenting and adjusting. But it usually happens on the basis of justified knowledge and on our previously successful practices. We very rarely change our whole way of teaching for the sake of change. We usually do it gradually, and according to plans, rarely on that basis of on-the-spot decisions even when we feel something’s gone wrong in class. It’s also only our consciousness that realizes the problem, not that of the students, at least for a while. It’s the normal way of professional development to reflect and then change.

We mustn’t forget, however, that a teacher occasionally making mistakes while experimenting is still a teacher, he/she has worked for years successfully to become a teacher, and then as a teacher. His and her ego is not going to be hurt for long and he or she has the expertise and knowledge to find a way or two to get around similar problems the following time. But what about students?

A totally different story, we should realize. Even if feeling the strength of being in a group, sometimes or often against the teacher as the case may be, they are still fragile, psychologically, intellectually, emotionally, faced with the group, with the teacher, with groups in the street and with their own families, while they can’t rely on  a history of successes at whatever they also make mistakes of. In most cases, they make a facade of strength to cover their insecurities, in certain cultures to a greater extent than in others, but they do. This should be one basis of our handling the mistakes they make, be it social or linguistic mistakes.

The other basis is the linguistic effect of our corrections. Linguists maintain that making mistakes is not only natural, but it’s also beneficial to the students’ development of the target language, and it will be solved all by itself in time anyway. I may agree, but perhaps only to differ.

The benefits of making mistakes can be justified to some extent if we consider the students’ good feelings while they play with, fool around with the language freely. For a while. But how long? When we want them, because we have to make them, to use the real kind of foreign language, how can we explain why and why then, not later, and not before? A solution to this could be if we could devise parts of later classes as well when they are allowed to fool with the language. If only it were so easy! But, granted, playing games with the language is important for learners.

Then there’s the question of mistakes disappearing all by themselves with time. Yes, if the student has a long enough time, and a lot of casual input, they may. Over a decade or two, as it happens with lots of Dutch people. But school takes shorter, results must be achieved, or the final exam result will be less outstanding than what all concerned desired for. True, there was little pain at school, but also little achievement.

Which is alright for a lot of kids, but look, if that’s the way everybody looks at it, students, left on their own wishes to be corrected, would achieve just as little in Maths or History, Physics or Biology as in English. We wouldn’t like to argue against the notion of guidance, would we?

But guidance as far as foreign languages (or music and art, for that matter) are concerned is involved in a lot more than giving the knowledge of the teacher over to the students, explaining and then after a while giving them tests. The development and then results at “tests”, if that’s the desired end-result, is based on doing a lot of small things all the way from saying the first strange sound and word, through simple repetition of basic sentences, listening, reading aloud, making up or writing their own sentences and texts to real communication and thinking in the strange, new language that they don’t use in their lives for a while. The Dutch may also be exceptions as they watch English TV, and also those with time and enough money and the addiction who play games in English. But if even the latter type only meets language patterns used by other freak users of English, their language wouldn’t ever evolve to resemble the English language used by natives and well-educated professionals all over the world. Besides, other languages don’t have these added benefits, so the problem of correction and other teaching methods is still there, and I myself would not consider it professional behaviour to simply let my students talk whatever way they prefer.

With this last statement, I declared already, in the face of all opposition, that I’m in favour of correcting mistakes. The question is rather how and when, than whether, as I see it.

Taking the first basis discussed above, that of considering students’ fragility, I argue for soft correction approaches. I’ve seen many a student with good abilities and intentions not able to get over their weaknesses and mistakes after lots of years, in one case after nine years, simply because of the rarity of exposition to the language and to correction. People can be understood and can communicate quite well in a freak language, if that’s all they want to achieve with priorities elsewhere in life. But for real good language use, they must be corrected in school.

The soft approach means that not all mistakes deserve immediate attention. Lots of methodology books deal with how we can make a list during lessons of some of the mistakes made by the students and then we can tell them about the problems. My problem is, though, that if I start taking notes during the lesson and then later look at the notes and begin to quote their mistakes and faults, they will surely know next time when I start taking notes that they’ve made mistakes. It’s like political tricks – people and students are not stupid, even if sometimes mislead.

I like instead to make different small signs when the mistakes happen and quietly let them quickly understand that they’ve made a mistake and perhaps let them time to correct themselves. There’s also a lot in the literature about this. What I consider important is that during valuable communication in class I don’t frequently stop students to correct small faults. Communication being the ultimate goal for me, it is valued high above any problems with the language. On the other hand, if misunderstandings ensue, I must remember perhaps a chain of mistakes that led there, and I must be ready to help, which the context usually helps a lot anyway. If there have been a few smaller problems, I may quote a few by heart and we may discuss them.

Usually, if there’s a major language issue at the basis of the class and the discussion, I only concentrate on mistakes related to that. But in such cases the discussion must usually be preceded and supported by some directed, more structured task to practice the language item in focus, so not a lot of correction is necessary later, which makes it easier. But correction is feedback, a sign of developing in the right direction, so it must be given. In this respect, learning a language is different from other school subjects in that a mistake doesn’t lead the student, without being monitored, all by herself, to a realization of it – a mistake has no consequence in itself for the student because he/she usually can’t find out about what’s wrong and what’s correct on his/her own. In this respect, language learning is not the perfect way of self-experimenting with the world for the upbringing of geniuses. Only the teacher can draw the attention to the fault, reality has no other way to make its way.

After introducing new language, the ride gets tougher with group work, if the teacher employs that at all. Of course, some don’t risk group work, because he/she himself/herself feels insecure, not being able to be in charge of several groups at the same time. I admit that it’s daunting to follow a dozen students talking perhaps at the same time in groups of three or four (I don’t often find it beneficial to assign discussion tasks to larger groups unless the nature of the task demands so, because the smaller the group, the more chance everyone has to express themselves, leading to invaluable STT – student talking time). But I can assure you that with practice, most teachers can get used to identifying so many different voices in their classes, like a conductor can identify dozens of various instruments in the orchestra, sometimes each musician playing the same instrument. It takes time and practice. For me, it goes without saying that correction of mistakes during group-work is not only next to impossible, but it’s also unnecessary. The aim of group-work is fluency, remember, not accuracy, and some of us feel insecure with that in small groups. But it is a very important phase of language development. We will surely experience an enhanced wish on the part of the students to speak the language and a more relaxed atmosphere after group work, which is usually necessarily followed by class discussion, if for nothing else, at least for a summary of points collected in groups. Students will feel brave enough in that phase after well-prepared and well-performed group-work. Task-based learning is one major such system which utilizes group-work followed by class discussions, the ultimate variety being, as far as I’m concerned, the so-called ‘balloon debate’, but I’ve also created mock-political discussions as well, which led to several hours of great, meaningful and enjoyable language use.

During whole-class work, I’m sure that direct and ad hoc correction and practice of mistaken language is not a very good way of dealing with problems, except at the initial stage of presenting a new kind of language feature. Too strong criticism and correction from teachers may draw various reactions depending on the personality and the situation of the student. Some may react by closing in, and then our correction is lost on her/him. Some may react violently, provoking arguments and disrupting work. We don’t want that. Of course there may be some who take even strong correction well. The variation is endless. But I don’t jump on the opportunity to correct also because most students are vulnerable and ready to counter-attack, perhaps after class, when we don’t hear them. They feel urged to defend their pride in front of peers at the cost of the authority. I agree that they often don’t have other means of defense. So why stimulate this behaviour? If, on the other hand, they don’t feel attacked and thus intimidated by the authority, everybody has a good chance of escaping unscathed, and then the correction of the mistake can really build into the language system of the student as correct language use. And this is the aim, isn’t it?

by P.S.

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Ideas about what works while learning a language – Part Four: mostly to the teacher

01 Thursday Nov 2012

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in English teaching, foreign language teaching, language learning, language teaching

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

China, education, English as a foreign or second language, grammar-translation method, Hearing (sense), IELTS, learning to communicate, Netherlands, Teacher, Teaching English as a foreign language, tests

As to teaching and teachers, I hope that quite a lot of ideas may already have been presented in my previous postings, but I’d like to add and elaborate further.

Most importantly, I think that interaction, speaking and revising are also the main areas which most teachers tend to forget about, unfortunately, though in the name of doing good to the customer.

Teacher

Teacher (Photo credit: tim ellis)

Very often, in more traditional classes, especially with very low frequency lessons, there’s no time for listening practice at all. By that I don’t mean that students don’t have the opportunity to listen to their teachers – oh, yes, they do the talking all the time very often. The problem with that arises if they either talk in the students’ native languages, which happens all too often in China, but probably, as I’ve already mentioned, in the Netherlands, and even in other countries as well, or if they don’t really stop talking – to check the understanding of their students, that is. These two cases are definitely not cases of time well spent to a smaller or greater extent and can’t be counted towards listening practice. There’s no practice without a degree of interaction, and more precisely, not without performing a task in the meantime. That can be done even while the teacher talks himself/herself, but can’t be done with the teacher talking incessantly.

English: kdi students listening to professor i...

English: kdi students listening to professor in class (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Teacher talking time, or TTT is very important for students. Let’s not forget that if nothing else, the teacher is the basis for a while for the aural/oral perception of the foreign language, and even if there’s some systematic work on listening with taped native material, he or she is the most frequent example to follow. Without examples, spoken language can’t be formed, thus no interaction can be expected of the learner. On the other hand, extended solo lectures are also not enough basis for interaction, and can become utterly boring and counter-productive in the long run. While talking, the teacher should at least frequently stop to ask the opinion of the students, which provide incentive to talk and also feedback to the teacher about understanding. If this latter fails, TTT was useless, and the nature of teaching should be adjusted approriately.

Very often, in more traditional classes, especially with very low frequency lessons, there’s no time for listening practice at all. If there’s a listening part to an important test for the students in the country, teachers tend to run a few practice tests through without discussing the results and parts of the test, so the learners have no idea about the reasons for some answers that they have missed, they have no chance to pick up the odd piece of vocabulary, they only have the tension of concentrating on several tasks at the same time for an hour: reading and understanding the questions, listening to the material and then making logical decisions, which, however, often doesn’t happen on the basis of the material heard, only on the possible answers. In many cases, if someone is weak in the language, or is taught with translation, he/she also has to translate the questions for himself or herself. A very tall order to succeed. Even so, in many cases there’s no time for a re-run, as I’ve experienced it in my Dutch classes, and anyway, the real tests also demand that the applicant listens only once.

Instead of this, according to English teaching traditions, even the highest-level language exams (Cambridge First Certificate, Cambridge Proficiency, IELTS, TOEFL, PTE General, PETS) allow the student to listen to texts twice and adjust their answers with the second listening, or with BULATS, the computer adjusts the listening and the question to the applicant’s previous answer. This follows an understanding of the workings of the brain, which needs first wider contexts, and often also adjustments to what has been heard before it can make informed decisions on details. This is why, for testing purposes, we need a second listening opportunity.

But this is only a question of testing methodology. The other, more important question is whether the students receive proper listening practice before that all-important final test, or are left to practice on their own, or perhaps not given anything in this direction. It sounds obvious to me that listening skills need to be built up just like grammar skills, from easier to more difficult, originally with a strong focus on language already covered and cutting out the kind otherwise. But not for many of my colleagues. Moreover, learners need appropriate activities and tasks to perform while listening. From answering general questions, through following the text with the script to gap-filling, re-arranging the text and repeating some sentences or items of important or problematic vocabulary or grammar should feature strongly among the techniques. These should be varied quite often and all should be ‘do-able’ so as not to frustrate the students but build up a proper understanding of the text.

By ‘do-able’, we usually mean that for developmental purposes, we are not supposed to ask deduction questions right at the start, or the kind that need outside knowledge. We should also not ask questions on passages that are unintelligible, difficult to follow even for native speakers, or demand spelling of unintelligible, or items not yet learned. Asking the students to write a series of answers only after a whole listening passage is also above most learners even at higher levels for the sake of practice. Giving answers in full sentences in response to listening is not a do-able task even when the text is broken down, at least on lower levels.

Instead, we can first ask near-beginners, for example, how many people talk and in what situation, what’s the relationship among them, and the like. Fill-in questions in the later stages should not contain groups of words, rather parts of groups where the other part helps understanding by making quess-work possible. In any case, expected language is a lot more understandable than the unkown or unpredictable kind. The listening passage should not contain non-understandable, unpredictable grammatical items that haven’t been introduced. If we want to introduce grammatical features, we should use it with items that are not difficult to hear.

There’s also debate about how long a ‘do-able’ listening passage may be. I myself have experienced in my teaching as well as my own language learning a very sharp decline of general attention after two minutes, often, at lower levels, even after one minute. With a foreign language, long-term memory on the basis of the logic of the text doesn’t work nearly as well as with our own, or on high levels of language competence. Before the student can think in the target language, he relies only on short-term memory, which mostly relies on understanding each and every word, interprets them and puts them away shortly. After a while, while the listener is still struggling to understand and interpret the ever-flowing following items, earlier memories quickly fade and the task becomes impossible to execute. Rather, such a long task above the student’s level of competent understanding will execute the learner.

I may here add as an aside that this is to a large part the reason why simply living the everyday life of a foreign country trying to learn the language doesn’t work in itself for a few years for most people. Without getting help in interpreting the language showering the new-comer, he or she will be inundated so much that exhaustion takes over very soon for a long time. Some formal help is also needed. But it’s also true that work or some other special activity that demands absolute attention and provides the ultimate need for learning (as I’ve pointed out elsewhere) can also speed up the learning process very effectively if there are helpful people around. Workplaces may not be ideal, but partnerships very much so. At later stages of development, all immersion kind of situations do so too.

Dictation seems to be a good listening task, but while it is also a writing task, we mustn’t forget that it relies on no understanding of the text much and it’s not creative at all. Above a certain level, when students have little problem with the spelling of individual words, normal slow dictation tends to become very boring and even counter-productive. As a result, some students may commit mistakes they wouldn’t in creative writing because of over-confidence, or get no benefits that they could carry over to their creative writing, when they only focus on meaning, still committing mistakes they no longer make in dictation. At levels starting at mid-level, scripting of videos by native speakers without the intention of dictating could be set as task, but with several rewinds if necessary. The difference for the learners’ hearing abilities between live dictation and machine sound from videos can still be huge, so this is the phase to be practiced carefully because at exams, machine sound must be decoded while performing additional tasks.

Such advice can be extended for quite a while longer, but I’m sure it’s already understandable enough. These types of points can also be extended to reading tasks as well. Part of the reason is that just as listening is a necessary basis for talking in oral interactions, reading can be understood to do the same in written interaction. Similar questions can first be put to students about the general meaning of the text, by way of fast extensive reading. Once the context is worked out with this help, more specific questions can be asked and activities can lead to intensive reading within the borders of boredom. Here we can come back to the general demand for teaching in interesting ways. On the one hand, both listening and reading material should be introduced by discussions or at least a few well-designed question about the possible meaning of the text and the feelings of the students about the topic. On the other, we should provide enough room after listening and reading tasks for discussion before the whole activity becomes boring, by which I mean overworked. Before discussions, more detailed work can be done on specific language items like grammar, or vocabulary, of which reading is the most fool-proof means of development. But if we don’t ask the group for their opinion, we have only done half of the useful work, because we haven’t activated the material just heard or read. Active use in post-listening and post-reading activities revise the meanings, vocabulary and grammatical features of the text in a way that involves the learners deep, if interesting enough for hem, making the activity memorable.

Which means that it’s more important to devise and carry out discussions than reading. We can set up interactive tasks just as easily as reading tasks, but interaction can happen preceding, following or instead of reading, the most important point being that it can’t be neglected for fast learning of the target language. Culturally, Far-Eastern, or South-Asian, Middle-Eastern cultures may pose a major obstacle to interaction if they demand absolute quiet and attention concentrated on the teacher most of the time. People of those cultures would find little help towards their interactive oral skills. So, as far as behaviour is concerned, the relaxed atmosphere of relatively free Western cultures can provide a lot more possibility for language development than stricter cultures. Sometimes, though, the infamous misbehaviour known from Hollywood films is also a major obstacle of course. I can assure everyone that the same may face you in Hungary or China if you try the appropriate places, and the one principal in the Netherlands I’ve talked to also warned me of behaviour special only to Holland, although, I suspect, she has had no experience of the same in said countries where I have. But that’s another story, perhaps pertaining to the headline ‘pigheadedness in education in the Netherlands’, where I have to stop before I can also be accused of the same.

‘balloon debate’ in Kitto college, near Plymouth

Extreme cases of misbehaviour aside, speaking and interactive tasks must often be given after careful planning. For whole activities, asking just a couple of simple interest-raising questions may not be enough. There must be a task to be performed with and end-result to be achieved. Task-based learning and role-plays are effective because, paradoxically, they steer attention away from the language necessary for them to be performed. Students are less controlled in such cases and, consequently, feel less inhibition to express their preferences and opinions, all in pursuit of a common goal of the group. Role-play also allows them to change personalities, which is often very exciting, but not for everyone and not at every age, so discretion should be used when assigning such tasks. In more elaborate and complex cases, the activity works like a simulation, without computers, naturally, but with real roles for everyone involved, which may help the more reticent ones.

It is sadly usual that, if such interactive tasks are given at all, feedback is not asked in return at the end. Except in very strange cases of group dynamics, the whole class would find it interesting to get a glimpse of what other groups thought about the case in question. Feedback serves as a satisfactory closing down of the activity or a whole study period and also serves to revise and reinforce some items of language that may be important for all. Good interactive tasks usually also serve as natural basis for written work, as homework in cultures which use it, or at following classes in cultures where homework is not often used, for example in the States or Britain.

Furthermore, there are strong arguments to using discussions not only as planned. With the multitude of different kinds of learners in each class, every single lesson planned the same way for different groups naturally tends to, and should be encouraged to, go in different directions. Differences should be encouraged and will surely emerge if the students are allowed room to contribute to the proceedings. They have a right to do so, they are the customers, we have to provide for all of them. Besides, providing for them doesn’t necessarily mean we have to give all the answers: we are there to provide the framework for learning, and that framework includes all members of the group with their differences. Consequently, they should be invited to discuss and give answers if necessary to problems other members have. On questions of grammar and vocabulary usage, it’s mostly the teacher who is best positioned to decide on best answers. In other cases involving opinions and decisions on tasks, better leave the group to decide for themselves, like with the ‘balloon debate’ represented above with my photo.

English: Some of us and our teacher, having fu...

English: Some of us and our teacher, having fun while understanding curcuits (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What a teacher must under all circumstances care for is that debates and discussions do not lose their aim and become loose and limitless. A friendly teacher would do well starting a lesson with personal questions of interest to the students, but that should lead towards a point and not become an hour of talking about how they like the latest music. Chatting on the level of teenage street conversations is also important but its level is not enough for foreign language development after a short while. After that, nobody can take home anything new. So it is up to the discretion of the teacher and his/her flexibility do decide when to channel introductory chats into learning.

I’m sure that I don’t need to discuss handling grammar here. Most of my readers, I think, are professionals and grammar is the area almost everybody feels comfortable with enough. The only remark I’d like to make is that, as I earlier warned, grammar should not be overdone, especially with the mostly isolating languages, those without differences of forms of words. On the other hand, word forms of agglutinating and fusional languages, those with a lot of changeable affixes and forms need to be thoroughly drilled before higher levels of understandability and fluency can be achieved.

I do, however, feel the need to talk about the good old ‘grammar-translation’ method. Quite a few teachers in Middle-Europe, those who have connections through teachers’ associations, the BC, meetings, conferences and summer courses, those who manage to and willing to keep up with English-teaching methodology in Britain and the USA have long ago refuted this method. Yet, I meet colleagues and students from time to time who try to stick to it. I’ve meet them not only in China, where, as I’ve described the situation in an earlier post, it is still widely in use, for lack of anything better known to many, but here in the Netherlands and also in Hungary.

For people so inclined, I’d like to  point once again to the intricate ways the brain has to take to process information both ways when trying to translate, which is not only difficult but also extends reaction times, especially because it almost always involves writing down the translation, and writing is already a lot slower than speaking. We can say, then, that this method reduces the possibility for using a lot of language within any given period, while it demands levels of knowledge that the learners are still only striving for. For translating a text, we must be in full command of both languages, which is not the case all too often. No wonder that translating and interpreting are two very demanding high-level professions very distinct from teaching, and are taught those already in full command of the target language. I can hardly imagine a slower and more dragging method than this for lower-level learners. Translation is also conspicuously missing from internationally accepted English language tests. Teachers using this method should at least keep this in mind. But one thing is sure: the conservatively or intellectually inclined students can feel after such a lesson that they’ve been given something, they’ve achieved something during the lesson: they’ve understood a text now. Alas, this hardly helps them communicate better in the target language if it stays the only method of teaching/learning.

With this we’re already at vocabulary practice. While the system of grammar structures can, with good, ordinary practice, listening, reading or writing, also be acquired, particular words and word groups may resist memorizing until the language system is internalized.  Until then, a lot of rote learning may sometimes help, but even afterwards, words must be practiced and recycled systematically. The house won’t stand without its building blocks.

The original source of vocabulary is necessarily the teacher. For good results, we do our best starting our very first lesson already in the target language. In this way, they find it natural to try and think in the other language already at the outset and find it gradually easier on the way, getting used to it quickly. Not much time is lost on thinking in two languages, trying to translate everything first, then translate it all back to the target language. At the same time, care must be given to meaningful vocabulary work all the time, avoiding unnecessary and rare items until much later or perhaps never. The aim is not to teach them everything, but to let them develop their second or foreign language competence as fast as possible and prepare them to respond in and to likely situations and language use. Unlikely, old-fashioned, too formal phrases don’t have much place in EFL classes. They can learn them later if they decide to specialize in the literature or linguistics of that language.

I could even say that vocabulary is one of the greatest responsibilities of the teacher, because the learner is inclined to forget the new words even in their own language and can at home tell his/her father that they haven’t learned anything today. The student must be made to keep a vocabulary booklet of his/her own from the start, it should not only be encouraged but regularly checked. But not only that. Because of the forgetfulness of the students, the teacher is responsible to make sure that the students also remember the words covered. The teacher must explain the new vocabulary and important idioms, and soon must recycle it – within the same lesson, at the next lesson, or even next week. I understand how difficult it is for us to remember with each group what items we’ve taught, but we can keep track of it ourselves too. It’s a nasty argument if later students start grumbling that they were tested about vocab they’ve never properly covered. If that happens, as it quite often does, I sympathize with the student. Of course, the student is responsible for his/her own work on the language, but without help, he or she is at a loss and can’t cope.

After good introduction of basics of the language by the teacher, to make sense of vocabulary regularly and to revise it, learners need good dictionaries in the first place. Only good two-way dictionaries can help, those that not only give one supposed meaning to the target word in either language, like some weaker Dutch-English dictionaries do, though the ultimate horror sometimes comes from my Chinese-English double dictionary published by Oxford UP, which, if I randomly open the Chinese part, may come up with a Chinese word like 衰 (shuāi) and give me ‘decline’ as translation. Does it then mean ‘get smaller’, or ‘refuse’ like in refuse an offer – or a request? There are example phrases that help with this one, but far from everywhere. Also, smaller and simpler dictionaries either don’t give example sentences, or give no idiomatic phrases at all in which the words are used. Soon, learners will find such dictionaries inadequate. On the other hand, at later stages, single-language dictionaries can become more and more useful as they become increasingly usable, when the learner has reached a level on which he or she can think in the target language. So, if possible, we have to give good advice on which dictionaries students should buy for their money.

Even if the learner achieves the ultimate aim and can think in the target language fluently, the teacher has his/her role to the end. Because it is so difficult to reach that ultimate aim, the teacher should focus on working towards that aim providing guidance and structure to learning in class and for home work as well and caring for recycling all the way. He or she should also see to it that the language is learned in a complex way, not only as individual skills. I find a so-called ‘grammar lesson’, or ‘vocab lesson’, or ‘listening practice lesson’ as full lessons very strange. All the skills had better be mingled, providing new angles to ideas and new ways and expressions to utter them.

Student teacher in China teaching children Eng...

Student teacher in China teaching children English. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Now I’d like to add something about what is not really necessary to do in school classes. One such thing is too much translation. Words or idioms may be translated if necessary, but real translation is a completely different skill to the usual four skills. It had better be avoided, especially if the language levels of students is relatively low. How could they then benefit from translation, a complex skill requiring total competence in their own language as well as the target language, if they don’t have a complex competence in the new language? No wonder that most Chinese students, who also suffer from inappropriate language patterns to follow, fail miserably after a decade of being taught English 6-8 classes a week, while their abilities at repetition is outstanding, as attested to by the fact that they manage to learn the tens of thousands of characters of their own mother tongue. No mean feat. The reasons can be found if we think about how important creative, interactive use of the language is, how inefficient sheer word-repetition is, and how futile it is to translate from or into a language that you don’t understand or can’t use in the first place. Studying their own characters happens in the context of their mother tongue, it’s not something out of thin air, as words of an unused language are.

Another thing that has little place in purposeful class work is using complex tests. The Chinese prove its futility too. But above that, we have to remember that most tests are used as the measurements of achievement, so they should be treated as such, not more. Fortunately, there are tests devised for assessment of development. In this case, however, the students must be well prepared for them, meaning that they should contain material already covered in a re-structured way. They serve the teacher to be able to ascertain how far his/her students have progressed. Using the large, general test instead of this kind only frustrates students.

My usual approach is that once the language is properly acquired through purposeful and well-constructed activities, practice tests among them for structures and vocabulary too, the important, hot assessment tests, for language proficiency tests or university entrance test, for example, will be taken care of by the skills acquired along the way. Sitting through examples of these kinds of tests are necessary as far as the need to experience the feeling and the structure is concerned, but repeatedly doing them is overly and unnecessarily tiring and purposeless, because most of the time they’re so long that they can’t be properly discussed, though that could lend some usefulness to them. That discounted, better keep with meaningful interaction in class. Correcting usual written work, compositions, grammar tasks is enough to keep the teacher up some of the night alright.

Now a late addition to this post. It seems obvious that although language teachers usually speak in terms of the four skills, development of the students’ language use often happens, or rather should happen, along different lines, and particularly without using tests in the first place. I’d like to point out, too, that the role of the fifth skill, translation, should be reduced as much as possible. Instead, active use of and thinking in the target language should be promoted, especially using the sixth skill, that is, thinking! For anyone having doubts about its applicability or being in need of related methods, I’m directly providing a link here to a very interesting article which leads on to the details of the methods themselves: It’s about The Learning, Not The Tools.

Some final words. We can use a wide scope of methods that we think is best suited to our students, but we are only human, and not omnipresent or omnipotent. Consequently, there may always be a few students who we can’t help. They are also human and may have their priorities far from our classes. Don’t let yourself be disheartened by failures, you also learn from them. On the other hand, real results tend to come slowly. We may only see them many years after our work is done.

by P.S.

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The situation of language teaching – comparisons: Hungary

26 Friday Oct 2012

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in English teaching, foreign language teaching, Hungary, language learning, language teaching

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

British Council, English as a foreign or second language, Hungary, Netherlands, Teaching English as a foreign language

I believe that nothing really feels strange, or awkward, or wrong in our native society as long as we have a glimpse of other systems, other possibilities, other ways of how people in different societies go about their business. To see examples of differences from our own is perhaps the greatest initiator of change, hopefully development, that’s why some systems even try to exclude their members from getting information about these differences.

That may partly be the reason why in countries under the socialist system for decades after WWII language education was not a priority, to say the least. Although half a century before, in the years of Hungary being a semi-independent and large part of the Habsburg empire, the country had largely been multilingual, the loss of a majority of its territory meant a loss of most of its multicultural, multilingual peripheries, and what remained is the mostly pure Hungarian core. Or rather, it was made to seem pure, because even within this territory, there remained various peoples of ‘ethnic’ origin, except that they were largely driven under the ground, or out of sight.

This happened to language education too. The system was completely revamped to avoid the impression that there was much culture and diversity outside the ‘iron curtain’. Where in secondary education there used to be Latin, sometimes Greek, almost always German and often French, especially during the empire period, after the victory of socialism, there remained Russian as the sole language to be studied by all kids from the upper half of primary school, which meant around the age of ten. From secondary level, which in Hungary starts after 8 years of primary round age 14, Russian was compulsory, and in ‘gimnázium’, the kind of school for the brightest and equivalent of the grammar school in Britain, kids could choose to study English or German, if fortunate. Mind you, this was not a country of the darkest parts of the socialist-communist part of the world, but I keep wondering until today where those teachers really came from who took up teaching us languages they themselves may have never encountered in real life, except some German teachers who could travel to East-Germany, and those English teachers that could manage to visit Britain on a 50-dollar allowance form the government every three years, if you were not considered a ‘class enemy’, in which case you couldn’t get a visa, or couldn’t even teach.

On the other hand, we students hardly ever had the opportunity to hear or meet real native speakers of those languages. Radios couldn’t be tuned to the BBC well at all, and television was very new even in the 70’s. Even so, we saw the beginnings of English language teaching programmes imported to Hungary. Thus our almost exclusive source of knowledge was the teacher. I myself had never met a live native speaker until university and never set foot on British soil until well after graduation. The most difficult result of this to get rid of was the heavily accented pronunciation and the difficulty understanding natural, everyday speech.

Language teaching and study possibilities didn’t change very dramatically with the abolition of socialism and opening up of the borders. Possibilities to travel did multiply, but alas! our financial resources hardly did so. But at least teachers could start to travel to summer courses, visit each other in ‘the old block’ at least and to a unified Germany, and the coming of the British Council and a number of international funds made it possible for the elect few to be funded for courses or even a whole year of studies in the West, which benefitted some of us.

In schools, Russian was abolished overnight, leaving an army of teachers without a job, but with the possibility to re-train to teach a western language, an arduous process for most middle-aged and aging ‘babushki’ though it was, most managed somehow. The quality of teaching English must have suffered, though, with the sudden widening of possibilities to study various new languages, because, obviously, the new re-trained teachers were not only not at the pinnacle of teaching methodology, but also themselves often in the middle of learning the languages concerned.

After a few years of stumbling, and setting up enthusiastic new institutions to cater for the new pedagogical needs, then suppressing those institutions to suit the old system in order not to give too much new thought and quality, the university system widened its admittance from below 2% of school-leavers to near-western levels, above 30%, but mostly without getting substantially greater resources. Financial means, teaching space and teacher base has hardly grown in tertiary education for more than two decades, except for the introduction of electronic administration, which swelled the anarchy in the area of course organizaton and has taken its toll on quality of instruction attainable.

As was already suggested, secondary school starts around age 14 with the more practical technical school and schools for various trades up to grammar schools. Education is, like in the Netherlands, compulsory until the age of 16 with a low-level graduation exam, but at most technical and grammar schools, students go on to study until 18, when they can sit for higher-level school-leaving exams, ‘érettségi’, which is absolutely necessary to be admitted to university of any kind. The quality of the necessary examinations is on the decline, but in Hungary, the HBO-style, shorter type of higher education is of much lesser importance than in the Netherlands. Thus university studies last about 5 years, except for medicine, where they take 7.

English: Language learning among students in u...

English: Language learning among students in upper secondary education in Hungary in 2007 (%) – source: Hugarian Central Statisctical Office (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Obviously, the number of languages and teachers to teach them has greatly grown in the school system as a result of the much higher numbers of graduates. This leads to an oversupply in teachers, which is coupled with an uncertainty about the quality of their background and abilities. This problem aside, the pupils of today are provided with at least three language classes per week in at least one electable language even in technically oriented education. The most popular languages are English, closely followed by German, then with some French, Spanish or Italian, and Russian is also staging a come-back. On university level, almost everything can be studied.

Ancient, dead languages don’t feature in the country. Although a few people study Latin as a major at a few universities, besides this, Latin is only taught for students of medicine and law, the latter only for a year or two, and then forgotten. Thus Latin is almost non-existent in schools. On the other hand, modern languages are supported very much outside university too, by the British Council, by the Goethe Institute, the Italian Institute and the like, but mostly only in the capital, Budapest. As this city is, for reasons of history, over-sized, it concentrates a larger share of the population, and with it of financial, cultural and educational resources, than may be considered healthy. Saying this, I’m also saying that the quality of teaching in the country also depends on its geographical situation, so expect much better background in the capital than in country towns. However, for social reasons, teaching may be much more rewarding in the latter, with much less social unrest in rural schools than in the capital, where students are more exposed to western patterns of behaviour, which they take to school with them.

Teaching is becoming just as difficult in Hungarian schools as anywhere in the Western World. However, for language teachers from abroad, this country still seems to be a bit exotic, so it provides an opportunity for adventure for, mainly, young teachers from America and Britain, and some German teachers as well. Nobody who ventures to come to teach English or German speaks Hungarian on arrival, and it’s not necessary either, because they are guided and helped by their Hungarian peers at school as well as in their more private life while with the particular school. For the pupils, this provides an excellent opportunity to get to know the culture of the guest teacher first-hand, learn the native sound and ways of speech, and also some fun to teach them a bit of their language, but the task of the guest teacher is not to learn the local language, which is far to difficult anyway, but to teach their own to the local kids. This is the second best way of learning a foreign language anyway, next to doing it while living in the country of the target language, which can’t be an option for the masses anyway.

The life of a teacher as an employee and private person in Hungary is not easy. Average incomes in the country are about a fourth of those in Western Europe, perhaps an eighth of those in the richest countries, but teachers’ salaries here are way below the national average, compared to the above-average levels in the West. Thus the gross salary for teachers with degrees is around 600 Euro according to recent data, the net income is usually around 400 per month. There are variations, but the grid is quite flat and the highest salaries are perhaps not more than 40% higher than the lowest, except for university lecturers.

Compare this to the ‘CAO schaal’ of approximately between 2400 and 3700 Euro per month in the Netherlands, of course depending on ‘diploma en ervaring’, and we’ll instantly see the reason why someone would like to ‘go west’ to teach. Most teachers, of course, have no such intentions, let alone chances, because of the nature of their subjects, but for those with outstanding language skills, teaching their subjects in English in IB-schools around Europe is a great possibility but for the fact that vacancies are limited in that area.

An important part of my analysis of the state of language education should also touch on methodology. As expected from the lack of Latin, instruction on methodology at university follows the influence of the modern methodology of the language involved, which is most apparent with English. British linguistics and methodology inundate courses, just as it happens with teaching material for schools. The country imports not only ideas from the international best, but the commercially available as well. Older lecturers not always teach based on these ideas, but the teachers, working with the modern means, are more or less made to make use of them in practice. The unfortunate system of dubbing films, scarcity of English-speaking TV-channels, and the distance from English-speaking countries also make it imperative for teachers to rely on imported listening materials, and on insisting on students’ speaking activities in classes.

With institutional help from the BC and teachers’ associations, attending courses, conferences, discussing ideas with each other and with the international community is wide-spread, though not everywhere. School exchanges with schools in the neighbouring countries and with German, or even with British or Dutch schools is also frequent. The big difference, as far as I can see, is that Dutch teachers don’t seem to do anything else internationally: at the numerous events I’ve taken part, from Ireland and Romania to Croatia and China, the one nationality I’ve never encountered from Europe is Dutch.

So, where are the teachers who are, on paper, responsible for the high levels of English skills in the Netherlands? After years of encountering the sort of answers I keep receiving for my applications, if any at all, my answer, provocative as though it seems, is that Dutch English teachers wouldn’t benefit from and wouldn’t have anything to share with English teachers from other countries. They have their own ways, and those seem to work well enough for the country, so what else would they want? Not developing a system, though, carries the danger of being left behind. But with the country’s proximity to Britain and availability of the British media in the country, even this doesn’t seem to be a danger. Also, with no real contact with their peers from outside their system, everything seems to be right, doesn’t it?

to be followed by a description of the Chinese language education

by P.S.

Related articles
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