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Learning and teaching English in the Netherlands

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Learning and teaching English in the Netherlands

Tag Archives: English language

Chinglish, or Dunglish?

09 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in English teaching, museums, Netherlands, translation

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Amsterdam, English as a foreign or second language, English language, Madame Tussauds, mistranslations, Translation

Various places on the web and elsewhere expose the terrible mauling of the English language in China, one of the latest editions coming on the Chinese language blog here. Although this last one is called ‘tasty Chinglish’ on account of the fact that the examples come from food names in restaurants, this whole development of the ‘fan-club’ is beginning to become rather tasteless to me. After a visit to Madame Tussauds in Amsterdam, I thought, why not start looking at other ‘…lishes’?

‘Dunglish’ seems to be quite over the top, but let’s consider the distances, geographically, historically and linguistically, between English and those two countries. China used to be one of the doormats on the way to riches the imperialist mighty cleaned their feet on a hundred years ago. China got into such a terrible state of affairs as a result partly of this that they chose to follow the Chairman, who, alongside guiding the country out of the deepest doldrums and almost led it into just another one, kept grounding salt into the already bleeding wounds. He also cut the Chinese away from any foreign influence, umpteenth time in the country’s history. This also meant that practically no English-speaking people got into contact with any ordinary Chinese between 1949 and 1976.

This was easily a full generation, if not more, who were not only unable to learn languages but who also grew up loathing any foreigner. Coupled with long and repeated historical maltreatment before, no wonder a ‘foreigner’ is still mostly called a ‘laowei’ (老为), meaning ‘foreign devil’ by Chinese people in the street. Add the distance of kind between this Asian type of language and Germanic English, and the thousands of miles to English-speaking countries, hardly balanced by a few thousand native English people, or highly qualified non-native teachers teaching English as a first foreign language to an ocean of 1.3 billion natives, and you’ll see the enormity of the task. The enthusiasm leading up to the Beijing Olympics helped several thousands to master English, but the ratio is still tiny. And to critics from the West, may I ask which of you learned writing the Chinese sign system besides the Latin ABC? They do both en masse.

Considering that Dutch is a young Germanic language, in close proximity of kind to English and to the Islands themselves geographically, what extent of mistakes, if any, would be allowed for Dutch texts? Obviously, there aren’t enough English speakers to translate or correct all public signs and restaurant menus in Beijing, let alone around China. On the other hand, the Dutch are one of the nations that stand out in foreign language skills in Europe. Whereas there is one English-speaking television channel in China, whose text is locally made, English-speaking channels are easily available for and popular among youth in the Netherlands. The historical opposition between the two countries hundreds of years ago long forgotten, the linguistic kinship also adds to the expectation that here in the Netherlands all public texts in English are excellent. The testing methods in schools that I exposed earlier in this blog somewhat dampens this, still, what I’ve recently found in one of the most widely visited museums in Amsterdam, in Madame Tussauds, is nearing the level of shamefulness.

P1090694

As I see it, it can hardly be argued that the third sentence explaining Stuyvesant’s importance is a quote from the man himself. He probably didn’t speak English, the ultimate foe for his country then. This is the work of a Dutch translator who translated this text from the original Dutch for the sake of English visitors. Still, he failed to change the sentence structure from Dutch into English.

This was perhaps the greatest blunder I found, but there are number of other, smaller ones that should be improved by the museum. This one, for example, is a close contender.

P1090695

Not only do we not address him ‘in’ as we prefer, he was also not crowned ‘as’ king (see the example here, he was still a prince when he was crowned king of the Netherlands, although “Today, only the British Monarchy continues this tradition as the sole remaining anointed and crowned monarch, 

though many monarchies retain a crown as a national symbol in heraldry” according to this source. However, it is simply hilarious to believe that his ‘mother officially abdicated … and was then crowned’. This would mean that his mother is still the sovereign following an anointment for the second time after her abdication. The writer simply forgot to include ‘he’ to signal a change of the subject. 

In the following example of manhandling English, ‘june’ spelt with a small letter, like ‘april’ in the one above, is a minor issue following the Dutch vernacular.

P1090713

Unfortunately, “The” following a “:” should not be capitalized, but the ‘sentence’ afterwards is meaningless simply because the “Artist, also known as TAFKAP and, was christened Prince Rogers Nelson after his father’s jazz band” is not a sentence. It’s not the senseless inclusion of a comma before ‘was’, but the inclusion of “and” that makes it so, making the following into a clause that would need another subject, or an object, before going on with the predicate. Then, “Besides the more than thirty albums he released, Prince is the charismatic owner …” is also not exactly the paragon of the correct subject co-ordination, making Prince another version of, or name for, the thirty albums he released. A little bit massed up, for my taste.

Then let’s consider another nice one, which also misses the capital on “may 5”.

P1090716

A couple of blunders here. The smallest of them is that it’s a normal text, so “Debut album” badly needs an article in front of it, on account of ‘album’ being a countable singular noun. Further, in a text in the past tense, we suddenly encounter “leads” and “breaks”. Yes, historic present, but then what about the rest of the text? All of it should either be in this historic present, or the writer should have kept the past, where he returns in the third part after all. But funniest of all the mistakes here is in the first and second line – “and that friend out her song …”. Fried out, friended out, ousted? That friend outed? What’s going on here? Would ‘published’ or ‘brought out’ have been so difficult? “amoungst” in the last part is only the icing on the cake here.

Perhaps we could only find the usual non-capitalized name of a month and the inconsistent use of the comma in the following …

P1090717

but this also allows one to see that the writer can’t differentiate between defining- and non-defining clauses, making it seem as if there had been at least two “Idols 2” competitions. Besides, “recordcompany” is a non-existent word, the idea must have been either a recording company, or a record label, or perhaps a record-company like here. I also suspect that they actually have a recording deal, not a record deal, which would perhaps mean a record amount of money for the deal; however, this seems far exaggerated, without real international fame for the said duo. I can simply accept the missing question mark after “Do you know what I mean’ … it may have been missing from the original as well.

P1090727

The usual ‘july’ and ‘october’ aside, I have a certain measure of doubt as to whether Rembrandt could have painted anything not “in his life”, but I’m certain that even he could not paint etchings and drawings, not even with his outstanding talent, and not in the hundreds and thousands. Further, if the writer knew that the Saxon genitive could be used in the case of “Amsterdam’s “Rijksmuseum””, how could he have not known it with “Rembrandts work”? Or did he get enlightened between the two sentences? The missing commas in the last sentence are a completely minor issue after this.

P1090731

In this last example of Dunglish, the second question is a fine piece. Not only because, in English, the what he received comes before the where from, but also because, sadly, oevreprice is not English. Oeuvre is the legitimate word in English for the work of an artist over his lifetime, but a prize for this work is called a ‘life achievement award‘, or ‘lifetime achievement award‘. It’s a small matter that, by the third question, the writer forgot that he had started to list questions after the original “Did you know that …” piece, otherwise he wouldn’t have started the third dependent question with a capitalized “He”. But he certainly never forgot to write all names of months without the English capital, so why so forgetful otherwise?

P1090720Well, I know a writer/translator can’t be perfect. That’s why translations are proof-read afterwards, before the texts are handed out, as done and dusted, to be presented to the original client. Obviously, at this very exposed museum, somebody forgot to care about this, and nobody else cared to notice. I hope that somebody does after this. But I have become a bit uncertain as to the seriousness of mistakes on English-language signs and texts in China. In which country of these two are mistakes relatively more serious? Besides the need for Mme Tussauds Amsterdam to check and exchange their notices, perhaps the image of the Dutch being excellent about their English also needs a revision. And berating the Chinese for their public English texts could also be done a bit more kindly. To ease the stern expression on Mme’s face.

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.

Answers to our applications – take heart, or give up?

24 Saturday Nov 2012

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

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

English as a foreign or second language, English language, Language education, Netherlands, Secondary education, teacher training, Western Europe

When in the Netherlands, judging from the answers that I’ve been receiving, one can’t really stay optimistic for very long. You can imagine the pile of refusals I’ve got in my mail-box, or on my desk (oh yes, there were still a few institutions about two years ago that sent you a real letter even on refusal).

When you get the hundredth or so refusal, you are justified to ask yourself what to do now. To understand the situation, lets have a look at what kinds of answers you can expect. First of all, you get messages that simply state that you haven’t been selected for further procedure. There’s nothing you can do about and with such answers, but they are the vast majority, though, granted, nobody really forgets to wish you good luck to your further applications.

Then you get a few replies that say that you don’t suit their profile. When I first received such an answer, I started to think that perhaps they want someone who’s written more than just one course-book, published more than one other kind of book, has a PhD in Education while he/she is only below 40, has presented dozens of times at international forums (which they surely haven’t even taken part of, as I mentioned elsewhere), and of course lives in the neighbourhood so that the institution doesn’t have to pay transportation costs. But this is not China, is it? Except that in China they’d provide a car with a chauffeur to pick you up if you otherwise suit the above criteria.

Then, suddenly, came a ‘brief’ – it means a letter in Dutch, and yes, it was quite brief, but yet it stated that as I have never taught in a Dutch school, they can’t accept my application. Oh, yeah, I thought, just like my grandma decades ago, when I wanted to climb a tree for the first time in my short, then ten-year-long life, “little kid, don’t try, you’ve never climbed a tree”. So childish! As I then answered, “But how can I ever climb if I can’t try for lack of trying,” I also wanted to answer that, for once, I’d like to do it and prove that a language class is a language class wherever we teach and what is different, even a Dutch teacher freshly out of university has to first try to find out about. Oh, how green was I! Now I know that they can’t get out of university without at least a year of practice teaching.

Still, this answer reminds me of the bondage of serfs in feudalism. Or of bonding Chinese people to their own region in the communist era of yore, which still exists in some areas. Stay where you are, don’t try anything new.

Then came a few other replies giving answers that are a bit different. One from a little town (or village) between here and the German border, really almost at the end of the world says that, due to the great number of applicants, they’ve found better ones, so I’m not among them. Yes, there are so many good ones here, you bet there are! I’ve just received yet another similar one from near Utrecht that informs me that they’ve considered all aspects of the applications, but due to the great number of applicants, I’m not among those invited for an interview. I’m beginning to think that, although the Netherlands has the third lowest unemployment ratio in Europe, there still are dozens of unemployed teachers in most areas, perhaps most villages, of this country. Or there are reasons completely beyond me.

I’ve also recently been rejected by a school where even my job-coach thought I have a good chance. Well, for a vacancy in Tilburg, the sixth city in the country there were three applicants, including me, yet I wasn’t given the opportunity. On the one hand, this number makes it highly likely that the refusals I’ve been receiving with the reason that there were too many applicants were simply lies. On the other, I’ve been given the reason, not for the first time either, that I haven’t worked at such a type of school, VMBO, in the country. Very true. Not in this country. Only in Hungary. In this case, see my remark about feudalism above.

On the other hand, I may think that the serf-like feudal attitude may also be present in the Netherlands on the whole. If someone has come out of the university with a practice period spent in, say, a gymnasium, he/she won’t be deemed suitable for a job at VMBO’s, and this works quite the same way with other types as well. A language class in one is not perceived similar to a language class in another one, though the age of students is the same. Are students in some schools so terribly different from decent students in others that no teacher who’s never worked in such circumstances may be able to cope, although he/she has a long experience elsewhere? Only a beginner can get used to such circumstances? Do we all get so rigid and unadaptable a few years after initiation? I’ve never thought so back in the other countries. We are aware of the logic of the language, of the learning processes of the age-group, and there we go, thought I. No, not here.

One big problem with this attitude is the feudal and childish thinking behind it, referred to above. The other is that it seems to underline the opinion of so many pig-headed youngsters, wherever, who think that a teacher considerably older than they themselves must already be senile, inflexible, unadaptable, rigid – to me implying that they see themselves as such in 10 or 20 years down the line, but, admirably, this seems to be the ingrained opinion of this school system too.

So now what? Does it make a difference if I fight for an acceptance of my old degree from back Hungary? I have doubts, considering the above. But then again, I’ve never been allowed to add to my CV that I’ve received such an acceptance, or that I’ve done practice teaching here in this Dutch school, or like that. I may still entertain the hope that such an experience may make a difference.

On the other hand, it may not. If I simply listen to the voice of the rejections and some political opinions, I may also conclude that this country, one of the founders of Western Europe as an entity back in the 50’s and a staunch member of the EU and the Euro-zone, quietly goes against the very rules they helped created, and more and more resists the influx, formerly seen as beneficial, of foreign knowledge. I may deem it institutional, as I’ve described it in my previous post, but it may simply happen in the heads of ordinary people, or ordinary school staff, for that matter. Even I, never mind a Dutch employer, may not see a reason why I may be chosen against a local teacher as long as there is one. True enough, I may want to create a kind of small revolution wherever I go, by using material out of the English-speaking source countries, bringing in the ‘lexical approach’, the ‘communicative method’, ‘cultural approaches’, or whatever I find as new and interesting, and this may go against the influence of local publishers. But, c’mon, is that so important for the individual schools? Do they get price exemptions if they apply local books?

What advice may I offer to Eastern-Europeans? Seeing the difficulties, they may find it a lot better to stay at home and fight for appreciation in their own land. This one may be a country which has dug itself into the trenches of its own successes and talents – like the old Hungarian vine-producer, who maintains that his method worked with his father, grandfather, with generations back to hundreds of years, so it must still work for him. Never mind that you can’t make ends meet in your fatherland – this is not your fatherland, so you won’t make it here either. This is only a part of unified Europe. Or so it seems.

by P.S.

Ideas about what works while learning a language – Part Three: mostly to the learner

30 Tuesday Oct 2012

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in language learning

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

education, English as a foreign or second language, English language, Learning

So now let’s go into more detail, even though I already gave a few ideas in the previous posts as well.

First, I’d like to give ideas to students, although those who can read my posts well, are not in much need to get additional ideas, they may already be well on the way to speaking English perfectly. However, teachers may also find some ideas to forward to their students, and we’re not only talking of learning English as the ultimate aim, but possibly learning as many languages as other bloggers have done. Besides, I’d remind my readers again that this site is written by an average language learner who happens to have become an English teacher and now has decades of experience, so the points of view I’m making my noise from is not the learner-genius-teacher for whom his own instruction to students once is perfect and anyone who can’t follow him had better think twice and cram into their own caves to practice a lot more. To avoid pig-headedness, I’d also like to remind colleagues that the state of English teaching is so much higher in quality than with other languages precisely because it’s based on a tradition of a lot of exchange of ideas. By writing this blog, my own purpose is to a great extent also to learn from the reactions of my readers. Learning never ends.

For those learners who would quite confidently state that their English is fluent, let me bring up the story of an excellent former friend who went on to study English and American literature in the States, where she was often met with people asking if she really came from Hungary. When it had become embarrassing enough for her, she asked her mentor, who she wasn’t embarrassed with, about the reason why so many people knew her country of origin. What he told her was that on the one hand, everybody in the States pronounces /w/ correctly and differently from the sound /v/, while on the other, almost everybody from Hungary can only pronounce /v/, of which Hungarians have become famous.

English: Image taken by author of a sign on a ...

English: Image taken by author of a sign on a door. This is an example of Chinglish. This door is located in the city of Taipei, Taiwan, the foreign immigrants recreational hall administered by the Taipei government. The word “Steek” is a legitimate English word, except it fell from common use hundreds of years ago. From top to bottom, the languages are Chinese, English, Vietnamese, Thai, and Bahasa Indonesia. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I can also tell you that teachers who relatively often meet teachers from other countries, can usually correctly guess who comes from where. My point is that even the best speakers, professionals and excellent students have some peculiarities at least in pronunciation that they can work on. National dialects have small, but sometimes disturbing features that can make the speaker difficult to follow, like the English spoken by lots of South-American colleagues for Middle-Europeans, which, however, may just as well work in the reverse direction. To avoid talking Chinglish like the Chinese, as mentioned in an earlier post, you’d better work on your spoken language at any possible occasion.

If you are not so talkative and don’t have so many opportunities to talk the target language, you can at least try to listen to others talk it. The internet age helps a lot compared to earlier times. If you don’t even have a Skype-friend, or you find talking more tiring than useful, you could still listen to news and other radio and television programmes on-line. It has great advantages over direct listening if you can find broadcasting sites that re-broadcast overdue programmes. Then you can go back to what you didn’t understand for the first time and clarify the vocab or the strange structure. It works like rewinding a tape twenty years ago. One example can be http://www.hebikietsgemist.nl, where you can find English-speaking programmes as well as Dutch. Another is Metropolistv, at http://www.metropolistv.nl, where you can add /en for English-, or/nl for Dutch-language programmes, while some of the broadcast comes in the original local language and the broadcast is dubbed.

For the best, trying to revind the video while transcribing parts of the program is perhaps the most outstanding listening activity that helps break through the ‘intermediate plateau’, which is widely known among teachers but quite unknown for students, the best of whom perceive lack of steady development a failure. It is not so. Experience and skills accumulate even while you can’t feel it, and on or above the intermediate level, it takes longer to achieve higher levels than below. As a student, you’d better believe your teacher that it exists and makes your feelings about your perceived lack of development wreched, but you shouldn’t give up on using a language that you already speak. People can forget anything not used over a longer period, so don’t let that happen. It would be a huge waste of your time and energy already invested. But transcribing is definitely time well spent, because it focuses on all aspects of the language and writing it down makes it resemble a kind of interaction.

Listening practice is the most important and often neglected side of language learning and is especially important when real communication is rarely possible. Besides, we can only use knowledge already acquired for talking. If we can use the listening material for collecting vocabulary, we provide ourselves with more to be used for interaction when the possibility arises.

For those less inclined to talk or listen, reading is the best way to build up the often elusive vocabulary base in meaningful contexts. But for good results, you shouldn’t be too lazy to revise, and you’d better revise a little frequently than too much too rarely. The brain tends to forget stuff fast after a while, but after revisions of not-yet-forgotten material, the rate of forgetting tends to get lower. It’s much more difficult to revise what we’ve almost forgotten, and then it may again become easily forgettable.

Methods of revision are numerous, but keeping your own vocabulary list and often revising it is a minimum. It’s also a good idea to keep a clean version of handouts so that you can later compare your solutions to grammar or vocabulary tasks, or the understanding of former texts to your present knowledge of them. There are also computer programmes, for example the kind downloadable from http://www.byki.com/ where you can find vocabulary lists, often with pronunciation from dozens of languages, and for a little one-time fee, you can upgrade and then make your own vocab lists. Those lists also serve as testing tools in both directions using flip-cards. In several countries there are also web-sites that have been designed to enable you to make your own vocabulary lists and tests out of those, like the http://www.wrts.nl/ site, which is possibly also accessible in lots of countries.

With these activities, the rules of interest are easy to apply: you listen to or read or practice what you are interested in, at the time and to the depth you find most suitable for you. My additional advice would be to use both ways to practice speaking. While reading out sounds quite matter of fact, you can also repeat what you’ve heard on the video. This is a very important preparation of real speech, because the speaker’s speaking organs also need practice before they can perform their tasks well. Every sound has its specific place of origin in the mouth in interaction with the tongue and lips, often with the throat too, and each has its own specific pitch, for which the larinx, in the depth of the throat, needs various positions that we are unavare of. It’s all like a singer preparing for the opera stage.

What I haven’t talked about is the area of grammar. There are numerous reasons. For one, some languages, among them English, Dutch and above all Chinese, don’t really rely on grammar much. There are rules, naturally, covering the structures of sentences, word-formation (if any), or verb tenses (if any, because these don’t exist in Chinese), but there aren’t numerous forms to verbs to be adjusted to the number, gender and person of the subject, and there aren’t numerous forms to the nouns and adjectives according to noun gender and various aspects and cases, as is the case with French, Russian or Hungarian and a lot of others.

Vocabulary - Words Are Important

(Photo credit: Dr Noah Lott)

A large part of modern English teaching considers vocabulary groups far more important than traditional grammar, that is, in what contexts and together with which other words can we use items to form utterances, which come together as idioms, what sentences can we learn by heart without grammatical analysis to be used as everyday forms. So you are also advised to consider certain structures in English as whole items to be learned, like for example ‘would you be kind enough to tell me if …’, just for the sake of being polite enough to your next interviewer for a new job. In the same way, it’s useful to learn something about the sequence of adjectives like in ‘a very old bright brown sunny Austrian wooden mountain house’ where you’d like to spend your next holidays, and that to talk about any other idea is not ‘very preposterous’, but ‘utterly preposterous’. There are rules about these possibilities, but they are in the usage, not in grammar.

And at the end of the day, teachers usually tend to overwork grammar anyway, so you’ll have covered probably everything five times over by the time you leave school. If something is not clear, there are masses of books to answer, and the teacher is always there to explain. That’s where most of them feel completely at home.

Some final words to students. Teachers know that you have lots of priorities outside class and studying, and some may resent that. They also tend to stick with their own methods, which may not suit you. If that is the case, find out what your own best methods are and use them to cover what needs to be done. But before going into rants about that stupid teacher, look into your own ways and habits, put your hand on your heart and try to declare that you’ve done all you could to develop and learn what was necessary.

Related articles
  • Time to stop avoiding grammar rules (guardian.co.uk)
  • EFL teachers’ perceptions about vocabulary acquisition and instruction (udini.proquest.com)
  • Welcome to LEFLa (Learning English as Foreign Language) (lefla.wordpress.com)

Ideas about what works while learning a language – Part One

28 Sunday Oct 2012

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in English teaching, language learning

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

China, Dutch, education, English language, Language acquisition, Netherlands, Second language

Now that I’ve done so much description, I’m going to expand on the critical side with some positive touch for the benefit of those who may find any kind of advice useful.

I must hasten to add at the very beginning that I’m not a good language learner. I studied, well, yeah, I know, but even then: Russian at school for 8 years followed by 2 more at university, and in the end I didn’t understand when they asked me for my name at the oral exam. However, I made a perfect written translation, so that’s something about what kind of learner I am. I have also studied some (between a few months and a year of) French, Italian, Bulgarian, Rumanian and Slovak, but I never really spoke more than a few sentences in these and they are, for lack of practice, long gone by now. Then I tried Chinese and now Dutch. Not a very fruitful linguistic career, but then again, I can say I belong to the majority, who can only learn maximum one second language. That’s what I could use as encouragement for my Chinese students: if I was able to learn good English, so can you, because I also didn’t have much else to help me but the teacher and the classes at school, we also did not have listening material, didn’t meet native speakers and didn’t, for the most of us, listen to English songs (at the time of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, few people had access to western radio channels).

But as an average learner, I can say that most people then are average learners. Most people in the world find it difficult to learn a second language at school. On the other hand, most articles, blogs and their comments come from people with outstanding linguistic abilities, the kind that already speaks 4-5 languages because they have talent, time and money to do so. I wouldn’t like to explain myself on those terms and levels, I’d like to speak to those who have none of the above advantages, perhaps. I’d also like to benefit the masses of teachers addressing crowds of average students.

I must also point out the difference between language acquisition and language learning. The acquisition of a language is the natural process of learning to understand and then speak and read and write our own mother tongue. Multilingual acquisition also happens in some parts of the world, where people acquire a second language, or more, in a natural way, mingling with neighbours who speak a different one from their own mother tongue, like many people in rural Africa, or South-East or South-Asia, where the former colonial languages are also often naturally acquired along with perhaps several tribal-local languages. This could be ideal, but it depends on where we were born, so can’t really be affected. What remains for others is studying at school.

And there come the problems. The student depends on the national culture of schooling or education as well as his/her own work and talent. If he’s a lazy one, he can still get by alright in the Netherlands, where the general idea is to let the kids develop at their own pace and in general, there’s little interference or pressure on a learner. In China, the lazy one may become suicidal in areas where studying is considered the only possible way to get out of poverty. Such suicides have lately been widely publicized, although the case may be that statistically it happens just as rarely as in Europe, where the population is only about 60% of that of China, or in the US, with half the population of Europe, so it doesn’t happen every decade. Perhaps Japan is famous for some earlier cases, which might mean a higher occurrence statistically.

However it happens, studying a language at school is just one among a lot of other subjects, so the majority handle it that way. But I’ve often met the idea, usually promoted by failing students, that their failure is the teacher’s fault. They shouldn’t be failed, because everybody is capable of learning a language just like history, chemistry or maths and they’ve managed to pass those – well, often only just, I must add. And while probably few students have ever got suicidal over languages, they quite often fail in maths or other subjects, so, we can be sure that they can sometimes fail in a language as well. That just happens at school, as it almost happened to me with Russian.

The reasons are numerous even if discounting the basic cultural surroundings and requirements. I would group them into three areas: the complexity of learning languages, the so-called learning types and individual psychological/intellectual differences.

First of all, learning languages is perhaps the most complex kind of learning, only comparable to learning to play a musical instrument. Both involve a lot of muscular activity (of course of different parts of the musculature), flexibility of body organs as well as the brain, intellectual power, the retaining power of the memory, the power to repeat and persevere with practice in the face of possible boredom, but with languages, we need more interactive ability, problem-solving ability, power to analyse and synthesize smaller and larger structures, like grammar and sentence types, creativity to restructure the elements of language in new ways, so possibly even faster reaction to stimuli, and above the level of everyday chatting, speaking a language well also presupposes a lot of knowledge outside the language itself.

This also means that some extent of failure to speak a language doesn’t mean that the person is not intelligent. On the other hand, he or she may lack patience to practice, withstand the boredom inherent in revising and practicing vocabulary items or grammatical patterns, may be impatient with any kind of grammatization, or is simply a reticent person who doesn’t like to speak a lot.

By the same token, somebody very successful with languages in general may not be a very intelligent person but may simply have the knack and liking for the aforementioned, may perhaps be only a very sociable, perhaps even foolishly sociable person who feels absolutely no shame when uttering stupid mistakes – it may be enjoyable practice for him/her even when others may consider him/her aggressive. That may be a kind of positive selfishness as well.

The second set of conditions for un/successful language learning is the variety of learning types, which are not often discussed in blogs lately, so let me give you some basics.

Pedagogy usually mentions three basic learning types. Visual learners have a preference for seeing (think in pictures; visual aids such as overhead slides, diagrams, handouts, etc.). Auditory learners best learn through listening (lectures, discussions, tapes, etc.). Tactile/kinesthetic learners prefer to learn via experience—moving, touching, and doing (active exploration of the world; science projects; experiments, etc.). Its use in pedagogy allows teachers to prepare classes that address each of these areas. Well, idealistically. But if a teacher of a class of 30-40 pupils, or more than 50 as in some countries like China, tries to work according to the so-called mashing-method that takes these types in consideration, he/she is likely doomed to failure simply by the impossibility to get to know most of his/her students having 5-6 or more such groups every week. Sometimes methods also contradict the culture and traditions, so I can find it difficult to imagine that a lot of teachers would dare and be able to use methods catering for kinesthetic students in a country used to students sitting rigidly at their places slavishly repeating phrases or words by the teacher. I also met the idea in Hungary of giving differentiated materials and handling students according to their abilities in language classes, where the usual class sizes are very often halved for languages. The idea is usually promoted by headmasters and other colleagues not related to language teaching, but I never really met a colleague who managed to implement this ideal well in practice. We have to accept that we do our best and the students do theirs if, but it’s next to impossible to prepare for each and every individual in 5-6 teaching hours every day 5, or in China 6, days a week.

Students can themselves use the model to identify their preferred learning style and maximize their educational experience by focusing on what benefits them the most. Could, but for the fact that teachers don’t draw their attention to such possibilities and have precious little time to suggest a few activities for the students to start with at home. Besides, pedagogy is in itself in contention if the whole idea of the three learner types is neurologically valid. If it were, I should have learned Russian along with English at secondary school, especially after good result in primary. But I didn’t. Or there were and are other factors at play too.

It is true, however, that some students who love listening to English pop songs and do so often, learn, or should I say acquire, the language naturally. It is sometimes suggested that learners listen to music and get to love the language through it. Well, to my mind it’s a good ideas and I have often seen it work, but what if the target language is not English? Have large numbers of pupils ever listened to Chinese, Slovakian, or Dutch pop-songs? I can’t imagine that situation. For learners of some languages other than English, some other methods may work better. It’s about the emotional relationship now. If one doesn’t care about the use of the language but enjoys listening to it, it makes a world of difference. So as teachers, we could try to entice the students

A painting from the Rembrandt-museum, Amsterdam

with something aesthetically pleasing – not with paintings of Picasso, Rembrandt, Riepin or Munkácsy, though those can also be used, but we can show (especially for the benefit of the visual type) photos of interesting cities, buildings, people or activities to our students. Easy again with English, but not significantly more difficult with German, French, Spanish or Italian either. Lots of European language teachers are of the open-minded and well-travelled type, they can even raise their students interests in learning more exotic languages, like Arabic, Chinese or Russian, or even Swahili, by showing them their own photos taken during holidays. However, the important point here should be not simply to flip through the pictures, but to stop with many, evoking personal stories and inviting discussion. Such experiences have a chance of becoming an experience for the pupils themselves too, and through the emotions going with this, will become memorable fix, familiar points to learning.

From the point of view of learning types, language learning may give some advantage to some and disadvantage to others in comparison with learning other subjects. Whereas learning most other subjects may give advantage to the intellectual visual types or, if the teacher lectures better than the book to follow, the audio types, language learning involves a lot more doing than, say, learning biology or history, if there’s any discussion in the pedagogic repertoire of the language teacher. Most kinds of group work, discussion of problems, problem solving tasks and the so-called task-based learning above all, involve a lot of speaking, and that itself is doing for many. Problem-solving stimulates the intellectual types. Games and other group activities like line dictation, arranging sentence part or themselves in patterns and the like add real bodily movement and such a language lesson far exceeds the effectiveness of language classes for the kinesthetic type that any other subject can attain.

The third major group of factors involve the learner’s psychological and intellectual leanings. Like with all people, some students may be sociable types and like talking overlooking their own mistakes easily, as I’ve already mentioned. They can survive any language course with flying colours and being among the most popular members anywhere in the world, though the quality of their achievement may vary greatly. Others are almost afraid to speak out in public, be it a small group or a larger community. This type can just survive an oral test every semester in Hungary and can completely avoid attention in China, whereas could have very hard times in good

Classroom scene, student as teacher

Classroom scene, student as teacher (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

British schools where lots of community tasks, discussion and interaction is in order. Intellectual, quality-oriented people could take a lot more time to achieve good results, especially as speaking is concerned, but if they have resistance to the boredom of repetition, they may emerge as by far the best after a few years of study, and could become very good writers and debaters inside and outside class. They only need to survive the years before that without giving up their seemingly futile and embarrassing effort. On the other hand, they may stay slower speakers for the rest of their lives, but being more keen on reading, their vocabulary and general knowledge could sky-rocket.

Then there are the analytical and synthetic types. Without other major strengths, they may become great at solving grammar tests or writing tasks, could especially well analyze pieces of literature, but could never become good teachers or orators on the pulpit of a university. With a good balance and strong intellect, such people will become the best writers. I once had such a reticent type of student who started to write poetry at a young age, also in English. Another one concentrated solely on writing fantasy-literature, also instead of doing his homework tasks, but was so good at it that he got away with it. Unfortunately, those with such limited interest can’t bloom to be all-round excellent speakers of a language.

Others again may lack the sheer memory that is necessary for learning languages. Such people may need logic to support their retaining power, such that may easily come to their help in their own language with any subject but language. Without memory, they may acquire grammar skills, but could hardly use them for lack of means to fill in the spaces.

Another major requirement is to be able to hear well. If effort, intellect, memory, interactive interests are all present but the person still can’t make good differences among the sounds he/she hears and makes, they may become utterly embarrassing talking partners, sooner or later avoided by most. A language inherently has its musical qualities and without getting that right, correct intonation, articulation, sound formation will suffer greatly to the detriment of being understood. Of course, such people can still become very good writers, fast, voluptuous readers, or successful in any other field of life requiring language competences if they don’t need to and insist on talking too much.

Well, it sounds obvious that a language teacher should understand most of these sleeping abilities and difficulties at the cocoon-stage in most of their students and try to draw the attention of as many as possible to their own strengths and weaknesses within the time-constraints that may be. Besides, the teacher should have the utmost quality of the good teacher: persuasiveness. On the other hand, the student who has the advantage of being informed of his/her qualities should need the added ability and brevity to follow advice. With that, they may become successful language learners even against the odds. A tall order against the pull of modern hedonism.

Dutch Flag

Dutch Flag (Photo credit: Guido.)

Still more to come in part two

by P.S. and Z.J.S

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  • The role of character in learning (Education Week)

The situation of language teaching – comparisons: China

26 Friday Oct 2012

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in English teaching, language learning

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

China, Chinese language, education, English language, Grammar translation, Netherlands, Teaching English as a foreign language

The country where the grammar-translation method breaks down is China. Chinese, in its utter grammatical simplicity, resists most grammatical explanations about kinds of words and word forms that exist in European languages, the differences between adverbs, adjectives, verbs and nouns that mostly do not exist in Chinese, also about singular and plural, or conjugated, pre- or suffixed forms in complex languages especially like Russian, Hungarian or French and the like.

This Chinglish is not so bad …

On the other hand, the fields of meanings can be so different that simple word-for-word equivalents in dictionaries may completely miss the point in both ways. One can’t explain this to Chinese students of English, they keep doing what they have done for the last couple of decades, or perhaps for centuries with all subjects, that is, walk around campus holding their copy-books or books mumbling out lists of words or sentences half aloud hoping that they’ll be performing well at test the following class. Yet, wherever we go in the country, we can’t miss the perverted English translations of public signs wherever they make the attempt, like on these ones in this collection. The fun is a bit lessened by the fact that we don’t know the real meanings of the original Chinese sings.

Thirdly, and this may sound strange, there are the sometimes insurmountable cultural differences that a European first finds exceptionally strange. If we, for example, ask Chinese students to translate the following, “Next week, citizens of the Netherlands are going to election to vote for candidates to represent them in the lower house of Parliament”, except for ‘next week’ (and perhaps ‘the Netherlands’), they will ask for the meaning of each and every word and will still shake their heads for lack of understanding the explanations. There are no direct elections, no representation, no known candidates to vote for, voting in our sense doesn’t exist, and there’s no parliament, let alone a lower or upper house to it in China, so how should they express these notions and institutions? I know about the problem, because I already had a hard time trying to explain this stuff to university students in one of the most highly developed area, the South-East. Then, even if they manage to put the sentence somehow into Chinese, inserting the name of the Congress of the People’s Communist Party for ‘Parliament’, we will wonder why ‘the Netherlands’ was left out, because in this language, internationally well-known names necessarily come in disguise for lack of suitable phonemes.

So how do language differences of these kind translate into foreign language education? Let’s have a look at public education before discussing teacher training at universities.

Compulsory education starts at age 7, but for most kids, community teaching starts in babyhood, with the whole overage and underage neighbourhood handling them simply because most working-age mothers must work for lack of childcare benefits after the first few months and for the low wages that press them to add to the family budgets. After a couple of years, children have to be taken to kindergarten, usually provided by the workplace, and it can often happen that they already get used to some English nursery rhymes there, simply out of being fashionable on the part of the kindergarten. At primary school in modern China, kids start studying some of the Latin ABC along with some Chinese, and when they go into the higher levels, this naturally increases in scope and depth. Unfortunately, not all teachers know the real English pronunciation of the Latin ABC, and overall, they inevitably drive the notion into children that that’s the only pronunciation of the letters. This may lead to huge problems if somebody might later try to study a language other than English, although this happens very rarely.

Most primary schools are inside town, but with the spreading of private schooling institutions over the last two decades, if the school has primary as well as secondary section, the pupils may usually be moved for a decade outside cities, where the land is cheaper for building a new school. So although there are still lots of traditional state secondary schools in the cities, an alarming rate of emerging private schools means that perhaps a quarter or more of secondary school children in the developed areas go to ‘high school’ to enclosed, though spacious institutions, where they mostly remain within the campus walls, simply for lack of the time it would take to get to town and back.

private school

a private school near a housing estate way outside town in SE-China

Staying within the school means that children have no way of meeting the few foreign people who may come to town, thus missing any opportunity to communicate in English. Although they often have 6 or 8 English classes in lower (3 years) and upper high (3 years) school, they receive them from Chinese teachers of English, who, with few exceptions, hold their classes in their mother tongue, as if the class were about Latin a hundred years ago. So the focus is on understanding English texts, translating them, however difficult that may be as we’ve just seen above, and then talk about the grammar and taking tests. Tests are the ultimate goal because English is necessary for students to get to universities of any value.

The trend is a bit counteracted by another trend, vis. the one that schools, especially private schools, lure one or two native English speakers to teach with them. In practice, the need is so high that people of other nationalities, like myself, Ukrainians, Bulgarians, Russians also often get such a position. The requirement for such ‘foreign experts’ is of course proficiency in English, which is usually thoroughly tested by a native associated somewhere along the line with the school.

On the other hand, the system hardly works well in practice. The foreign expert, be it native or not, is given one hour per week per group and simply told to ‘teach them something’. The only chance we get to do something useful occurs if the school is able to set up a group of students aspiring to university in Australia, or the USA, and for them, the foreigner gets several hours of teaching that one group.

Then the difficulties of being understood multiplies. In most classes, it’s an uphill struggle to get yourself understood, as can be guessed from lessons in Chinese and lack of meeting any foreigners before. Chines media don’t help either: there aren’t any foreign-language programmes on TV except for the occasional Chinese lesson by an expat and the occasional English-language news for English-speaking folk resident in the country on one of the 15 channels of China Central TV. And students rarely watch anything but NBA matches with Chinese commentary. No wonder, then, that students keep asking each other ‘shenma, shenma’ (what? what?) for several weeks, that is, for several lessons. Some do believe that the ‘laowei’ (that is, foreign devil, as every white person in the country is referred to) doesn’t speak English and possibly they do. Of course, nobody can utter an English sentence for a while except “What’s your name?” and “Where do you come from?”, and the sound of English stays completely alien for most.

Although my American colleague wasn’t understood much better, I was often complained about as being impossible to understand until the American explained to everybody that I speak with a British accent and that’s more difficult to follow than educated standard American. Still, we succeeded somehow, managed to make an impact by employing all techniques available for explaining everything without speaking the students’ mother tongue. The message to Dutch English teachers worried about this is that it’s not easy, but can be done and it can sometimes be great fun and a great experience for all concerned – we can be the very first foreigners, and for a long time the only ones that the students can talk to, and that’s a big thing for most kids there. We can also learn some local language if things go well.

'foreign devil' at sports event in school

‘foreign devil’ at sports event in school

For the sake of those aspiring to take up this line and try to get to China to teach English, I must admit that for most of the groups and time and schools, the foreigner is a figurehead used for representing the status of the school. There are no real responsibilities for us other than the requirement to be present when prospective parents are met, or existing parents visit the school. Besides, the foreigners should be present at all school events, be that about sports, or singing competitions of classes and the like. In exchange for this, standard salaries for foreigners are considerably higher than for local teachers, which inevitably makes some of the staff jealous (usually those who have no English competence at all), still, they are hilariously low by western standards, comparable to salaries in Eastern and Central Europe. So the experience is for the fun and experience and adventure of it almost exclusively, especially because in most provinces, most of the salary saved (living costs are very low, so saving can be expected) is not allowed to be taken out of China. But at least most schools provide very spacious, new, if not altogether high-quality living quarters free of charge.

Back then and in the particular city where I worked, it was possible to be discovered and lured over from the school to teach at the local university, so I also had experience about that. Let me add in a rush that since then, age has been restricted to 40, employment at universities have been linked to PhD and the native speaker requirement has really been enforced. But as university is the origin of the future generations of teachers, I have to talk about the situation there.

new friends in the street

Although perhaps not as general as in Europe, tertiary education is still already open to masses of young people in the more developed regions. At the same time, it’s really not for the uneducated. Those making the entrance exam really have to work hard and achieve high standards to be admitted. As English is on the list of tests to be taken, most students have some English, at least a grasp of grammar and basic vocabulary. It means that in and around campuses, the ‘laowei’ more often encounters those usual questions, and is even sometimes approached by the request that the foreigner become a friend (on the spot) and improve the guy’s English (also on the spot, and ever after). Most such young people then can’t understand a word of our answer. These are the ones with a good heart and intentions, but they don’t study English at the Uni.

after a happy end-of-year class

Those that come to study English are the real cream of the area concerning English. The ‘laowei’ has a chance of being understood, and also of enticing tentative responses from the students. Students majoring in English have two or three classes a week with the foreigner, sometimes even four, and several of them regularly come to take part in the weekly ‘English corner’ activities intended to further providing a chance for their improvement. They tend to be open-minded, caring, interested and very friendly, often years after the departure of their former teacher: a few keep mailing me even after five years.

only in English at the English corner

On the other hand, we must bear in mind that by the time the ‘foreign expert’ meets them, those students had already had about 10 years’ of formal teaching in about 6 to 10 hours a week by mostly Chinese people who themselves may never have met a living specimen of English speakers. The Chinese co-author of this web-site was born before Deng Xiaoping got to power and graduated in the mid-90’s in one of the largest cities, and had never received any English tuition, so that’s how usual it was to be able to study English at all. This is the generation that teaches the future English teachers at universities nowadays. We can realistically hope that with the opening to the West the situation improves fast, but we know that in education, results are slow to achieve.

some of the better, young generation of teachers

Besides the personnel and outside-of-school possibilities, we must also consider teaching/learning material available for developing knowledge. In this regard, I found a much wider range of internationally published material in South-East China than in the Netherlands, though, naturally, less than in Eastern-Europe, where publishers and the BC are very active. I must also stress, however, that these were Chinese editions, supported with Chinese explanations and translation tasks very unlike those originals available in Eastern-Europe. Listening material was also hard to come by. It must be added that I also found Chinese-made teaching material reasonable, except the excessive test material often full of mistakes. For what we think of testing, our readers are kindly requested to click here.

A few more words here about the new requirements for ‘foreign experts’. I would have no problem with the native requirement if it weren’t for the ridiculously low salaries, according to western standards, the country can offer. It results in drawing only the young and adventurous to the country, with a few talented ones alongside, who are inexperienced, but at least strive to do their best and are interested in really discovering the local language and culture, like my own colleague, Chris was. As a result, secondary education would get an influx of talented Middle- and East-Europeans, who would be as happy as I was with the few hundred dollars to take back home after a year’s work and exploration of the country. They would, if it weren’t for the more strictly enforced laws.

This requirement looks superfluous, because any reasonable school can demand and execute high-level spoken interviews over the telephone as it happened to me, so the quality can be made sure. It also goes against the fact that English has so many variations around the globe that any perceived deviation from the so-called ‘standard English’ may also be regarded as standard enough. Besides, almost any dialect can be beneficial in the face of the very low quality of Chinese English, and if the school so wishes, the dialect of the applicant can be monitored over the phone, as this happened around me, people saying that the school wanted to avoid the Indian pronunciation, which they regarded too distorted compared to American. Which American, we may ask though. All in all, this requirement is counter-productive to the interests of language education in China.

Universities apply the PhD requirement quite strongly nowadays. This I find ridiculous, seeing the ridiculous wages, even though they are considerably higher for a PhD than it was for those without a few years back, but the biggest problem is that a PhD is usually quite inexperienced in teaching. He has become a researcher over the years spent on his special field and has given a certain number of lectures to younger fellow students, but that doesn’t make them comparably competent teachers to career teachers. A PhD’s purpose is not teaching but researching, so he or she is also less focused on teaching in China than ‘ordinary teachers’, who also have taught a huge number of lessons while the PhD was doing his/her research. As a result, as it also happens in other countries, like in Hungarian universities, university lecturers give lectures in ways that don’t appeal to young adults at universities at all. As it happens with English, teaching it at universities can’t be efficiently done by lecturing, especially not in China, where the language itself still needs developing while they also have to study the usual linguistic aspects. Experts only in linguistics are not well disposed and well equipped in this department. Those who are, haven’t had the time and interest, but often only the money, to go on studying for PhD after getting their Masters, and went into practicing teaching instead. So China would do better without enforcing this requirement, they could employ far better teachers that way.

But the PhD requirement in itself may not be so counterproductive, as those who go into teaching after getting their PhD’s have a chance of becoming better teachers in time. However, many areas have also imposed an age limit, which is usually 40, and only in a few cases 50. Well, how does a young PhD acquire teaching skills without having time to do so? This beats me.

Experienced foreign English teachers at the National Conference in Beijing in 2004

Fortunately, those already in the country for several years haven’t been required to leave their jobs everywhere for their advancing age, and can also often find a new work-place too. Most institutions understand the advantages of the foreign expert having expertise with the system and possibly also the language after years of work there. But the PhD requirement is often rudely imposed, having resulted in releasing many competent teachers only for lack of the degree. We can’t really understand the reason why this so happens, but, then again, that’s the way they are. Also, they will think again another time, very possibly.

One word of warning for those who have managed to read through our article thus far. What we’ve discussed and criticized above may not apply to some of the largest and oldest university cities in China, like Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai, or probably a few more, but is likely to hold more-or-less true for most other areas. But then again, China is such a vast country, with so many differences, and such fast changes, that, hopefully, our points about weaknesses hold less and less true for more and more areas.

regularly updated with newly-emerging memories

by P.S. and Z.J.S.

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The situation of language teaching – comparisons: the Netherands

24 Wednesday Oct 2012

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in English teaching, language learning

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

education, English language, Great Britain, Language education, Netherlands

In this new post, I’d like to compare the language education systems in a few countries where I’ve had some experience. Because I suppose most people properly educated in English have a fair idea about the education systems of Great Britain and the United States of America, I only draw a few parallels where this seems practical, but I’m not going into details there. I also have very little first-hand experience about the US.

Firstly, I’d like to discuss the situation in the Netherlands. This is the country that has come out on top of Europe in a recent poll about the ratio of people speaking at least one foreign language, so it can be assumed that language teaching is of utmost importance and in a very modern state here.

As far as I can see, in the Dutch education system, there are lots of choices for people as to denomination, educational philosophy and the like: this is a country for catholic, protestant, muslim, Montessory, ‘themaonderwijs’ (theme-oriented teaching), Dalton, Jenaplan, adaptive or development-oriented schools and a lot more. I personally haven’t seen a system in which the force of competition led to a greater variation of idea-based, philosophy-based, theory-based schools than in the Netherlands. There is great pressure on schools of different levels to stand out in one way or another, perhaps at all cost. True, this leads to a variety of choice perhaps unprecedented elsewhere. This also means that it is next to impossible to generalize about the kind of educational practices followed, it’s only possible to draw a few wild conclusions. However, that’s what I’m trying to do below.

The different levels of education in the Nethe...

The different levels of education in the Netherlands (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As can be seen in the chart, education in the Netherlands starts at age four and secondary education starts at twelve. How much foreign language education goes on between these two points depends on the kind of school the kid goes to. From secondary age, studying at least two foreign languages is compulsory, often one changed to a third one after a couple of years. There’s a wide range of choice, but at schools in the VWO section, which prepare students for higher education, especially at ‘gymnasia’, students must choose between Latin and ancient Greek. The number of lessons for modern languages is very low, maximum two or three in all three types of secondary schools, but students often have only one class per week per language in HAVO or VMBO-schools. One may wonder whether the system itself is designed to give no chance for students to learn a language properly, or to economize on the likelihood that they will do so later anyway. For the brighter ones, some larger, comprehensive-like institutions, like in lyceums, give the possibility to upgrade their studies by shifting upwards from VMBO or HAVO level, but then they get a compulsory dead language for their efforts.

English: Education System in the Netherlands N...

English: Education System in the Netherlands Nederlands: Schema van het onderwijssysteem in Nederland (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What really strikes me as a language teacher and a foreigner is that teachers at interviews and other colleagues admitted that most students don’t speak English until about age fifteen, or two or three years of instruction. This is further attested to by former student friends, who maintained that they didn’t really learn anything about English at their schools, especially at the more technically-oriented HAVO and VMBO. The stress here is on learning about the language, as if English was one of the classical, i.e. dead languages. It seems widely accepted that classical languages are necessary for higher education, which may or may not be the case from other points of view.

What is further interesting is the opinion of a colleague at an institution between secondary and tertiary institutions, where English language training for university entrance exams takes place for those who have failed first. The course at his institution consists of test- and reading practice and a little writing, but apart from occasional listening to their own reading, there’s no listening practice, and no speech practice. Out goes the complex views of language learning prevalent in the English-speaking world, or where they have strong impact. The reasons are that students must be prepared for reading almost all, or at least most, university material in English, have to write in English for their papers, and there’s no time for other activities at the course. Besides, the students can practice listening from the television, and speaking in their private lives.

This all points to a strong leaning on the grammar-translation methods of yore. At an interview, I felt that time has stopped in that one school, and since then I feel it has stopped in this country as a whole. My own experience supports the now wide-spread wisdom that teaching through grammar and translation without real communication slows down the learning process. I’ve reached a stage in my Dutch studies when I’m able to just talk Dutch without thinking first in my own language or English about what I want to say. This is the aim of all learners, but it has to be on a level when one can really express everything. I’m not at that level, so when I can’t find a word in Dutch, I try to fall back on my English, and that’s the point when I find that not only can I not say that particular word in English, which I’ve been speaking for over forty years, but in my own mother tongue either. So, how can, I wonder, Dutch English teachers effectively teach their students a foreign language through Dutch? I didn’t have the presence of mind to ask the panel this at the time of being asked how I can teach without Dutch. Obviously, they have no idea about the truism that translation is a separate skill, to be taught separately from the others.

I should perhaps add that the Netherlands has a strong system of teaching Dutch to immigrants, with support from ‘vrijwilligers’, or volunteers from all walks of life. The preparatory phase for full-time employment in education, as well as with perhaps all jobs, called ‘stage’, is general, which creates the foundations of effective workers in the education as well. On the other hand, the job of teacher assistant is not wide-spread at all to the extent it is in Britain, although it exists. For foreign teachers trying to get a job here it would be a useful step.

So how does it come about that the Dutch are so proficient in foreign languages in general, and in English in particular?
As was suggested above, the Netherlands has come out on top of a recent survey of Europe about language proficiency. Irrespective of methods, this result shows a wide-spread use of second languages here. We can hear it in the streets of most towns and cities, and it not only means the use of their mother tongue by the lot of immigrants to the country, but also the use of English, German, French and other major languages. True, it’s not very usual to hear German, French of Spanish, perhaps because visiting speakers of those languages already know that if they speak English here, they will surely be able to communicate. So one hears mostly English by tourists asking for tickets, ordering hotel rooms or asking for beer at pubs, and even train or bus conductors answer them as a matter of fact.

People in the Netherlands like to travel and discover the world. One of the closest neighbours is also one of the most popular destinations: Britain. The reasons could be anything from studies or work to following a match of favourite football clubs there. Instead of animosity, there’s a strong sense of rivalry towards the English in the Netherlands. Historical animosity may already have been forgotten towards England, much more, than towards Germany. I know of young people who have been to Spain or France to work in the summer holidays, and they have gradually learned those languages, especially if they already had a course about them. I also know about German spouses or Dutch people who live in Germany, but on the whole, the use of these languages seems to be very limited. Besides personal and possibly historical reasons, these languages are also not very often used in television programmes or in cinemas. On the other hand, English-language programmes and films abound in the Netherlands. Young people have the opportunity to watch relatively good quality English soaps and at least one TV channel airs an English or American film every evening, often without subtitles, but those with subtitles also benefit learners a lot. Besides, programmes about fashion, famous people and lots of other, sometimes strange topics abound on several channels even in peak time. I have to underline the fact that dubbing is not used in this country at all. Besides, to follow university courses, one has to be able to read any literature pertaining to their subject more or less fluently, as a colleague has pointed out. All this leads to an overwhelming knowledge of English (87% of the adult population, 5th in Europe after the English-speaking countries, and Norway and Sweden, according to a recent survey here, or the latest full results downloadable here), but less so of other second languages, or the others are simply and clearly far less popular and accessible.

If we look beyond the convenient everyday use of everyman, then specialists of English, like travelling businessman, language teachers and linguists, must rely on more than watching films. The businessman meets native speakers often enough to have no problems with English, or other languages, and the Dutch are a great nation of travelling businessmen. On the other hand, they may be less great with linguistics, as far as I can see. University students, or those aspiring to become one, must rely on dictionaries. In this field, I must feel sorry for them, because dictionaries available in two languages are not unlike their Hungarian counterparts: some words are translated with only a single word, many without example phrases or sentences that would help the learner to understand the contextual use of the word or phrase, and I’ve come across several mistakes, whereby the equivalent is given in an English word that is not used or doesn’t exist in that sense. I find this mostly with my big van Dale Studiewoordenboek, but sometimes with Kramers too. It disturbs me as a learner of Dutch greatly, but this is also the source that learners of English are supposed to rely on. Enough? Hardly so sometimes. I also find it conspicuous that it’s very difficult to find the single-language English dictionaries and specialized dictionaries like slang, or phrasal-verb dictionaries here, just like it’s next to impossible to find internationally-published, modern coursebooks that abound in Hungary and other countries. I still have to dig deeper into the local offer to offer views on those, but if the Dutch coursebooks we receive at the Dutch course are anything to go by, I have little to expect in organization, methodology or life-like interest enticing the young learner.

Just as a by-thought, I’d like to add that the perhaps largest and best institution to teach English as a foreign language around the world, IH, or International House, only has no school in Europe in the Netherlands, Denmark and the two Scandinavian countries mentioned, thereby ridding their learners of English of a direct possibility of learning from native speakers, or their highly competent equivalents. May it be down to self-confidence, or self-deception, or sheer arrogance, which countries like Germany or Switzerland give a wide berth to by giving the possibility to their learners to study with IH?

Next, I’d like to give a general overview of the Hungarian system of language education. So that each post doesn’t become too long and tiring to read, I’m going to do that in the following post.

regularly updated with new ideas if possible

by P.S.

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