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Learning and teaching English in the Netherlands

Tag Archives: grammar-translation method

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.

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The extent translation is ‘correct’

14 Friday Mar 2014

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in translation

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grammar-translation method, Translation, use of translation softwares

I’m going to write again about the special field of translation, and only about a small section thereof, so my topic should actually be read as “What does the percentage score of agreement mean when using machine translation as basis?” I would like to invite fellow translators to comment on the issue. However, I also hope to provide further proof against the validity of using the ‘grammar-translation method’ in language teaching. Or at least further warning about it.

The main reason for me to write today, plainly put, is that I’m not very experienced in translating based on CAT tools and machine supported translation tools. I’ve received one agreement so far that included percentages of my full price if there was a partial agreement between the pre-translated (by Google, for example) version and my corrected version. I haven’t actually received any jobs yet from this client, but I keep wondering about what it means in practice. I can imagine % of agreement between Dutch and German, or English, or Swedish, but my feeling is that there may be very rough estimations and even wrong ones between languages of very different nature. To be explained later below.

Another reason is that I must prepare a long list of my own so that I can convert the whole thing into an auto-suggest dictionary or term base. I use a translation tool for it, and a global service helps me, but one feature of the software helps me identify and apply translations that I’ve already done through the translation memory I’m creating along the way. There’s the rub. After I translated “take note”, I wasn’t offered automatic similar answer when the next phrase to be translated was “take note of”. However, when the following item was “taken notes of” (I’d originally made a typo using the -n), I was given a 71% score relative to the previous one, and a possible translation based on mine with that one. On the other hand, after I did “throw (threw, thrown), hurl, fling”, I was given 85% when I tried to translate “throw (threw, thrown), yield”. I wonder how – ‘yield’ has nothing to do with hurling or flinging, yet, the similarity was found higher here than when I accidentally added the third form of ‘take’ with the plural of ‘note’.

On the text level, I don’t think anyone could come up with anything better than the famous Karinthy story with the cross-translations between Hungarian and German. On a lower level, I have an idea to show what I mean by asking about this problem. Here is goes.

Let’s suppose there is a situation when someone was murdered, there was a knife found next to a pool, the identity of the victim not yet revealed at the beginning of the news. In Hungarian, the text could go like this,

“Az áldozatot valószínűleg késsel ölték meg. A dikicset közvetlenül a medence mellett találta meg a rendőrség. Az elkövetés időpontja még bizonytalan, de a száraz vér okán a dikics már napok óta ott fekhetett.”

Well, because the target language is English, the native English translator may not directly remember what a ‘dikics’ is, he may be a tennis fan and may fail to look up the Hungarian word because he remembers Ms Dokic, former tennis player’s name. There is really not a lot of difference, so he may easily come up with the following translation of the second sentence,

“Dokic was found dead right next to the pool by police.” Deepest apologies to the living person, but the translation tool could well find a 90% or 95% similarity between this and my correction, based on which I would have to give up quite a lot of my earnings on this sentence. However, the meanings of the two sentences couldn’t be greater. The corrector would have to recreate the sentence and give it a completely different meaning, revealing that it was not a person and not dead that was found next to the pool. Not to mention the problem of defamation to the person very much alive. And not to mention that if it were really Ms Dokic, the Hungarian text would read ‘Dokic-ot’, not ‘A dikicset’. Very different, but no MT would understand the difference. I would venture to add that anyone checking my translation with a CAT-tool would also overlook the difference. I would deem the original translation almost worthless, but for the correction, the corrector would receive perhaps only 10% or 20% of his full fee.

Working on my own word list, I am also continually perturbed by the fact that verb forms of English words are identified as nouns, like “bark” as a verb comes in invariably as “kéreg”, and, what’s more, mostly suffixed, like “snore” becomes “horkolással”, while “blare” becomes “Katonazenét hallottunk”. Boggles the mind.

It is also nice when a simple list of verbs is turned into a completely wrong sentence, like from “spot, catch sight of, descry”, I get the result as “Helyszíni, mikor a pusztaságot,” In this way, with a comma at the end. Similarly, when I use the tool for texts, it regularly up-end the translation by adding a negative in Hungarian to the originally positive sentence. Why, one wonders incessantly.

For more fun for Hungarian speakers, let me quote here two machine-translated Hungarian terms from TermWiki, the aspiring definition-provider,

“szerecsendió
fűszer (egészben vagy őrölve) leírás: a szerecsendió fa szürkésbarna, ovális magot. Buzogány a spice, nyert a magokat a membrán. Diós, meleg, fűszeres, édes. Felhasználás: Italok (esp. tojás nog), sütemények, cookie-kat, szószok, édes burgonya, tejsodó és kenyerek”
and
“Folyó Georgina

Georgina folyó ez Észak-három fő folyók, a csatorna ország nyugati Queensland áramlását rendkívül nedves években, hogy a Eyre-tó.”

No comment. But if someone got such texts to be corrected, based on the similarity of many of the original words to the correction, I am afraid that the fee would not reflect the fact that the whole text would have to be re-done.

Aspiring translators of unrelated languages: beware! Students swotting words of a foreign language: beware!

On the other hand, I would gladly receive any kind of feed-back from En-Hun or Hun-En translators, or any other, even if there’s a great disagreement with the above.

by P. S.

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

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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.

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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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
  • { Phrasal Verb } (ilyaelina.wordpress.com)
  • The Treachery of Translators (opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com)
  • ‘Jew’ is the new ‘cool’ in Dutch, linguist says (jta.org)

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.

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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