• Privacy policy
  • Translator – ProZ.com Pro member
  • About

Learning and teaching English in the Netherlands

~ A fine WordPress.com site

Learning and teaching English in the Netherlands

Tag Archives: Netherlands

Statistical truth about problems caused by asylum seekers in the Netherlands

01 Thursday Feb 2018

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in immigration, Netherlands, refugees in Europe

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

asylum seekers, dangers, fear of strangers, Netherlands, refugees, strangers

Dear Reader,

Research has been done in the Netherlands over whether fears about lack of safety of a few years ago have been justified in some places. The article below was published this morning in the Volkskrant about the findings of a huge research done at the behest of the Dutch Research and Documentation Centre of the Department of Justice. The findings are presented in more detail in the Dutch House of Representatives Today.

My translation of the article can be read below. To my mind, it points towards “untruths” given to residents of most Middle-European people by propaganda reporting “neighbourhoods in the city of (you name it) in” Belgium, Sweden, France, Germany, Britain etc, where “locals do not dare to go out into the streets”, “which are ruled by hordes of migrants” and the like, even making bold statements about the Netherlands based on statements and opinions by Gerd Wilders, leader of the second most supported party in the country. Whoever can claim for sure that the Netherlands is an exception from these phenomena are absolved of the burden of reading about the situation there, but others are advised to read the article to learn about the truth. I think the Netherlands is just as representative of the problems as the other countries mentioned above, consequently, these findings may be indicative of the true size of the problems in other parts of Europe.

be542282-4fff-4d96-9c1f-3b813028e968.jpeg

” ‘Robuust’ research proves: Setting up a refugee centre does not lead to less safety in the neighbourhood

The WODC has examined statistical data from the CBS.

Safety in a neighbourhood does not decline after the arrival of a reception centre for asylum seekers. Local residents face no more risk of becoming victims of crime. This is the conclusion of the Research and Documentation Centre of the Department of Justice (WODC) after an analysis of statistical data from Statistics Netherlands (CBS). The results will be presented to the House on Thursday.

By: Marjon Bolwijn, 1 February 2018, 02:00

Fear of insecurity and rising crime three years ago was a major reason for strong protests from citizens in several municipalities where asylum seekers’ centres were planned. In 2014 and 2015 the number of asylum seekers, particularly from Syria and Eritrea, sharply rose. Sometimes citizens’ protests turned into riots and police intervention.

Meanwhile, the influx of asylum seekers has abated and the discussion has been silenced. The question remains whether opponents of a reception centre were right in saying that insecurity would increase. Therefore, the Ministry of Justice asked the WODC to investigate. Conclusion: the chance of becoming a victim of a criminal offence has not demonstrably risen with the arrival of a reception centre for asylum seekers. Researchers have found that there is a difference of 0.03 percent, which is statistically “insignificant”.

‘Rabble-rousing’

‘Robust research, no question’, says criminologist Jan van Dijk of Tilburg University. The results do not surprise him. ‘The vast majority of asylum seekers are keen to make something of their lives. They think ten times before they commit a crime,’ says Van Dijk. In his opinion, the conclusions of the WODC suggest that the protests were ‘a projection of fears’ and ‘rabble-rousing by a political party as the PVV’.

The WODC compared all the inhabitants of Dutch neighbourhoods with and without asylum seekers in 2015, 2010 and 2005. It was also examined whether registered crime in neighbourhoods was higher in years with than in years without asylum seekers in the period 2010-2015. In addition, the researchers compared offender profiles of asylum seekers with those of other population groups.

Safe countries

It is not that no asylum seekers commit offences. Earlier research already showed that mainly light property crimes, such as shoplifting, are involved. Because the safety in the neighbourhood does not demonstrably change after the arrival of an asylum centre, the researchers of the WODC suspect criminal offences committed in the reception centre itself or in a city centre in the wider area will presumably be committed. Two-thirds of the offenders are young men from safe countries in North Africa, for example, who do not have a chance to get a residence permit. ‘Adventurers who have nothing to lose,”says criminologist Jan van Dijk.

Compared to their counterparts of similar age, counterparts of the same gender, and people with low socio-economic status among the Dutch population, asylum seekers are somewhat under-represented in police statistics, also when it comes to sexual crimes. The majority of the offences are committed by young men. ‘If a few thousand people are added, it makes sense that crime will increase, but in absolute terms, we are talking about small numbers’, says Jan Wahideh of the WODC.

The greatest outrage over asylum seekers was felt in de Beverwaard, but there is nothing left of it there

The suffering from asylum seekers that residents of Rotterdam were afraid of at the coming of asylum seekers has not materialised. This is consistent with the findings of the WODC Research Institute. ‘We were stirred up,’ says a resident in the neighbourhood. (+)”

Full article with additional statistics: https://www.volkskrant.nl/4564736

I’ll soon translate the original into Hungarian for those of my former compatriots who do not comprehend the text in English.

by P.S.

Advertisement

Intercultural life in the Netherlands

06 Monday Jun 2016

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in child development, Dutch culture, education, immigration, intercultural learning, Netherlands

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

appreciation of variety, cultural variety, education, education in the netherlands, intercultural festival, Netherlands, primary school

cl_043_ 001I’ve almost begun this post as most of my Chinese students back then in China began most of their (almost always very optimistic) papers: “In our highly developed, modern society …” But before I completely change my mind, let me begin by saying that in our societies in Europe, it’s more important than before that our children appreciate variety in the world, learn to understand and live alongside various other cultures than their own immediate background. When knives and guns are aimed from left and right at people that others think are ‘different’, meaning ‘strange’, ‘dangerous’, ‘threatening’ and this feeling is sometimes enhanced by the reality that others may actually be that, what can we do? When we think of ‘us’ v. ‘others’, let’s not forget that in such equations, we are ‘others’ to them just like that. And when we think that ‘others’ are dangerous, it means we are dangerous too and then how can we stay alive?

In today’s Europe this question is debated all over. What I was surprised to hear a few month back was that the largest country of the EU, which also has been having probably the largest imported work force, from Turkey, for that matter, has always forgotten about language teaching to those working for them. Thanks to improved understanding and policy, Germany may soon start teaching their language to those who have come and worked in Germany.

Great move. Hopefully not too late. But here in the Netherlands, such policies have long been in place and contributed to the peaceful living together of millions of people from all over the world, lots of whom are not only from former colonies, and lots of whom are muslims, or at least non-Christians.

P1120868I’ve already praised the language teaching system that allows immigrating adults to learn Dutch almost free of charge, or at least very cheaply and efficiently. Now I’ve just witnessed workings of a perhaps even more important ground for future peace: a primary school. The bigger kid of the Chinese partner to this post has already been going to school for a year. I’ve often seen kids coming or going to that school and already known that it lies in a ‘mixed nationality’ area of town. This means that probably all nationalities are represented at school, form Moroccans and Turks through Chinese, Indonesians, Thai, Surinamese and Syrians to Somalis and other black Africans. These can be very well seen in the area, but let’s add a probably huge number of Polish and some Hungarian people and we have a real cauldron.

So far I’ve found kids after school very interesting because most of them are so little that they have to be picked up by parents at the end of the day. Then I can see they talk their own languages to their parents but happily talk Dutch to all their friends to say good-bye. Nice. And of course the language of instruction inside is Dutch. The common denominator is important for understanding the society around us and to integrate into it.

P1120858Now, the school finds the original cultures of their kinds also important. We can’t deny that these exist: those parents (or their parents earlier) have come from somewhere else and it’s just natural that mother speaks her mother tongue to her children. The great thing is that the school understands the values embedded in such diversity. Instead of pointing at each others with grins, they are given the opportunity to first take everything around them at face value and accept it – no kid even realizes that some of them have very dark skins, others very white, yet again others different eyes or something – and then at the end of the school year, the school organizes a little festival to bring out the values inherent in the population of the school. This is what I’m going to show you parts below.

P1120861First, it was interesting to hear that the leader of the event found it important to wear a clothes and a piece of jewellery from Somalia. And to tell the kids about it too, and proudly at that.

As kids start going to school at age 4 in the Netherlands, no wonder the whole things was sometimes quite noisy, yet, it was apparently to all kids’ interests and they took part in chorus singing with obvious enthusiasm.

At the beginning there was Turkish dancing for everybody’s delight – even some teachers joined towards the end.

Most of the event contained singing and as parents were also invited not only to attend but also to take part, the co-writer of this blog decided to contribute as well.

The following are the recordings I took of her performing two Chinese songs. Her first performance started with inviting kids to help her play out the scene in the lullaby, thereby making the foreign text somewhat understandable to the very young audience. For those who find the Dutch introduction too long, the song starts at 5′ into the video. What I find important here is the children’s enthusiasm to join the ranks on the stage.

With the next song, teachers were asked to participate, again to great cheers. Children of all nationalities were chanting their favourite teacher’s names to make them join a song they knew they would not understand. Here the song starts rolling at 4′ into the recording.

There was also a very nice, colourful act with pairs of little ones parading clothes worn in their (or rather, their parents’) country of origin, again to great cheering from the audience.

The even practically closed with a Dutch song. The kids’ performance itself was not of the most outstanding quality but they had all volunteered in the first place, like the others, but what is here very important is that this is a Dutch song in front of a very multi-cultural audience, of which the most enthusiastic co-singers were ….

I hope my dear visitor also enjoyed the above and understands what I mean without me going on ranting about it. I just wish the world had a lot more similar institutions, events and joy about our differences and we can see more and proud wearers of such fabulous clothes and singers of such enchanting songs like on that day.

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

Teach Dutch to refugees

17 Sunday Jan 2016

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Dutch, Netherlands

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

De docent die we zoeken:

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

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

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

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

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

by P.S. 

Eastern-European views on the Netherlands

23 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in European Union, Hungary, Netherlands

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Dutch people, European Union, Netherlands, Western Europe, work in the Netherlands

When I registered myself and moved to this country, it was a personal matter. But after I had lived in China for three years, I definitely felt it may be a lot better option than staying in Hungary. At the time, Hungary had a Socialist government whose prime minister admitted to lying all the time to their people, but he didn’t resign. After a few years, Hungary got into the grips of a leftist government who built up a two-thirds majority from 53% of the votes of 53% of the voting-age population, which they managed to strengthen with changes to the constituencies. Now they have a two-thirds majority with 44.8% of the votes of about 52% of voters (detailed results in Hungarian here).

Since then, the country has been receiving a lot of criticism from the EU and the US for actions and declarations from mostly the Prime Minister about building a non-liberal democracy. The government seems to have changed not only the constituencies to its advantage, but has changed almost all institutions of importance, like the central bank, the media, courts of justice, the national tax office and its supervising agency, has syphoned the billions of pension reserves of future pensioners and is replicating the action with the last remaining reserves of those who were not involved in the first round, has been driving public education and the health system almost into the ground with fully taking their administration into the (rather inexpert) hands of the government. Now, after a lot of negative experience with my original country, it’s time to take stock of where my choice of leaving Hungary has led me to, and whether a similar action of fellow Hungarians would be worth it.

Emigration has been escalating ever since former members of the Warsaw Pact have been admitted to the EU and the area of the Schengen Agreement. The main targets of movements have been Germany and the UK, but besides Austria, a lot of other Hungarians have moved to the Netherlands as well, so it’s important to look at the situation and chances in this country for East-Europeans.

Most of my friends here have pointed it out as a fact that circumstances in the Netherlands have been deteriorating for about 15 to 20 years. Younger people have been complaining about too many rules, but to my mind, they should look at Hungary with its ever-changing regulations for solace. The most important factor is then security. Regulations don’t keep changing, people are more-or-less reliable with a number of them to be certain to let you down without a word if you’re not chosen for a position, but life in general is just as secure here as anywhere in the developed world (or in China, for that matter). Institutions take care of you, most matters can be securely and quickly handled, or at least registered for handing, over the internet, there’s not much waiting time for almost anything. Systems work well, charges and prices are on a level which are not above reasonable limits.

Prices are nowadays just as high (of low, if you like) as in Hungary, except for housing prices. You have to be aware that by selling a property in Hungary, you get nowhere here, but renting is reasonable – while there’s a 1-to-5 ratio for buying a flat, renting one may not cost you a lot more than in Budapest. There is a system of help for poorer people too. You can get help for the compulsory and comparably very high rate of health security insurance, like for renting. However, you have to avoid a trap here. Possibilities are that you can get a part of your renting fees and health insurance fees covered by the government/national tax office.

However, they reckon you are a member of the family where you rent a room if your address is the same. All of this year, I’ve been demanded to repay the amount I was paid in 2011, and although I’ve pointed out that I, as a 56-year-old Hungarian man, didn’t marry a 64-year-old Dutchman a year after his wife had died of cancer, such things, as I’ve found out, do not matter: one is considered to be living together with another if the address is the same, and one hasn’t got access to a separate kitchen and bathroom. I did, still, my case is still pending and I can’t be sure I can avoid paying back nearly a thousand Euros I was given three years ago.

Thankfully, no such problems with health insurance, which is about 60% covered by the health subsidy if your earnings are low. Just be aware that insurance costs and the amount you have to pay before you get paid by the insurer (your own risk) keeps climbing, your subsidy decreases as you earn more, but all these are expected and not dramatic changes like in Hungary. If you have a profession, you may or may not get a job, circumstances depending. As you can get informed from my earlier posts here, a teacher with a foreign degree has next to no chance, except if he has a British degree. If you have good expertise and documents about it in a special area of industry, you can get a job for a year or two, but, like Polish people, you may come in for a lot of criticism and problems. Some leaders in industry may even directly cheat you.

The situation hasn’t been helped by a large number of Romanians who had come here to take up the support and then disappeared. I could have done that if I had moved back to Hungary one or two years after I had taken the support. As a large number of temporary workers come into the industrial sector from Poland, I have to add a few words about them too. A couple of years ago statistics indicated that they had already become the largest minority group in the Netherlands. As a result, the xenophobic, anti-Islam, anti-foreigner right-wing Freedom party made a lot of noise and came in for a lot of criticism after they tried to temper with the situation over the internet and over working rights. This weakened their position in the Parliament at the elections in 2012, so since then, politics has been looking relatively quiet here. As it is, Polish people do not stay in the country, rather, they help the industry a lot by offering cheap work that locals couldn’t or wouldn’t do, stay for a year in shacks and then take the remains of their wages back home. They aren’t a burden for the security system so they are a lot more useful than some of the other foreigners who stay, scarcely get work and live on subsidies.

On the streets, the huge variety of people you can see seems like a security against anti-foreigner sentiments, but while security is very good, crime rates are low, your bicycle may still be stolen or damaged, small miscalculations in the supermarket could happen and groups of youngsters may shout at you in the street on the way home from school. But when you get into trouble in the street, even young guys will help you instantly.

If one stays here for good, one has to live on something. If you have incomes not exceeding ten thousand Euros per year, you don’t have to register anywhere other than with the local government and get a bank account, then you get your social security number and can fill in your tax return on-line. To perform many kinds of economic activities, you have to ask for a “VAR”, which is a declaration to perform your activities as an individual normally under licenses asked of a company. Above that sum, you have to register yourself as a small company, or a “ZZP’er”, and with that you’re asked to register for VAT (“BTW” in Dutch). This VAT is only slightly less than in Hungary, it stands at 21% now, so don’t underestimate it. Business charges burdened on businesses here is not a real reason for anyone to escape the Hungarian system.

Accountability and help from the system is. If you have any questions, you can make an appointment with relevant institutions within a few days, and if they can’t answer you well enough (probably because your question is outside their competency), they will still refer you to information or organizations that can. If you don’t have high skills, or can’t use them, or just want to try something new on the job market, the most usual way to do it is walk into a temporary job agency, or “uitzendbureau”, and you may get a small job for minimum wages at a factory, store, or the post office centre. In such a case, all administration, security deductions etc. are done by the agency and you can do your tax return the following year copying stuff from their year-end declaration.

What you can’t avoid for long is payment for health security, which is high and rates keep crawling upwards. You can try to use the European Health Insurance Card, but it’s intended for travellers, not for people settled at an address within the EU, so you have to get insured by the compulsory local system. Sooner or later, you’ll be demanded to do so anyway as all systems are linked together. Even your bank has to declare your basic data to the tax system once a year, only the details are secret. But one can live with this small matter.

On the whole, the Netherlands, with all its cultural void compared to Hungary, with all its quiet and efficiency and relative coldness of the population, is a good choice for those who want to start again on a calculable basis.

by P.S.

Everywhere …

16 Thursday Oct 2014

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in education, Hungary, translation, university education

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

China, education, Hungary, Netherlands, people's behaviour

I know you already have at least an inkling that wherever you are, independent of the country, things are bound to go wrong even after they look like going well. In this post, I only want to add to that roster of experience about the fickleness of life in various countries. I’ll start with the country that may be my favourite. Actually, I don’t have much to add after the Chinese Language Blog of Transparent Language has posted a discussion of bad things, and also of good things about China.

This is the correct attitude, but these post are general, whereas my examples are concrete, something that could happen to anyone on floor level. Although I could obviously add items to the negative list like there’s no real nature in China, all parks are fake, trees are mishandled, environmental pollution is rampant and growing faster than economic development, I’d like to tell you about an issue that a local leader I worked for experienced.

He was the Department Leader at the Economics Department of the university where I worked back in those days. He decided that at the rate of 16 hours of teaching a week, the ‘foreign experts’ cannot do enough preparation and provide enough quality for the students that he required, so he hired one more foreign teacher and unofficially reduced the number of hours allocated for each of us.

Actually, his plan worked well for me as I felt obliged to satisfy my students’ need and request for some extra activities, so we enjoyed watching and discussing several films over several weeks.

However, the Dean of the university found out about it in the middle of the second half-year, reprimanded the department head, and radically reduced the number of foreign teachers the following year. It didn’t have much impact on me as I was moving on, but it impacted the following year’s students substantially. Quality-wise, which is difficult to assess of course. I wholly enjoyed my following year at another branch of the same uni, but this case left a warning impression on me. Besides the lack of internet freedom.

In the Netherlands, I’ve been enjoying my life quite freely. A quiet country (if you forget about the rampage they go on on Queen’s (now King’s) Day, or at a football match, or about the sense of proprietorship concerning their own property even without fences), they smile at you a lot in the street except in Amsterdam, where people behave just like everywhere else on fashionable territory, well-organized, people behave, offices work efficiently, provide social security benefits for the needy … Fine, ain’t it?

It took some time for me to discover, through a friend, that I’m entitled for help for the money I pay for my rent and social security costs. I applied, got it and was happy. Ever after, right?

Not exactly. At the beginning of this year (2014), I was informed that I had to repay almost a thousand euros (the whole amount) that I was given for 2011, because I had lived at the same address as some other people: the person whose room I was renting back then, and his adult daughter, and another person who also rented a room there. So the office reckoned we were all the same happy family, our incomes were put together and, as a result, I had had no right for housing allowance. I should pay back. For those not really aware of the weight of money, this is an amount to the value of a teacher’s three months’ net monthly salary in Hungary.

This is insane enough, since I’ve been renting another room for more than two years now, I’m a man of Hungarian origin with my own son back in Budapest, not with a Dutch daughter of 22, who is from the owner’s deceased wife who had died a year before. Not to mention that I had no income during the period in question due to severe illness. And not to mention the fact that I never married that man after his wife had died …

But no data had been checked except the address. I was allowed to apply for redress. We had to explain the whole situation with a lot of documents about the family situation and the situation of the house. On top of this, although they wrote to me that, until the case is decided, I don’t have to pay, I haven’t received a decision until now – instead, I received another order to pay up two weeks ago. No reply yet to my second protest.

If this is not enough, my last case involves Hungary. Nobody may be surprised that when I had graduated and then applied to be trained as a Geologist, I was told I should be happy to have been educated enough at the cost of the working people and now I should be happy with it and work myself. No further education in the socialist system for me.

What did I have to do? I did what I had room for and became a teacher trainer, and a project member with the British Council, with a lot of excellent students in my schools along the way, quite a number of whom became English teachers themselves a couple of decades ago.

After three decades, however, the appeal I used to have for my students, and also the interests of students, have changed dramatically, and I have ended up with the same work I started to do more than two decades ago: I became a translator. I can’t complain about it, but I still don’t have the education about it, no degree, only experience, but with very little feedback, which I had very much rather get.

So I entered a university course in Budapest this autumn. I began the course, but before that, I had talked to the department head in July, who encouraged me to apply for an individual course of studies, practically doing the course over the internet. I live in the Netherlands, and I would like to stay here among my best friends instead of paying for my room and health insurance while living elsewhere. I was told to collect the signatures of my teachers allowing me to do it over the net, so I reckoned I should first go to lessons, then ask them to sign.

At that point, the head told me I should ask for a form to be filled in from the Students’ Office, where, however, I was informed that the application deadline had expired – at the end of the first week! I am still flabbergasted! At the best university of Hungary, one is expected to apply, as an unknown person to them, for special treatment by unknown teachers, who may even be absent in the first week, thus unavailable (one was in fact absent for two weeks).

Now it is my fault not to have checked upon the deadlines, but when you go to buy a chair at IKEA, do you check if they had packed all the screws and screwdrivers in the package right after you’ve bought it? I had been told by the department head that it’s alright, go for it, and when the deadline had passed, she told me I should just go ahead, she would help me with my application with the university leaders, I can quietly leave. Case closed with success.

After all this, she went to the deputy dean for students’ affairs and wrote a letter to all my teachers to scrap me from the roster because I “hadn’t even paid the fee”. Which I had paid two weeks before her letter. When she talked to the deputy dean, she didn’t even check whether I had paid my dues. I may even not get back the fee I had paid, let alone successfully finish my studies. I’ve been in limbo and in a lot of doubts ever since.

Up to this point, I didn’t have time to think about my application for writing my thesis. The rule is that this must be submitted before half-time of the last-but-one semester when the thesis is to be submitted, in our case, one-and-a-half months after we started the one-year course. Then I realize now that with the same sweep of her mind, thinking I hadn’t paid, the department head refused to sign my application earlier this week, so by now, I have also missed this deadline. Even if the dean consents to my request to carry on with my studies after all, it does not seem feasible for me to finish it on time.

This is not a system geared to work badly – this is only a system of formalities, keeping to deadlines no matter what. I can only personally re-claim the fee that I don’t need any more, and only a part of it. I’ve been told to behave like an adult by a clerk in the Students’ Affairs department, whereas it is the Department Head who has behaved like a child to me. I’ve been acting in good faith and am looking to loose almost as much as by the Dutch department for housing allowances. If only the department head had the guts to go ahead with what she told everyone, her teachers included, to do.

All in all, it’s usually not the system, but the participants in the system who make it feel …

by P.S.

Summer disappointment on the Dutch job market

02 Friday Aug 2013

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in applying for a job in the Netherlands, English teaching, job application, work in Dutch education

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

failure of web-sites, Job Search, Netherlands

Netherlands

Netherlands (Photo credit: Vicki Devine)

I already described elsewhere how the Dutch job market is organized and what web-sites you can link to and search if you want to find a teaching job (in most cases other jobs as well) in the Netherlands. But what I have just found in some cases is worth complaining about. Not all is a bed of … well, tulips in the Netherlands.

Anyone can run into such disheartening experience any time from now, I thought, when I got my regular daily message from one of the biggest sites scraping the Dutch job market, Trovit. A click on the ‘Docent Engels (op Speurders)’ button, I did get to a place under Speurders, but inside, it appeared to be an ad placed there by Banenmatch. Because it concerned a vacancy in my area, I clicked on the link below on Banenmatch, which promised to give me more information.

When I did so, it gave me no more information (actually, being a very small text in the first place, it still did not give me anything particular about any details and circumstances concerning the job other than the area), but at least there was a button which said ‘Solliciteren’. This means ‘to apply’, so I hoped to get somewhere important by hitting this button, but I was only led to a page of another agency, Multilingual careers, which still gave me the exact same text as the one three clicks before.

There was then a button called ‘Apply at external website’, so I happily clicked on this. Then it appeared that the job should be on the site of DPA Detachering. If you look at this page, you’ll agree with me that this doesn’t get me to a description of the job concerned, only to their home-page. I have tried to find the job using the categories in their search window, but I failed to see the ‘Docent Engels’ ad anywhere. It just does not exist!

Reacting to another job ad, I came duly to one of the organizations where I am also already a member, also the above-mentioned Multilingual careers. Here, I had to find out that my personal info was not yet full because I should still upload my CV. I saved my CV in several formats and tried to upload them in turns, but none worked, my CV could not be uploaded. There’s no button to upload it in the first place, but I hoped that the Save button does the trick. Well, no, it doesn’t. The page offers a possibility instead to create my CV according to the formula of the EU system. The only problem is that getting to ‘Former employers’, one is required to give each and every detail about all my previous employers, which, after I have had about twenty former employers over about thirty-five years, takes a bit of time to fill in; even more dauntingly, I long ago lost addresses, names, or the then bosses and contacts leading to them, especially because more than one are already dead, and most of the others were probably replaced long ago. Important requirements I admit, but people with a longer career abroad behind them find it next to impossible to fulfill. One more reason why young people get the chances.

I tried to react to a third advertisement as well, but when I got to the site in question, Metafoor personeelsbank, where I am also logged in, it told me that I could raise the completeness of my personal page by adding information about my education. Well, there are details about that, and many more, on the personal page, but there is no place or button leading to a separate ‘Education’ page, so I can’t add anything new. Unfortunately, though the info is there in separate lines, to an employer looking at my description, it appears that I haven’t got any education, so he’ll abandon my page. And I am not given a chance to improve the situation. There is no category on the page to give info about the required category!

English: Different types of Dutch cheese

English: Different types of Dutch cheese (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So much about the famous Dutch organizational skills. Looks rather cheesy. The thing actually looks pathetic, but in my situation, I can’t really choose if I should laugh hard or cry hard … Any preference, anyone?

by P.S.

Related articles
  • Size matters: How to keep your CV short and sweet (reed.co.uk)
  • How to best tap into the hidden job market (thejobguy.me)
  • Restyle Your Resume For Instant Results On The Job Market (makeuseof.com)
  • The Hidden Job Market (stacywhalsy.wordpress.com)
  • Employment sentiment continues to dwindle (lexingtonlaw.com)
  • Nationally-Renowned Grief Expert Releases New Strategies for Coping… (prweb.com)

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

27 Monday May 2013

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

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

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

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

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

Dear Sir,

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

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

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

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

Best regards

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by. P.S.

Related articles
  • Are you making the most out of your Recruitment Agent? (graduate-rescue-blog.com)
  • One of 500 (insidehighered.com)
  • “youth and kids and the jobhunt” (humidityandhome.wordpress.com)
  • 6 steps to find work as a Jobless graduate (graduatemploy.wordpress.com)

Bending immigration statistics – English version

15 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in European Union, immigration, language learning, Netherlands

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Bulgarian, Eastern Europe, European Union, German, Immigration, Netherlands, Romanians

As I promised yesterday, I am adding my English version of my criticism of a Dutch article from yesterday here. The original of the article,

 Immigratie steeds meer uit Oost- en Zuid-Europa

or “Immigration grows again from East- and South-Europe”, published by NRC Handelsblad on 8th March, can only be accessed digitally by registered users of the NRC Handelsblad. Sorry about that.

The bending of statistics

We already know that demagogy knows no borders. Communism spread from Germans in London on to Russians, Cubans, Indians and North-Koreans, Nazism spread from Germany through Italy and Austria to Finland and Japan. It’s well-known that statistics are an important and good way of describing the world, but also that, in the wrong hands, it can lead to demagogy. I am quite used to it in Hungary, but it surprised me here in the Netherlands the other day.

I always thought NRC a high-quality newspaper, until now. This opinion changed when I read their article of 8th March about immigration. In this article, they distort statistics, not very seriously, but enough so that people do not give it a second thought. If someone seriously distorts the truth, people may also react strongly and fast and think that a refusal is necessary. But a little clouding over easily remains unobserved. Easily creeps into the mind as the truth. And I find that dangerous.

NRC Handelsblad

NRC Handelsblad (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What do the writers state? First of all, it is not clear from the article if they use the statistical figures they quote on yearly basis, or as the sum total of immigrants. In most cases it can be said that it is not likely that a country with 17 million inhabitants receives close to 600 thousand people from the EU each year (the population of the Netherlands is still growing, but not that much), but who knows, it may be possible in the case of Bulgarians, whose numbers grew from 6 thousand in 2007 to 18 thousand in 2012. The article does not say at all that that means the whole number of Bulgarians that live in the country. But the article starts by saying that “Most migrants (!?) who come to the Netherlands, … from within the European Union.” (!? is my addition, because I also find it conspicuous that immigrants are usually called migrants in the article, as if they were just shifting like nomads; and the word, in the headline of the attached chart, can be understood as people migrating from the EU, to other countries, that is.) So is it first about the number of migrants who are coming at the moment (in Dutch, the normal present tense is used for general, momentary and even future meaning, so ‘komen’ allows for all interpretations)? Afterwards, the article only uses full data sums of people living here. It becomes thus shifty. Why? Because otherwise, people could clearly see that there are only 18.000 Bulgarians in their country of 17 million, which only means 0.1% of the whole population. People could simply ask, “What’s the problem?”

European Union

European Union (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The second problem with this piece is that it is highly unclear what they mean by East- and Middle-Europe. Added to this, this dubious idea is washed together with East- and South-Europe, which shouts out of the headline as if it were an entity. Completely wrong. What is this article actually about? But it seems to be alright for the masses of Dutch, they should not worry about such small matters, and that is good enough for the editors.

Furthermore, from the chart it seems that about 580 thousand people live in the Netherlands from the EU (and the number is rising). Here, South-, and East- and Middle-Europe are separated. But where do Bulgarians, or Rumanians belong? Alright, it does not matter. According to the text, “the number of migrants from the previously communist (my problem: all those countries were ‘socialist’, not ‘communist’ – we knew our definitions better) EU-countries has risen … to 237 thousand,” and that seems represented in the chart by the ‘Middle- and East-Europe‘ line. Besides that problem of where Bulgaria and Romania belong (politically perhaps East, geographically South!), we have the problem of who are most of the immigrants.

EU and candidates

EU and candidates (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

From the text, we have the following, “Most migrants from inside the EU come from Poland.” Same problem as above: do they mean ‘are coming’? This is important because we get only the percentage of Polish people. What does their 28% really mean (if it means 28% of those now coming, then we have a problem of who constitute the 237 thousand)? If it means the percentage of all present inhabitants from the EU, then it gives 165 thousand Poles who live in the Netherlands. Whether only short-term, or long-term, it does not seem to matter. Well, from the chart we see that the number of EU citizens living here from the EU is 580 thousand. Out of this number, and from the number of Bulgarians and Romanians (only 18.000 and 14.000 respectively) at fourth and fifth place, we can find that the group of Germans and Belgians at second and third place should be really large, but the article does not say anything. Otherwise, however, where do men between 200 thousand (all Poles, Romanians and Bulgarians) and the full 580 thousand from the EU come from? Each other country can send only fewer than 14.000 people, the number of Romanians at fifth place. We can thus only guess that there are also relatively many English (who come to do translation or language teaching), Spanish, Greeks, perhaps also Portuguese and Italians living here. There can’t be many from other countries, so we can guess that there are about 50 thousand from those five countries. Add a number of thousand Hungarians, Czechs and Slovaks. After that, it is not likely that many people emigrate from dynamic and very small countries like Estonia, Slovenia, Cyprus or Malta, and French and Nordic people also do not do so. This leads me to deduce that we still miss about 300 thousand to make up the 580 thousand. That number can only belong to the Germans and Belgians, who account for the second and third largest group, although not given in numbers.

What does this mean? It means that more Germans and Belgians together live here than those from all other countries of the EU. However, this is not a problem at all in the article. It tells us nothing about the 300 thousand. Also no word about South-Europeans. Only in the headline, further nothing. It tells us only about the 0.1% Bulgarians and Romanians, and of course the Polish people.

Why is it a problem, according to the article? Because “last year there were a good 4 (four!) thousand EU people receiving social security provisions, and that number … is rising.” That is 0.068% of all ‘migrants’. It says nothing about the 17 million (my addition, based on the opinion of friends and facts: for example about the thousands and thousands of Dutch who rarely worked in their lives and receive regular social security support). So what a problem that that number of 4 thousand is rising! Where is it going to lead? “We still don’t know exactly how much of those don’t have a right to those provisions,” they admit, but we should think that a few hundred more illegal receivers of social support will cause a really big problem.

5886859183_6b31c87b95_mSo, “There is fear of a social security migration.” Indeed. According to the newspaper, there is no such problem with the two and a half million people from countries outside the EU, or the 300 thousand Germans and Belgians, only with those 4 thousand on social support. Or with the 165 thousand Polish people, most of whom, by the way, are provisional guest workers and busy working hard in industry. Or with the Rumanians and Bulgarians, who may be more professionally able to work in industry or in language education than some Dutch, but may not get work on account of never being able to speak the language well enough. That is a problem, but not in the article. East- and Middle-Europe is complaining of ‘brain drain’, but at the moment, thousands of people with high levels of education from there have to work as cleaning personnel, postmen, or storage personnel. About which the Dutch do not know. That is a problem. Yet, the writer-editors, and as they say, some ministers do as if the country should quickly stop the influx of East-Europeans.

I think that if that is the message, Western Europe had not thought over the effects of widening the community well enough. And then the Netherlands could shut down their borders in front of all immigrants. Just like some professions are shut down by law.

But then, to lay all fault on the shoulders of “East-Europeans” is demagogy from the cold war.

by P.S.

Only after I added the links below did I realize that such a problem and debate is raging in the UK as well now. My readers are kindly asked to contribute their opinion about it all below in the ‘Reply’ space. Thank you.

Related articles
  • Benefit plans target new EU migrants (bbc.co.uk)
  • Outrage at new migrant flood: Public force MPs to debate block on benefit tourists (express.co.uk)
  • UK attracts most immigrants in whole of EU (telegraph.co.uk)
  • Outrage at new migrant flood (express.co.uk)
  • UK citizens WILL have to abide by the same benefits rules as EU immigrants (express.co.uk)
  • Why has Romania got such a bad public image? (bbc.co.uk)
  • Romanian Campaign Hits Back At Negative British Ads (rferl.org)
  • Rhetoric ‘could lead to racist abuse’ of EU immigrants (morningstaronline.co.uk)
  • British National Party Leader, MEP Nick Griffin: UK Press Targets Bulgarians, Romanians Because They Are White Europeans, Not Muslims (novinite.com)

Bending immigration statistics

14 Thursday Mar 2013

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in European Union, immigration, language learning, Netherlands

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

European Union, Netherlands, NRC Handelsblad

Dear reader,

I feel I have to turn my attention over to subjects that have little to do with language learning. As I am also a geographer by education, so statistics and politics are not far from me. The topic of migration is also to some extent to do with language knowledge, at least here in the Netherlands I have to find that to my own disadvantage. So what I’m writing about also relates to languages. Or politics. Please don’t be too much taken aback.

Over the last few weeks nothing much has been happening to me, no news on the job front, still lingering health problems, no new experience except at the language course, where we were given an article from NRC Handelsblad of 8th March which discusses immigration from some countries within the EU. It is called

Immigratie steeds meer uit Oost- en Zuid-Europa.

As in my opinion this article distorts truth, I want to react to the editors of the newspaper, so my text is still in Dutch. I still have to work on it to make it shorter so that it falls within their limits, but here I can publish it as it came to me. It’s in Dutch, but for the benefit of those who don’t understand that language, I’ll soon translate it to English. Now it goes like the following.

Het verdraaien van statistiek

We weten al dat demagogie geen grenzen kent. Communisme verspreidde zich van Germanen in London naar de Russen, de Cubanen, de Indiërs en de Noord Koreanen, Nazisme verspreidde zich van Duitsland door Italië en Oostenrijk naar Finland en Japan. Dat statistiek een belangrijke en goeie mannier van het omschrijving van de wereld is, is bekend, maar ook, dat het in slechte handen tot demagogie kan verworden. Ik ben eraan gewend, dat het vaak op zo’n mannier in Hongarije gaat, maar het verbaast me in Nederland.

NRC Handelsblad

NRC Handelsblad (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ik dacht altijd, dat NRC een dagblad met kwaliteit is, tot nu toe. Dit is veranderd toen ik hun artikel op 8 maart over immigratie heb gelezen. Ze verdraaien statistiek, niet serieus, maar genoeg, zodat mensen er eigenlijk niet veel over zouden moeten nadenken. Als iemand de waarheid sterk vervalst, zouden mensen snel reageren en hun afkeuring kenbaar maken. Maar een kleine onduidelijkheid kan niet makkelijk ontdekt geworden. En dat vind ik gevaarlijk.

Wat zeggen de redacteuren? Ten eerste is het in het artikel niet duidelijk of het aantal migranten er eigenlijk per jaar of als het hele aantal gebruikt is. Met de meeste getallen is het niet waarschijnlijk dat in een land van 17 miljoen mensen elk jaar bijna 6oo duizend immigranten uit de EU krijgt, maar wie weet het met het aantal Bulgaren, het aantal waarvan steeg tussen 2007 en 2012 van 6.000 tot 18.000? Het artikel zegt het nergens duidelijk, dat dat het volle aantal is, hoewel het artikel begint met te zeggen, dat “De meeste migranten die naar Nederland komen, … van binnen de Europese Unie.” Dus is het eerst over het aantal migranten die nu aan het komen zijn? Daarna gebruikt het artikel alleen volle bedragen. Dus wordt het niet duidelijk. Waarom niet? Omdat de mensen dan wel zouden zien dat er alleen maar 18.000 Bulgaren in hun land van 17 miljoen blijven, die alleen maar 0.1% van de bevolking uitmaken. Mensen zouden dan makkelijk kunnen vragen, ‘Wat is het probleem?’

European Union

European Union (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ten tweede is het helemaal niet duidelijk, wat de krant bedoelt met Oost- en Midden-Europa.  Bovendien is die onduidelijk idee “samengespoeld” met Oost- en Zuid-Europa, die in de krantenkop staat alsof het een eenheid zou zijn. Helemaal fout. Waarover gaat het artikel eigenlijk? Maar het blijkt goed voor de meeste Nederlanders, ze kunnen zich over zo’n kleine probleem helemaal niet schelen, en dat is goed voor de redactie.

Verder blijkt uit de grafiek, dat er nu ongeveer 580 duizend mensen uit de EU in Nederland blijven. Hier is Zuid-EU en Midden- en Oost-Europa verschillend. Maar waar horen Bulgaren of Roemenen bij? OK, het maakt niet uit. Volgens de tekst, “het aantal migranten uit de voormalig communistische EU-landen steeg … naar 237 duizend”, en dat blijkt de lijn ‘Midden- en Oost-Europa’ in de grafiek te zijn. Behalve het probleem waar Bulgarije bij hoort (politiek Oost, geografisch Zuid!), krijgen wij het probleem wie het meeste immigranten zijn.

Uit de tekst blijkt het volgende: “De meeste migranten van binnen de EU komen uit Polen”. Bedoelt de redacteuren dat de meeste NU komen uit Polen? Het is belangrijk, omdat wij alleen een procent bij de Polen krijgen. Wat betekent hun 28% eigenlijk? Als het de % van alle hedendaagse bewoners uit EU betekent, dat maakt het 165 duizend Polen uit die in Nederland wonen. Tijdelijk, of lange termijn, dat doet er niet toe. Nou, uit de grafiek blijkt het aantal EU-immigranten 580 duizend te zijn. Uit dit cijfer en het aantal van Bulgaren en Roemenen (alleen 18.000 en 14.000) op de vierde en vijfde plaats lijkt dat de groep mensen uit Duitsland en België op tweede en derde plaats heel groot moet zijn, hoewel het artikel dat niet zegt. Maar anders, waar komen mensen tussen het aantal 200 duizend (alle Polen, Roemenen en Bulgaren) en de EU-totaal van 580 duizend vandaan? Enkele andere landen sturen minder dan 14 duizend, het aantal Roemenen op vijfde plaats. Dus kunnen wij alleen raden, dat er nog veel Engelsen (hier om te vertalen of les te geven), Spanjaarden, Grieken, misschien Portugezen en Italianen hier wonen. Uit andere landen waarschijnlijk niet veel, dus kunnen wij raden dat er hier ongeveer 50 duizend meer uit die vijf landen wonen. Wij kunnen nog een paar duizend uit Hongarije, Tsjechië of Slovakië toevoegen. Verder is het helemaal niet waarschijnlijk dat vele duizenden uit de dynamische een heel kleine landen als Estonië, Slovenië, Cyprus of Malta emigreren, ook doen Fransen en Noordelijke mensen dat niet. Dat lijdt tot een aantal van ruim 300 duizend die wij tot 580 duizend nog missen. Dat aantal kan alleen uit Duitsland en België komen, die op de tweede en derde plaats staan, zonder cijfers.

Wat betekent het? Het betekent dat er nog meer Duitsers en Belgen in het land wonen dan alle andere mensen uit de hele EU. Maar, volgens dit artikel is het helemaal geen probleem. Het praat over 300 duizend met geen woord. Ook geen woord over Zuid-Europeanen. Alleen in de kop, daarna niks. Het praat alleen over de 0.1% Bulgaren en Roemenen, en natuurlijk over de Polen.

Waarom is het een probleem, volgens het artikel? Omdat “er in Nederland vorig jaar ruim vierduizend EU-burgers waren die een bijstandsuitkering kregen en het aantal neemt … toe.” Dat is 0.068% van alle migranten. Die zegt niks over de 17 miljoen bewoners. Jammer dat het aantal stijgt. Waar leidt dat toe? “We weten nog niet precies hoeveel van hen daar geen recht op hebben”, maar wij moeten denken, dat een paar honderd onrechtelijke bijstandsuitkeringtrekkers meer een heel erg groot probleem kunnen veroorzaken.

Description unavailable

Description unavailable (Photo credit: bogers)

Dus, “Er is vrees voor ‘uitkeringsmigratie’.” Inderdaad. Volgens de krant is er geen probleem met de ruim twee en half miljoen mensen uit andere landen buiten de EU, alleen maar met de ruim 4 duizend mensen met een bijstandsuitkering. Of met de 165 duizend Polen, de meeste waarvan bezig zijn met het hard werken in de industrie. Of met de Roemenen en Bulgaren, die ook in de industrie of in het onderwijs meer professioneel kunnen zijn dan Nederlanders, maar ze kunnen misschien geen banen krijgen omdat ze nooit goed genoeg Nederlands kunnen praten. Dat is een probleem. Oost- en Midden-Europa klaagt over ‘brain drain’, maar tegelijkertijd moeten duizenden daarvan met hoge opleidingsniveau als schoonmakers, postbezorgers, of magazijn medewerkers werken. Nederland weet niks erover. Dat is een probleem. Toch geeft de schrijvers en sommige ministers in, dat het land snel de instroom van duizenden Oost-Europeanen moet stoppen.

Ik denk, dat als het de bedoeling is, hadden er mensen in West-Europa niet goed nagedacht over de gevolgen van de uitbreiding van de EU. Maar dan kan Nederland alle zijn grenzen voor alle immigranten ook sluiten. Net als dat soort banen die nu al rechtelijk gesloten zijn.

Maar van alles de schuld aan de “Oost-Europeanen” geven is demagogie uit de koude oorlog.

Followed by the translation in the following post.

(After writing the above, I shortened my Dutch text to the requirements and sent it to the paper, but they answered that, due to a huge number of new articles, they cannot publish mine. I have to face it: it would be inconvenient.)

by P.S.

Related articles
  • UK attracts most immigrants in whole of EU (telegraph.co.uk)
  • Have you seen our European Recommendations? Call to action! (languagerichblog.eu)
  • Britain has highest immigration in EU (express.co.uk)
  • Assessing the Status of Muslim Immigrants in France: Testing the Bounds of Egalité, Fratenité, Liberté, and Laicité (cristianomlima.wordpress.com)
  • Eliminating Immigrants (clarissasblog.com)
  • Most Canadians in favour of limits on immigration: poll (news.nationalpost.com)

A big leap forward for me … where exactly?

09 Wednesday Jan 2013

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

English as a foreign or second language, Netherlands, Secondary education

For those that already know my story from this blog or from elsewhere, I’m happy to announce that today I received the recognition (‘erkenning’ in Dutch) of my MA from Hungary for the Netherlands on the second level. For the sake of those who are nursing similar ambitions to mine to become active (and salary-earning) members of the Dutch education system, I’d like to elaborate further. It may give you a good laugh …

First of all, to clarify for those who still don’t know what a second-level degree (‘tweedegraads bevoegdheid’) means in this country, let me quickly point out that from now on I have a paper to prove that I’m legitimately able and allowed to give English lessons to students in the secondary system between the ages of 12 and 15, which means the first three years of secondary education. This also means that my MA has actually been accepted as a BA, or something like that. Furthermore, it means that those members of my profession from the former Eastern Block who have studied to get degrees in two subjects at universities for five years (I also read Geography), will also be recognized as having completed three years of study at an Eastern-European high school (‘főiskola’ in Hungary), which would qualify them to teach in primary schools. If you have such a double MA from there, you should also first ask for this second-grade recognition. You won’t get the first-class recognition straight away, but will get second-grade if you ask for it.

If you still want to have first-grade recognition, you can choose to apply for – supervised – practice teaching for a year at a qualified secondary school on that level, or apply to a university to make it possible for you to follow a short programme to reach the same. But this latter also involves practice teaching.

Today I’ve decided to consider my cup half full, instead of pessimistically saying it’s still half empty. If you wouldn’t under any circumstances like to admit that all coins have a second side, please don’t go on reading this. For others, I’d like to shortly explain why my other eye still has tears in it.

The tears may come from crying, but in my case, they may also result from laughing. Hard.

On the one hand, before this recognition, I was told that I can’t have followed enough education in English with two majors compared to Dutch students following one. I wonder what I didn’t read or discuss in my five years. Was there anything missing from Beowulf through Chaucer through Marlow and Dryden to Mary (or Percy Bysshe) Shelley to Laurence? Not to mention all the Americans? Or have I missed a rare use of a particle or preposition in the grammar course? Thirty-four years ago. Guess how much of that knowledge I have had to use through the decades of my career. If I have missed anything in grammar classes, I have definitely had to make up for it through teaching.

Anyway, if I want to get first-degree appreciation, I get the chance to brush all those up, and fast. Time is not on my side.

On the other hand, now I’m allowed to teach kids of ages that I mostly never taught – those under 14. This is where I have no experience and methodological background, nor psychological leanings or instincts. I’m not the playful type. I’m rather the logical and culturally and otherwise interested type. But I can’t teach those who I’ve been teaching for 30 years and more-or-less successfully have been working with. In short, I can’t teach those and how I am able to teach and can teach those and how I’m not able to teach because I may not have been educated enough 34 years ago in facts that a teacher hardly ever uses while teaching, although I’ve read almost everything important published since my graduation, which I doubt very much that a lot of Dutch English teachers ever read. I find this a lovely contradiction, don’t you? But, of course, I’ll do my best if I get the chance.

Finally, a little bit about the supervising we may get during practice teaching from my own point of view. I got training for, and did supervising, or mentoring, or coaching for would-be teachers in Budapest for a decade. It may be interesting to become a ‘mentee’ once again, perhaps supervised by somebody younger and less experienced than I am. However, I definitely have less experience in classes in the Dutch system, so I have to try to look forward to hearing “but we here in the Netherlands …” a lot, possibly followed by remarks like ‘I’ve never hear about Murphy’, or ‘What is First Certificate Language Practice by Vince? I’ve never used anything like that’, and ‘Where can I get Inside Out or English Panorama?’ On the other hand, I’ll have to brace myself to translate the Dutch in the English language tests.

If I survive an interview successfully first. And that has to happen in Dutch, to a large extent. My new paper also stresses that it’s at the discretion of a school to decide how much knowledge of Dutch they require from an English teacher. A few years ago I would have guessed, as much as an American or English colleague was required to speak Hungarian, or Chinese, in Hungary, or in China respectively. Now I’m not so sure. I guess I should go back to Hungary, kick out all those ignorant Americans and take over their jobs. They would be better off if they came here and learnt some Dutch, then earned five times as much. Do I have a future like that here?

by P.S.

Related articles
  • Teaching Abroad: What knowledge do you have to share? (flipkey.com)
  • Game Tactics (teachandlearnwithgeorgia.wordpress.com)

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.

Dutch teacher education – institutional shortsightedness?

22 Thursday Nov 2012

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

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Higher education, Netherlands, Secondary education, Teacher education, Teaching English as a foreign language, Teaching qualification

It has just happened. Just the way I suspected. But it wasn’t a self-fulfilling prediction. It had to happen on the basis of the laws of the land. I knew it.

My father used to say in the old ‘communist’ era that laws are worth as much as they are upheld. But what about bad laws? Or about flexibility often demanded by life?

What happened was the following. As I have been an English teacher all my professional life, which is to say over thirty years, I have tried to get an official permission to teach here as well. I got my degree, along with a degree in Geography, 33 years ago, which means that I haven’t been able to teach during the three years I’ve been in the Netherlands. I let out some steam, did some other things, and then looked for a job. In vain, as those reading my first post will already have known.

I have always taught students in secondary schools in Hungary, then sometimes above, trained trainee teachers for nine of those years, for which I received additional training, and I did all these a little bit more in China too. I tried teaching young kids too, but I felt I wasn’t really cut out for that. During my training years, I also visited a few primary classes, and then I knew more exactly why I wasn’t. In short, it’s a different psychological and intellectual world. The teacher should behave and do things quite differently as a result with kids below 14.

A few weeks ago I applied for the acceptance of my degree in the Netherlands. Fair enough, they didn’t take very long to answer. The only problem is that they let me know I can’t get the same kind of acceptance as back in Hungary. Just as I had supposed.

To make it understandable what the possibilities are, let me explain. In the Netherlands, a secondary teacher can have ‘erste graads’, that is ‘first-degree’, or ‘twede graads’, that is ‘second-degree’ level qualification (or competence, depending on how you like to translate). In the reality of secondary education, this means that the second group of teachers can teach the lower intermediate classes between the ages of 12 and 16, the first-level qualification holders can teach the upper intermediate classes, from age 16 and above. A holder of this qualification can also teach in some classes of higher education, though not at universities.

The answer I was given states that because I received university education not only in English but also in Geography during the same five-year period, I can’t have received the same depth of training as Dutch students with only one degree, that in English, receive. I can either re-apply for a second-degree acceptance, or I can ask for an additional ‘stage’, that is, training, if I still want a first-degree qualification. Fair enough, one could say, and that’s what I’d half-heartedly expected too. Though I had also hope for something better. In a way I got something a bit better with this offer of an additional training period. But I still have my strong reservations.

My first reservation is that no education below the 850 hours received count towards qualification. On paper, my 120-hour teacher-training course and 100-hour CELTA training is nothing here. Never mind that with the latter I could teach English to adults and young adults anywhere in the world. Never mind that I was able to use the first for nine years to train university students who wanted to get a teaching qualification. These count nothing in the eye of the law, all I could do is to go back to a school and get training as if I were my own trainee. It sounds ridiculous.

My second reservation is that by sticking to the word of the law, my experience of 30 years is neglected and negated. I count as if I was still sitting at university and haven’t finished. I am worth as much as I was around 35 years ago, except that I’ve become that much older.

Third, I could qualify, if I wanted, as a second-degree holder. In Hungarian terms, I count as if I had only studied those two subjects at a teacher-training college for three years, as all primary teachers did and still do in Hungary. It doesn’t make a difference that all university students received enough education to enable them to teach at and sometimes above secondary level. Back in the old days, all university students were only allowed to study two subjects, for the sake of their more flexible practical value, and there was no education above that level.

Next, it seems as if all those studies of the English and American literature, syntax, phonetics and the like were also for nothing. Or as if a Dutch second-degree-holder also gets that much and besides, uses literature for 12-year-olds. My guess is that the real difference is in the methodological preparation and that first-degree-holders are the only ones required to do what I did. As for methodology, no preparation is better than long-term practice, which, in my case, is neglected. Also neglected is the fact that I’ve never received proper methodological preparation for young students, yet I could get a second-degree licence to teach them if I wanted. But if I do, say, a half-year practice, I may get enough preparation to be declared a first-degree teacher. Which counts more: half a year of undergoing mentoring the way I did to others, or 30 years of doing teaching and 9 years of mentoring?

I think, after all, that the most important difference between the teachers who are considered first-level and second-level teachers is that the latter should be trained to do what helps young teenagers, and first-level teachers should be trained and equipped to do what suits older teenagers. There is a world of difference between a 12-year-old’s needs and interests and those of a 16-year-old, and the ability and skills to accommodate and adjust to them can only be acquired through practice, not by attending more or fewer classes at university. The latter fast becomes irrelevant. I think I must insert a quote I already used in one of my earlier posts, but this one, out of a Guardian article, is most highly relevant here:

In recent years a very dangerous idea seems to have been accepted by the decision-makers around the education system that the best teachers are the best qualified teachers, leading to a sliding scale of funding that financially disadvantages those without high-class degrees from the classroom. The reality is very different. A good teacher has to be an exceptional communicator, with patience, common sense, focus, more than a little belligerence and vast reserves of tolerance and empathy. Many prospective teachers simply do not possess these qualities and yet are accepted on to teacher training and even passed despite every indication that they do not have what it takes. The most fantastic academic background cannot make up for a lack of these qualities, but a great communicator with a third-class degree has far more than the necessary knowledge to inspire a class of teenagers.

To neglect these points is what seriously counts as shortsightedness. Cling to the letter of the law and neglect the person with experience. Is this Eastern-Europe after all?

However, it must be said to all people with an older degree from Hungary, and very possibly to all those of my friends and acquaintances from Romania, Slovakia, Poland, Serbia, or Croatia who have been doing a great job in their respective countries, that if they would like to come to the Netherlands to try teaching, they will have to undergo the same procedure. Rules are rules, we have to obey them if we want to make a living in the West. Equal opportunity may reach the younger generations, those masses who I trained too, but not those few who received their degrees in times when only a few were able and allowed to. Hours of education received counts, hours of education provided since then does not. We are equal in the EU, but still, there are some who are more equal …

by P.S.

RELATED ARTICLES

  • Anton – Classroom experience was the key to training to be a teacher (and part-time pirate) (getintoteaching.wordpress.com)
  • Daniel – The training path that took me into teaching (getintoteaching.wordpress.com)
  • Michael Gove’s teacher tests are a smokescreen | Darren Macey (guardian.co.uk)
Related articles
  • Charter school group wants to register unqualified teachers (radionz.co.nz)
  • How to Become a Teacher (answers.com)
  • Standardized testing under fire in USA (Education Week)

Discoveries and advice about finding a teaching job in the Netherlands

17 Saturday Nov 2012

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

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

CELTA, education, English as a foreign or second language, Netherlands, Teacher education, Teaching English as a foreign language

As I already dropped a hint in my first post, it is important for someone with a foreign degree to ask his degree to be nationalized by the authorities of the “Ministerie van Onderwijs, Cultuur en Wetenschap”. It can be done through the DUO-group, or through NUFIC. Their web-sites can be found under these names, they describe the necessary procedure and requirements. It takes about six weeks to get your diploma/degree to get what they call ‘erkenning’, or ‘waardering’, after which one can go about job-hunting. For those who are looking for such appreciation of their CELTA, or similar diplomas, I have to add here that Dutch law states that no course counts for ‘diploma waardering’ which involved fewer than 800 teaching hours. The Dutch word ‘diploma’ is equivalent to the English ‘degree’, as MA or above, but CELTA is not one, the English word ‘diploma’ is not equivalent to anything much in the Netherlands in this respect, in spite of what some dictionaries say.

While I’m waiting for DUO to answer my request, I haven’t stopped trying to collect information and submitting applications. In this post, I’d like to describe what I’ve found out in the meantime.

Language Learners and Gaming - IATEFL

Language Learners and Gaming – IATEFL (Photo credit: blogefl)

First of all, though I’ve earlier written that I’ve never met a Dutch at international events, I have to admit that I’ve discovered the presence of an IATEFL-associate at the annual IATEFL (International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language) conference this year. I mean, the presence of ONE person. Smaller countries like Hungary, or Slovakia, regularly send five-six members.

The other thing I’ve found about Dutch presence at IATEFL is that the Dutch organization as partner to this international organization is called ‘Levende Talen’, which, true to its name ‘modern languages’ in English, has 14 modern language sections. This means that the Dutch organization associated internationally has little to do with English, it is only the English section of it which is really associated. Accordingly, their web-site is written in Dutch almost without exception (the exception being a part of the small Italian section-page), and so is the ‘Newsbrief’ of the English section. Unheard of with IATEFL-Hungary, though their web-site content is still relatively weak and under construction, very possibly because of under-funding.

As to finding a job in the Netherlands, it is most advisable to sign up – for free – with some of the national search-engines, which collect a huge number of vacancies daily from throughout the country. Such are, for example, Jobrapido,  Werkgever-vacatures,  Jobbird, Meesterbaan, Trovit, Matafoor personeelsbank, Careerbuilder, Unique, Banenmatch, StudentZonderBijbaan (obviously, mostly for students, so here you can find possibilities for ‘stage’), or FunktieMediair. Some of such search-engines are general kinds, but most have a separate search field for jobs in education. You can also join the international site Skillpages, where you can advertise yourself as having special skills, like languages.

One piece of advice after you start receiving information from one or some other of the above search-engines: when you look at the vacancies contained in the ad, it’s worth opening even those that do not look suitable for your, for example for geographical reasons. I have repeatedly received ads saying in their titles that they concerned a vacancy in, say, Utrecht, but in reality, the job was offered in Tilburg, or Lelystad, or the like. It has also already repeatedly happened with a particular search-engine that a vacancy was said to be for Hungarian speakers in the Netherlands, while inside the text it was revealed that it was intended for German speakers in, say, Brno in the Czech republic. Another company always advertises with a time-frame of 20 to 36 hours per week given on the side-bar, but for a while the applicant is continuously perplexed to find that every second one of their ads is for “0.2fte”, which means 20% salary and workload of a full-time job, which means about 4 or 5 contact hours a week. After a while the unhappy job-seeker comes to understand that this search-engine almost never adjusts its settings to the differences inside its advertisements, so you either open up each and every one of them, or give up bothering about any.

While most schools advertise their own vacancies in the major national newspapers during the main period for job-hunting for the following year, they advertise throughout the year in their region, mostly through their school-groups, or community of schools, like Eudelta, in the delta region in Zuid-Holland and Zeeland, Plana, around Arnhem and Nijmegen in Gelderland, or VIA-scholen for Christian schools in the ‘Bible-belt’ between Gelderland and Utrecht. Besides this, they often outsource most of the selection procedure to headhunter firms, or ‘uitzendbureaus’, which are the most important channels for finding jobs in other sectors of the economy, but not so usual in education. One can find dozens of such ‘uitzendbureaus’ in the centres of all towns and villages, but those for education I’ve found work almost exclusively through on-line search-engines, so one should know about them, like http://www.upointonline.nl/, http://www.intermediair.nl/, http://www.flexibilityonderwijs.nl/, http://fairflex.carerix.net/, or http://www.match4onderwijs.nl.

As I’ve had the good luck to find out, personnel at ‘uitzendbureaus’ care a lot more about the applicant than school personnel. While most advertisements contain constraints that would scare away most applicants, like “if you are experienced in final exam training in VMBO, you’re welcome to apply”, or “we expect applicants who have a distinct affinity to HAVO/MAVO/MBO students” and the like, ‘uitzendbureaus’ have a lot more information about the school’s requirements. They then call each applicant personally and try to understand the strength of applicants while also informing them about all the advantages and drawbacks of the job on offer. Very possibly, they work on the axiom that no perfect match at a given point in time is likely. But they work hard on getting the nearest possible match for their money.

Foreigners with a degree can also approach a school or a university and choose a place where they may get a ‘stage’ (/sta:ʒɘ/, as I’ve already mentioned earlier). This means they may have to work a year full-time, or for several years part-time, but without a salary, while on the other hand they receive experience in the school-type and may have their degrees validated much more easily, but definitely can get a job much more easily than those without having done so. This path is best for those women of the younger generation who have Dutch partners to take care of their daily victuals and other supply. Those having to fend for themselves better be equipped with strong financial reserves and a good measure of optimism. Yet again, this latter kind may be willing to pay several thousands of Euros per year for obtaining a Dutch university degree (‘diploma’ here) after a few years, but they would go to ‘stage’ towards the end anyway.

Whichever way one is willing or able to choose, the need to speak ‘good enough’ Dutch is an unavoidable first requirement. It’s a bit difficult to define ‘good enough’, but judging from my peers at the Dutch course, I suspect that if one speaks very fast, understands everything a native speaker or anyone else throws at him/her, and has a strong foreign accent, his/her mistakes are shrouded up enough to pass as ‘good enough’, which means that fast thinking without translation rules. Quite the opposite of the methods I suspect foreign language teaching employs.

If someone’s Dutch is on a low level, somebody suggested the other day that he/she should not lose heart either. Nowadays, nearly half of school children are not Dutch and do not speak Dutch well either, so they may be a lot better off at an English lesson with a teacher who is only willing to speak English. Older types of teachers may be put out by such a proposition here, but if one gets through such a barrier, they may succeed with flying colours.

English: White Pine Montessori School in Mosco...

English: White Pine Montessori School in Moscow, Idaho, USA; from Wikipedia

A few things to know about while applying. It goes almost without saying that you have to tailor your cover letter to the needs of the school, however strange it may seem when, for example, they ask for somebody who can work and make decisions on his/her own and is an outstanding team worker, or for somebody who is experienced in drama and also in testing – this latter leaving one wonder what kind of teaching philosophy is at the heart of the school’s culture after all. It is also quite unimaginable to get a job at a Dalton-, or Montessori-school, not because we aren’t used to applying their pedagogy, or something very much like it, but because we can so rarely point to experience working in such schools outside the Netherlands, where they feature much more often than in other countries.

Writing our cover letters and CV’s, we also have to be aware that, although seemingly excellent speakers of English, most educators themselves rarely understand abbreviations from abroad. The Dutch use a shocking amount of abbreviations in their daily and professional lives as well, but English teachers have no idea what the BC, IH or CELTA means. It may be due to the isolation of the profession from mainstream English teaching trends and communities as I suggested in an earlier post. It seems imperative that we give the full versions of all abbreviations we may employ in our application. To illustrate this need, let me tell you about a very funny experience I had a couple of years ago. I was interviewed at a local private teaching institution, where I also pointed out that for me it is no problem to teach adults because I have CELTA, a qualification from the University of Cambridge for teaching adults. I was asked to give a lesson to a pair of teenagers from abroad who had until then failed to pass their English exams but would sit for a re-take the following day. Besides being criticized for not dealing with their otherwise somehow excellent pieces of homework and not giving them more test items (off the top of my head) but trying to communicate with them and covering several key grammar issues in the process that they still seemed to find difficult, I was told by the boss of the school that his colleagues also have all kinds of English diplomas from the University of Greenwich and the like, so I’m no speciality. Not that said university doesn’t exist, very much to the contrary, but it was glaringly obvious that he had no idea what he was talking about – he only remembered a famous name from Britain that sounded similar to the name I mentioned, which he might have found less known. Perhaps this was the basis for his failure to send me my meagre fee for the lesson as he had promised. To be fair to the Dutch, this guy seemed to be of Turkish origin by his looks and name. In all fairness, it’s shameful to have such an ignorant face in charge of any teaching institution in this country. Whatever their shortcomings, people here deserve better.

by P.S.

Related articles
  • Social media today news | Facebook launches job hunting app (socialmediatoday.co.nz)
  • Nearly one in three trainee teachers does not stay in teaching (schoolsimprovement.net)
  • The Turning of the TESOL Tide: The Rise of TESOL Qualified Non-Native English Speakers (tutoringtoexcellence.blogspot.com)
  • Where clarity is lacking in English language teaching (guardian.co.uk)
  • TeachingDegreeOnline.com Releases Online School Profiles (prweb.com)
  • How to Job Hunt (Without Your Boss Knowing) (dangerouslee.biz)
  • Job hunting tips (savingtricks.com)
  • Anton – Classroom experience was the key to training to be a teacher (and part-time pirate) (getintoteaching.wordpress.com)

Interesting features of education – Part 2: teacher training in the Netherlands

10 Saturday Nov 2012

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Dutch, education, education in the netherlands, Netherlands, Teacher

I was recently lucky to meet someone who explained the ways of becoming a language teacher in the Netherlands.

The different levels of education in the Nethe...

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

As it happens around the world, teaching a language starts by following university courses. In the Dutch system, universities constitute the WO section of education, which stands for ‘Wetenschappelijk Onderwijs’. Those who wish to become teachers, have to do practice teaching as well as following university courses during the last two years of their studies. This is called ‘stage’, pronounced, unlike pronunciation of the English word of the same lettering, as /’sta:ʒǝ/. In general, teaching practice takes several days a week over a year, when the student visits and later conducts lessons in several hours a day, followed by ‘reflexion’, that is, discussion of what has happened, what went well and what didn’t, and what could change another time. There is also opportunity follow university studies part-time, in which case practice lengthens a couple of years and course-work formats are changed somewhat.

In theory, this system looks very good because it gives over a hundred hours of practice for the development of the trainee to become a full-blown teacher. However, as a former teacher trainer confided to me, the quality of trainees is often quite low, while trainers often neglect their trainees, cutting down on the reflexion stage, sometimes to a quarter hour per week, sometimes to nothing. In this case the whole idea of development through discussion, reflection and self-reflection suffers a deadly blow, as it happens to a friend of mine also on ‘stage’. Her practice turns out to be a full-time job without being paid. It looks like employment-lead training in Britain, except that there she would be paid a salary.

Teaching practice takes place at schools of any kind anywhere in the system where the leadership offers opportunities to those on practice time. One looking for job opportunities most usually reads about vacancies for people with one year experience in their specific sector (VMBO/MAVO, MBO, HAVO, HBO or VWO for secondary-level applicants) followed by saying that ‘stagiaires’, those on teaching practice, are also most welcome. There are a few ads for people with several years of experience, but the stated number is usually below five years. This probably doesn’t have much to do with refusing experience, but a belief that those freshly out of WO have more dynamism, but also with a very steeply rising salary-scale until fifteen years of experience. This to me means, on the one hand, that the system believes and appreciates a fast improvement in quality with the first years of practice, but also that experience quickly becomes expensive. However, older, more experienced teachers don’t get further pay-rise, so they don’t become overly more expensive for schools to employ them instead of a 40-year-old. Hopefully, this gives chances for older people to move, but it my also be an indication that most experienced teachers don’t usually have any incentive to do so.

This system is different from the British or Hungarian systems. In Britain, for a teaching diploma, one needs a separate line of studies after the specific subject is fully completed, at which point the would-be teacher enters teaching college. Here I would need help from British teachers about the ways of how and where teaching practice is carried out, as I have no relevant experience. However, one article, listed below by Daniel, describes the author’s path to teaching and out of this article, we can safely deduce that teacher training in Britain has a great variety of forms depending most often from the training school’s own ways. As teaching requires post-grad studies in Britain, the Dutch system may only resemble this in its institutional variety.

How the – much more unified – system works in Hungary is discussed in a the following post.

by P.S.

Dutch Flag

RELATED ARTICLES
  • Gove unveils tougher tests for trainee teachers (guardian.co.uk)
  • Michael Gove’s teacher tests are a smokescreen | Darren Macey (guardian.co.uk)
  • Daniel – The training path that took me into teaching (getintoteaching.wordpress.com)
  • Michael Gove’s muddled thinking on teacher training (newstatesman.com)
  • OFFICIAL DFE STATEMENT ON NEW TOUGHER TESTS FOR TRAINEE TEACHERS (SCHOOLSIMPROVEMENT.NET)
  • Tough exams and learning by rote are the keys to success, says Michael Gove (guardian.co.uk)
  • Michael Gove’s tougher teacher tests are a smokescreen (schoolsimprovement.net)
  • Gove to highlight exam benefits (express.co.uk)
  • Being an outstanding teacher relies on more than passing harder QTS test (guardian.co.uk)
  • Tough exams and learning by rote are the keys to success, says Michael Gove (schoolsimprovement.net)
  • Teaching Methods (ivythesis.typepad.com)
  • Why I became a teacher: to show students how the world really works (guardian.co.uk)
  • Bad Teaching Practice #1: “I am Only Going to Teach Those Who Are Ready To Learn” (blogs.edweek.org)
  • Teacher quality: Investing in what matters (Education Week)
MORE Related articles
  • Michael Gove’s national curriculum reforms: where’s the creativity? (guardian.co.uk)

Interesting features of education – Part 1: volunteers and teaching material in the Netherlands

09 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in language learning, language teaching

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Dutch, Dutch people, education, Language education, Netherlands

I’ve discovered a number of outstanding features about language education in the Netherlands during the few years I’ve spent here. Perhaps the most special kind concerns teaching Dutch to foreigners, ‘Nederlandse taal voor andertaligens’, as it is called here.

It has been an important issue for the country because the Netherlands has been one of the few countries in Europe where the country has received a very sizable influx of foreigners for years. As a result, the Dutch comprise only 80% of the population, which means that teaching Dutch to fast growing numbers of immigrants has been big business and important for the country. My educated guess is that with a 1.76 fertility rate, the long-term and steady population growth of around 0.50% is to a large extent due to immigration.

Availability of Dutch course-books in libraries reflects this importance, but not that in book-shops. A couple of recent forays into local book-shops strengthened my earlier feelings that course-books in general are not publicly available. This holds true for any languages, be it Dutch, English, or German. It contrasts starkly with the availability of foreign language course material even in smaller towns in Hungary or at bigger places in China, and also with the availability of a very wide range of dictionaries that conforms to the colourful presence of so many ethnic groups in the country. The availability of Dutch course material in libraries indicates a healthy effort to supply for the needs of immigrants, but the lack of it in book-shops strikes one as strange. Even the rather muted efforts to widen the teaching of the native language in Hungary seems huge in comparison on this basis, not to mention the presence of Chinese courses available in China in spite of the weak state of teaching methodology. One seriously wonders how to get a picture about what students are taught from at school.

Insider opinion I’ve met recently holds that languages are taught using course material made in the Netherlands, not internationally. The same opinion also stated that choice usually depends on conservatism versus the over-valuation of the new. This would also support the conclusion I’ve drawn elsewhere and also from the fact that one can’t find Dutch participants at international events, that is, the profession is over-confident and isolated from international influences in language teaching. It also indicates that teaching languages is big business for Dutch professionals, though the quality may not always match international levels, which can be deducted from the price per quality ratio of the new series of books used by our regional MBO school for teaching Dutch, Code: the content is sometimes very strange, sometimes really modern with live video; the looks of the books reminds one of the quality of the Alexander-series of yore from Britain, or the quality of the first Hungarian course-books published in the late 1970’s; and the price is about four times that of international publications by Cambridge or Macmillan. If it is anything to go by about other languages, somebody does make big business out of teaching English, French and the other languages at school at the expense of those who need to buy their products in the absence of foreign competition.

Because ‘inburghering’, that is, helping immigrants learn the culture, administrative systems and everyday life as well as the language, is so important in the Netherlands, teaching is widely supported and delivered in a large number of various institutions and also by the population. One evidence is that schools are able to draw quite a number of volunteers, ‘vreiwilligers’ in Dutch, to help teachers with their work in class. This means that ordinary Dutch people with enough time feel it nice to come to classes and take part in group work making sure that good enough language is used by the groups. They are not teachers, but as natives, they can help the foreigners understand and use ordinary Dutch. Some of the volunteers also hold regular “office hours” in a separate place to help those in need of something extra after or before class, which takes the form of short one-to-one talks and discussions. I find both these kinds of help extremely useful and kind of the people involved.

But the most outstanding and unique feature takes us outside school. The system is called ‘taalmaatjes’, which means that a lot of Dutch people volunteer to regularly meet foreigners interested in the programme for a few hours a week and share their culture and language with them just for the sake of spending a few hours usefully and with communication with strange people. Such ‘language partners‘ also do this free of charge, for the joy and friendship in their free time. As this is also face-to-face, but regular as well, people get used to the foreigners’ needs, and can concentrate on them personally a lot more than teachers in class could. I can personally thank more to my taalmaatje now than to my teachers because my language partner is intelligent and can provide invaluable information on the one hand about collocations and idioms in the language, which are the most difficult to practice in class circumstances, and because, on the other hand, make it possible for me to speak intensively in supported circumstances for two hours. Such intensity and density of information about the language can’t be achieved in a normal Dutch class. Besides, the programme adds a lot to the understanding and the accommodation of newcomers in the country, so it is a basic ingredient to the much-needed mutual understanding and acceptance of differences among peoples.

With economic problems hitting this country too, schools in the Netherlands don’t have to see their budgets seriously cut, but, to my amazement, the ‘taalmaatje’ program was officially scraped in the middle of 2011. I find this very strange especially because the system only needed a small number of administrative people who have other tasks in their jobs as well, while the people involved in the actual work of helping learners, i.e. the ‘taalmaatjes’, didn’t get any remuneration. A proof of the success among Dutch people of the program is that a lot of those who were already participants at the time of the cuts have been keeping contact with their foreign friends ever since. This was and still is, through its intensity, perhaps the most effective way of language teaching coupled with tolerance and cultural understanding, while it costs next to nothing.

A great pity the government doesn’t support the program, but perhaps it is in connection with a kind of turning away from the long-term trend of welcoming foreigners in the country. Financial support to help immigrants learn Dutch has also been scraped on the whole, which is very likely to represent an emerging trend among the population against easy integration and further welcoming of immigrants. This trend was represented, for example, by one parliamentary party’s web-site earlier this year against Polish workers in the country.

To let you better understand the impact of such moves on a small country like the Netherlands or Hungary and the like, I’d like to give you a personal example. I’ve known a very nice young man from Iraq for years, who came here, and received refugee status and financial aid to live here and follow his studies at one of the best Dutch universities. His specialization is in microbiology, and after receiving his MSc mostly in English, he’s now pursuing his PhD studies in Dutch. Had he not received any financial help and language support over the years, he wouldn’t be able to do this, he would have left for Great Britain, for example. He may not stay very long after graduation because his field is very specific and this country is too small to support further researchers and research in it. It is far more likely that he’ll be able to get a research job in one of the English-speaking countries. By extension, we can safely say that any people with talent coming here would not stay here without language help, would not be able to utilize their talent to its full potential and wouldn’t make it possible for the Dutch economy to invest more in, and benefit more from, R&D on a scale comparable to the potentials of larger economies speaking the largest world language. The Netherlands can’t really become larger, but is still attractive to foreign talent, but only if the language barrier is surmountable in the first place. As R&D is the real measure of economic growth potential, and its source, besides capital, is the brains and intellect of the country’s inhabitants, talent shouldn’t be lost at the very first hurdle, on the language front, in any small country.

by P.S.

Related articles
  • Tolerance in the Netherlands (betolerant.wordpress.com)
  • Only decent white people know how to insult (africasacountry.com)
  • Lost in translation (bigpondnews.com)

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.

Related articles
  • Demand more from students and they will learn more (guardian.co.uk)
  • Testing, Testing, Testing IV (joyfullatinlearning.wordpress.com)
  • Lessons in Teaching & Learning – Why Intelligence Isn’t Enough (spin.atomicobject.com)
  • “Instead of seeing students as Far Below Basic or Advanced, we see them as learners” (larryferlazzo.edublogs.org)
  • Practicing What We Preach (neltachoutari.wordpress.com)
  • ……listening then…? (neltachoutari.wordpress.com)
  • Time to stop avoiding grammar rules (guardian.co.uk)
  • #KELTchat Summary: Lexical Approach – October 28th, 2012 (keltchat.wordpress.com)
  • Welcome to LEFLa (Learning English as Foreign Language) (lefla.wordpress.com)
  • Immersion education in the US (Education Week)
  • 30 Ways to Promote Creativity (classroom-aid.com)
  • Interesting Research Findings about How Students Learn (classroom-aid.com)
  • Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) (pilejoanot.wordpress.com)
  • Creativity in Teaching a Language (languagepie.wordpress.com)
  • Ultimate Vocabulary Software Acknowledges That Task-Based Language Teaching is an Effective Approach to Vocabulary Acquisition (prweb.com)

Ideas about what works while learning a language – Part One

28 Sunday Oct 2012

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in English teaching, language learning

≈ 1 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

Related articles
  • 3 States of language self-learning (informallanguage.wordpress.com)
  • Why have case endings and gender endured in language? (ask.metafilter.com)
  • Why the Dutch are better networkers [Fred Rutgers] (ecademy.com)
  • 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.

Related articles
  • The effects of the role play instructional model on Taiwanese ESL students’ learning attitude, social skill and oral performance (udini.proquest.com)
  • Teaching China to speak English (bbc.co.uk)
  • Is English or Mandarin the language of the future? (chinadailymail.com)

The situation of language teaching – comparisons: Hungary

26 Friday Oct 2012

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

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

English: Language learning among students in u...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

to be followed by a description of the Chinese language education

by P.S.

Related articles
  • A Study of Native English Teachers’ Perception of English Teaching: Exploring Intercultural Awareness vs. Practice in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (udini.proquest.com)
  • “The Cup of Tea” in Primary English Language Teaching (phunghuy.wordpress.com)
  • EFL teachers’ perceptions about vocabulary acquisition and instruction (udini.proquest.com)
  • Where clarity is lacking in English language teaching (guardian.co.uk)

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.

Related articles
  • 5 tips to learn a new language for expats (expatsincebirth.com)
  • The effects of grammar translation method and communicative language teaching grammar instruction in EFL university students in Taiwan (udini.proquest.com)

Learning languages and teaching in the Netherlands

21 Sunday Oct 2012

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in English teaching, language learning

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Eastern Europe, education, English as a foreign or second language, Netherlands, Teaching English as a foreign language

Learning languages means learning to communicate with people who don’t speak our mother tongue. So how do we go about it? And how do teachers go about it? Are there fool-proof methods, perhaps one method that could be perfect for every learner, and most people just don’t know about it? Or is even this question, well, amateurish? Then have a look at this:

What is, then, amateurish? Who thinks that this activity in class helps students best to acquire and use English for communication? Hardly anyone, I think, outside the Netherlands. Doesn’t this resemble the way my father used to study Latin in the 1920’s and 1930’s in Hungary? In the end, he was able to quote a few lines from some famous texts, but nothing else. And that was just as well because he and similar others never had to and still don’t have to communicate in Latin. Yet, in the

English: Main dialects, regional languages and...

English: Main dialects, regional languages and minority languages in the BeNeLux (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Netherlands, Latin, along with ancient Greek, is a compulsory choice in gymnasia, the highest-ranked kind of secondary schools, the equivalent of grammar schools in the Netherlands. Besides, a teacher is required to speak fluent Dutch to be able to teach English there and at other secondary schools.

Why, should we ask! The Netherlands as a country is still very helpful to immigrants at the moment with teaching Dutch to them often free, or almost so. In my city, people can receive 3 hours of teaching 4 days a week if they have their middays free. So how do those teachers there teach their own language? Like this, may I ask?

Well, to be honest, no English, or any other languages are spoken there. The teachers speak some or good English and very occasionally help someone with a word if absolutely necessary, but it’s avoided – students have to talk and understand the target language.

This is the point: use the target language! Most English teachers would agree that this is one of the most important elements of a language class. Of course, with a modern language the aim is not to translate texts and fill tests about the language but to learn to think in that language and thereby communicate as effectively and fast as possible. Do English speakers only forward this notion so that they can get jobs around the world? True, without this aspect, nobody from America or Britain or Australia could get jobs in Eastern Europe, or further to the East, nobody could get jobs in China or Thailand, or other exotic but developing countries where English learning is needed. I wouldn’t have been able to teach English in China either. The German guest teachers couldn’t have worked in my school’s German classes in Hungary either.

Do we fail? Not at all. I haven’t failed, and neither have those whom I’ve seen in Hungary or China do their jobs in class, whose classes have been enjoyed by students who have benefitted greatly from the experience and even taught their mother tongue to the guest teacher a bit.

The different levels of education in the Nethe...

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

So why can’t I get a teaching job in the Netherlands, and neither could anyone else without fluent Dutch? I’ve been told on several occasions that this is basic if I want to teach here. I know that the law prescribes having our degrees assessed and approved by the “Ministerie van Onderwijs, Cultuur en Wetenschap”, the Dutch Ministry of Education. It is necessary for all teachers from abroad, for obvious reasons. But I am not usually asked about it even when I am sometimes not rejected outright without any serious explanation. The few times somebody got to communicate with me about my application, I was asked instead how I keep contact with the students, with the parents and the colleagues at school without fluent Dutch.

Fluent seems important because at these occasions we communicated in Dutch all right. Still, it didn’t suffice. May I ask if my job is to teach English, or to chat and bide my time with the students? For the heap of money I would get, in comparison to my Hungarian salary at least, I’d happily do that, but no, no way.

I would also very much like to know who can decide what it means to be a fluent speaker of Dutch on the basis of a two-minute telephone conversation in which I’m praised for my language level but told outright that still, being a foreigner, I can’t speak fluently. What if I can? How does anyone know if I’m not given a chance?

On the other hand, earlier, when I was interviewed once, the panel didn’t want to hear my English at all. I wasn’t even asked how well I could speak. They asked me, in Dutch only, how I could keep in touch with everybody only in English. As if nobody here, no parents and no colleagues could speak English in this country, which, according to the EU report published recently and downloadable here, is on top of Europe with regard to foreign language competency, especially to English. At the end, my interviewrs admitted that at  around age 14 or 15, their students didn’t speak English. They start English teaching at the beginning of secondary school at least, at the age of 12. How could they not teach them some reasonable level of English in two or three years?

Very possibly with methods seen above in the first example. People learn English later, outside school, from TV, films, music, whatever, and by travelling to the other side of the English Channel. Easy. For school as well – people will learn English without them doing anything serious. Except tests for those going to university. Thus is the English level of  an applicant not really important at all, but his/her Dutch is of utmost importance.

My further question is, how could teachers here be so incompetent?

Possibly, because they haven’t had to learn the language in language classes either. Perhaps they’re just jealous of their positions. Isn’t it their job to teach English? Do they not do their job? Yes, lots of foreigners could do it a lot better.

by P.S.

Related articles
    • ‘English language learning must go hand in hand with multilingualism’ (thehindu.com)
    • How to Learn English (answers.com)
    • Welcome to LEFLa (Learning English as Foreign Language) (lefla.wordpress.com)
    • Update: Dutch learning resources.

Hello world!

21 Sunday Oct 2012

Posted by ZJShen-PSimon in English teaching, language learning

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

education, English as a foreign or second language, Netherlands, Teaching English as a foreign language

Een beeld van een leraar in Amsterdam

Learning languages means learning to communicate with people who don’t speak our mother tongue. So how do we go about it? And how do teachers go about it? Are there fool-proof methods, perhaps one method that could be perfect for every learner, and most people just don’t know about it? Or is even this question, well, amateurish? There’s a lot of research going on about the problem of helping students and of students trying, or quite often not even trying, to use ways that help the memory, the understanding, the spoken or written communication, the correctness which most call, correctly or less so, grammar. As a student of English in Hungary and a teacher ever since, I’ve listened to lots of wise thoughts about it all at university and at conferences, and even sometimes contributed somewhat. I’ve attended very many classes by other teachers too, mostly while it was my job to train young English teachers at my own school for the university. But most teachers would attest to it that teachers learn to do their job mostly by doing it as best as they can. So here I don’t want to pursue research projects, only to share experiences about this whole process, and mostly with a view to the situation in the Netherlands, which I’ve come to find, well, strange, in spite of this nice statue in Amsterdam.

After working in language education for so long, and getting so little response in the Netherlands, I’ve decided to open up to the world and put my ideas to the test on this site. I would like to receive comments on what I say because I would like to go on learning about language education here or anywhere.

I would advise my readers to go about the articles in chronological order, it would make more sense I think. If the reader finds them provocative, it’s because I intend them to be so. I believe that my provocation has a better chance to provoke or invoke contrasting ideas, without which my own ideas, coming from one person only, may prove to be limited, or one-sided, therefore not true or realistic enough. Besides, feedback is a central tenet of the British teaching ethos, right?

by P.S.

ProZ.com Pro translator

Recent Posts

  • Language teaching (?) March 28, 2021
  • And the First Prize in Chinglish Goes to… July 8, 2020
  • Statistical truth about problems caused by asylum seekers in the Netherlands February 1, 2018
  • In honour of the immigrant 2 April 20, 2017
  • In honour of the immigrant 1 April 17, 2017
  • Can something, anything, be more stupid? December 14, 2016
  • Intercultural life in the Netherlands June 6, 2016
  • Good books to learn from May 22, 2016
  • Teach Dutch to refugees January 17, 2016
  • Arnhem’s cultural week and the famous Dutch railways September 12, 2015
  • Hilarious Hungarian-English mistranslation June 19, 2015
  • Cello concertos almost forgotten June 1, 2015
  • Send Dutch applicants … no. 2 March 13, 2015
  • Eastern-European views on the Netherlands November 23, 2014
  • Everywhere … October 16, 2014
  • Chinglish, or Dunglish? June 9, 2014
  • English testing issue in Hungary May 13, 2014
  • Effect of Grammar Teaching on Learners and Translators April 4, 2014
  • Neurobiologist on the brain development of children – part 3 March 28, 2014
  • Neurobiologist on the brain development of children – part 2 March 26, 2014
  • Neurobiologist on the brain development of children March 25, 2014
  • The extent translation is ‘correct’ March 14, 2014
  • Translating using translation software January 19, 2014
  • Translation problems with machine translation January 13, 2014
  • Translation difficulties January 11, 2014
  • Translation in the extreme November 16, 2013
  • Life is looking up at long last October 4, 2013
  • Summer disappointment on the Dutch job market August 2, 2013
  • Send Dutch applicants abroad back home! June 21, 2013
  • What Teacher Education Programs Don’t Tell You June 10, 2013
  • Werkloos = waardeloos, i.e., jobless = worthless? May 27, 2013
  • Grammar of the ‘grammar-translation’ method May 21, 2013
  • The System of the Dutch State Language Examination – part 2 April 26, 2013
  • The System of the Dutch State Language Examination – part 1 April 24, 2013
  • Bending immigration statistics – English version March 15, 2013
  • Bending immigration statistics March 14, 2013
  • A famous literary mistranslation between Hungarian and German February 23, 2013
  • A criticism of translation methods from the point of view of dictionaries February 22, 2013
  • IamExpat: How learning Dutch can ruin relationships February 18, 2013
  • (no title) February 18, 2013

Blogroll

  • Discuss
  • Get Polling
  • My Photoblog 2
  • My second photo site
  • My third photo site
  • My web-site with photos
  • Our web-site about Chinese visual arts and nature in China

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 55 other subscribers

Archives

Categories

  • applying for a job in the Netherlands (2)
  • child development (4)
  • child rearing (3)
  • Chinese speakers of English (1)
  • Dutch culture (4)
  • education (16)
  • English teaching (29)
  • European Union (5)
  • foreign language teaching (18)
  • Hungary (5)
  • immigration (8)
  • intercultural learning (1)
  • job application (1)
  • joblessness (2)
  • language learning (29)
  • language teaching (21)
  • language testing (5)
  • learning Dutch (4)
  • museums (1)
  • Netherlands (12)
  • refugees in Europe (4)
  • teacher training (7)
  • teaching Dutch (1)
  • translation (12)
  • university education (4)
  • work in Dutch education (6)

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Blog Stats

  • 20,911 hits

Spam Blocked

58,560 spam blocked by Akismet

Categories

applying for a job in the Netherlands child development child rearing Chinese speakers of English Dutch culture education English teaching European Union foreign language teaching Hungary immigration intercultural learning job application joblessness language learning language teaching language testing learning Dutch museums Netherlands refugees in Europe teacher training teaching Dutch translation university education work in Dutch education

appreciation of variety Asia Audio-lingual method British Council Bulgarian CELTA China Chinese language cognitive science Common European Framework of Reference for Languages Culture of Hungary Dutch Dutch as a foreign language Dutch dictionary Dutch people Eastern Europe education education in the netherlands English as a foreign or second language English language European Union failure of web-sites Foreign language freedom in class Frigyes Karinthy German German language grammar-translation method Grammar translation Great Britain Hearing (sense) Higher education higher education in Hungary Hungarian Hungary IELTS Immigration Jiaozi job application joblessness job market Job Search Labour economics Language Language acquisition language correction approaches Language education Learning learning to communicate limits in class mistranslations Netherlands NRC Handelsblad Romanians Rote learning Secondary education Second language Staatsexamen Standardized test Student talent Teacher Teacher education teacher training Teaching English as a foreign language teaching foreign languages Teaching qualification Test (assessment) tests Training Translation use of translation softwares Van Dale Western Europe work in the Netherlands

Top Posts & Pages

  • Language teaching (?)
  • And the First Prize in Chinglish Goes to...
  • Statistical truth about problems caused by asylum seekers in the Netherlands
  • In honour of the immigrant 2
  • In honour of the immigrant 1
  • Can something, anything, be more stupid?
  • Intercultural life in the Netherlands
  • Good books to learn from
  • Teach Dutch to refugees
  • Arnhem's cultural week and the famous Dutch railways

Protected against copying

Protected by Copyscape DMCA Takedown Notice Search Tool

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • Learning and teaching English in the Netherlands
    • Join 55 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Learning and teaching English in the Netherlands
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...