Tag Archives: teaching foreign languages

English testing issue in Hungary

13 Tuesday May 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by P. S.

Examples for translation difficulties

31 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by in education, English teaching, foreign language teaching, language learning

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

Dutch to English

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other examples of phrases that are directly not translatable are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

English to Dutch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related articles

A criticism of the grammar-translation method

26 Saturday Jan 2013

Posted by in English teaching, foreign language teaching, language learning, language teaching

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

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

Translation Process

Translation Process (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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

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

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

Houses in Koprivstica, Bulgaria

Houses in Koprivstica, Bulgaria

Houses in Szentendre, Hungary

Houses in Szentendre, Hungary

Historical houses in Riga, Lathvia

Historical houses in Riga, Lathvia

Windows on a Chinese house, Dongshan

Windows on a Chinese house, Dongshan

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

Slovakian dumplings

Slovakian dumplings

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

Shaomei, a kind of jiaozi in Beijing

Shaomei, a kind of jiaozi in Beijing

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

in the Durmitor mountains in Bosnia

in the Durmitor mountains in Bosnia

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

high ground and forest in the Netherlands

high ground and forest in the Netherlands

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

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

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

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

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

Chinese Parliament

Chinese Parliament

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

British Parliament

British Parliament

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

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

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

By P.S.

On goals, limits and neurology

15 Saturday Dec 2012

Posted by in English teaching, foreign language teaching, language learning, language teaching

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

StateLibQld 1 113036 Cartoon of students recei...

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

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

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

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

by P.S.

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I’ve found a solution … sort of

03 Monday Dec 2012

Posted by in English teaching, foreign language teaching, language teaching, language testing

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

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

Tekst 1

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

A dat er mensen zijn die haar bang willen maken

B dat het horloge na een jaar opeens weer opduikt

C dat het kennelijk echt spookt in hun huis

D dat hun huis inbraakgevoelig blijkt te zijn

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

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

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

b Bij touwtjespringen worden alleen de benen goed getraind.

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

d Sommige vechtsporters trainen ook door touwtje te springen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

English: CEFR and ESOL examinations correspond...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by P.S.

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Make mistakes … ?

24 Saturday Nov 2012

Posted by in English teaching, foreign language teaching, language learning, language teaching

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by P.S.

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