This might sound paradoxical but the essays my students submit in Spanish are better in terms of grammar, the use of vocabulary and the correctness of the sentence structure than those they submit in English. I think this happens because in the Spanish courses we get to teach them how to create a good sentence from scratch. Nobody seems to do that for them when they write in their native language.
What is it that they do in their English classes in high school?
I think it’s simply that in a foreign language you’re more careful, afraid of not making yourself understood. On the other hand the English you see written in their essays is probably the one they use with their friends. They understand it; the others understand it, so why bother? Although they learned proper English in high school, they don’t yet see it as a necessity to get their point across.
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I would guess that most examples of teaching a foreign language focus excessively on (1) writing and (2) the idealized standard dialect. Since presumably local vernaculars aren’t focused on, students express themselves in the idealized standard for the significant reason that they don’t have any alternative.
For English, by contrast, for the vast majority of the time, it is (likely) spoken and almost never in the idealized standard. Since in almost all circumstances, people have no need to use the standard, it “leaks in”, so to speak, when writing.
Standard dialects are basically like any other dialect, just with prestige. Oftentimes, they retain features that have long-since disappeared from the spoken forms, or even forms that never existed in the spoken language. For example, many of the synthetic “tenses” (really Tense-aspect-mood) of written French are almost never used when spoken (because they sound the same as other forms), and rules that some English speakers enforce (like claiming we should remember to never split an infinitive, or that we shouldn’t use a preposition to end a sentence with) have no linguistic validity and are, to put it bluntly, instead a bunch of pseudoscientific prescriptivist BS.
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“I would guess that most examples of teaching a foreign language focus excessively on (1) writing and (2) the idealized standard dialect. ”
-This isn’t how foreign language teaching has been done in North America since 1960s.
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It may not be ideal, but yes it IS how foreign language teaching is often done in a lot of high schools and colleges of the US, at least. Or at least, how it was done 4-8 years ago. It maybe isn’t how it’s done by good faculty, but it definitely happens.
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I disagree. In North America, even with the communicative approach, we are still focusing on an iealized standard dialect. Look at the Spanish AP exam. Of course, students are not learning the Valladolid variant of Spanish because it is not the idealized standard anymore, hopefully. But we are still teaching a standard dialect.
I do not want to generalize, but many students in my SPAN 101 class with zero exposition to a second language learn what a verb is in my class, and what question to ask to find the subject of a sentence and the complements of a sentence. Many students did not take grammar class in English. Not all of them, but many.
So yes… what do students do in the English class in High School?
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“I disagree. In North America, even with the communicative approach, we are still focusing on an iealized standard dialect.”
-I speak with an exaggerated Argentinean accent both in and outside of classroom. So I’m not the one to speak of idealized standards. 🙂
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(1) is pretty correct; in my experience emphasis is on speaking. But (2) is the case in my neck of Texas at least.
In my German classes, they taught us Hochdeutsch, which the transfer students insisted that nobody in Germany actually speaks casually if at all, and then only in the north. My German grandparents don’t even speak it (they’re from Alsace region).
There were also tales, so frequent that they were cliches, of the Spanish-speaking students taking Spanish classes to get easy A’s, but many of them doing poorly because they knew, spoke, and wrote in border, Westex, and Mexican Spanish while the class taught, tested, and graded a very formal Castilian.
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Or, at least, that’s how it was fifteen years ago when I was in high school. There’s probably been changes by now.
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But pronunciation is not grammar. I doubt you teach the pronoun “vos” to your students. You probably teach what is called a ‘standard’ Spanish.
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I doubt anybody teaches them “nobody aint got nothing” and “its a problem” at school. So why do they do it when they write in English??
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That’s the reason why I am leery about organizations like the JET program and others which send newly graduated students abroad to teach English, regardless of what they majored in. If you don’t have an understanding of how English works, it’s not going to be very easy to teach it when a student asks you “So why is so and so this way?” and you just have to say “That’s just how it is!”
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Yeah, I’m not sure I could teach anyone English.
(I have successfully tutored/helped people understand other subjects, like chemistry and math. So it is not that I just can’t teach anything, but that I suspect I don’t know enough about how English works to be able to teach it beyond mere vocabulary).
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In my French class this semester, we’re learning everything from scratch. I couldn’t name the subjunctive in English for my life–but I know how to conjugate verbs into the subjunctive and form dual-clause sentences in French. My sentence structure seems so much better in French because I know more about what parts of a sentence I need: a direct object, a subject, a past/present participle, etc. I also know what tense I need, and tenses aren’t something we learned especially well in English. For example, I can tell you the difference between the imperfect, passe compose, and plus-perfect in French, but I couldn’t necessarily think of examples in English until later in the semester.
But then, when I write an essay in English, I know enough about structure that I can formulate a sentence well. I’d assume that if one had never learned sentence structure in a high school English class, one might make more mistakes in English than in the target language.
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Decent students should have improved English skills as their foreign-language skills improve. For example, Pen wrote about the subjunctive – I’d never heard of this part of language before I studied Spanish, but I now understand it in both languages. Or you can learn more about a word’s meaning by comparing it to the foreign equivalent – maybe they have a shared etymology? Things like that.
If their English writing is bad but they’ve made it through a strong Spanish program, I’d bet it’s more carelessness than lack of knowledge.
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This is interesting — isn’t English grammar ever formally taught in middle or high school? My eldest kid just started middle school, and so far not much — e.g. I was surprised that he was unfamiliar with terms preposition, article, pronoun etc.
I had grammar instruction for my native language in middle school, I was hoping kids get it here at some point before college.
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Very true! Nobody ever bothers to teach students even the names for the parts of speech, which makes my job a lot harder.
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I am reminded of a joke.
What’s a gerund? A type of rodent, similar to a hamster.
Parts of speech is easily solved. Issue a list with examples. Write a bit of story containing all parts of speech. Test. Require 100% pass rate. All students must retake exam until demonstrating 100% proficiency. Don’t pass parts of speech exam = don’t pass class.
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Students who tell teachers that they never learned what a verb is should not be automatically believed as representing the state of education.* We were all taught grammar by middle school but most of us forgot it all except the basics. I learned it all again when taking Latin and then forgot it all again. Who sits down and “constructs” a sentence in their native language anyway?
*I TA freshmen level bio and sometimes I TA upper division biology courses and you wouldn’t believe what students claim they were never taught two years previously in freshmen bio (and the upper division instructors always believe it).
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“Perhaps someday you might consider a series of posts comparing Russia of those days to modern, if modern is the right word, Russia”
-That’s a very good idea!
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I cannot speak for American high schools, but my high school English experience consisted of one part grammar, syntax, punctuation and the like and nine parts everything else. I tended to understand the technical aspects of writing fairly intuitively, but quite frankly, even someone who never mastered it could have easily passed the course with a sixty or seventy percent.
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The plasterer always has poorly plastered walls and the architect doesn’t necessarily live in a fashionable house.
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In Spanish we say “en casa de herrero, cuchillo de palo” [in the blacksmith’s house, a wooden spoon]
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It’s been 20+yrs since I was in high school, but at the time, English class taught literature, and the ‘proper’ (read = teachers opinion) interpretation of said literature. Independent thought was not appreciated, nor was basic grammar taught. It was assumed that grammar was taught in grammar school; I didn’t take a grammar lesson between 4th grade and 12th grade. In my 13th year, the teacher did an exercise in grammar, simply out of frustration, not curricula.
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Lindsay :
Yeah, I’m not sure I could teach anyone English.
(I have successfully tutored/helped people understand other subjects, like chemistry and math. So it is not that I just can’t teach anything, but that I suspect I don’t know enough about how English works to be able to teach it beyond mere vocabulary).
I’m excellent at understanding understated intentions. I’m a really good bridge between one culture and another. It’s my particular skill.
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I should add that my sense of ethics leads me to a different approach to knowledge than that which is typically Western, which is why I am such a good teacher of non-Westerners. (The same attribute probably makes me poor at communicating with those who have developed a very strong Western line to their thinking.) I am averse to telling people what they ought to think or what attitudes they ought to have in interpretation. When I write anything, I desire that people should draw their own interpretations rather than looking to me for “the right one”. (Part of me even believes that producing a thesis statement defeats the purpose of writing, which should be to carry the reader along with you to the point that they draw their own conclusions in a way that is meaningful in relation to both affects and logic.) If they try to alight upon “the right” answer — usually an interpretation based on input from a received authority — this inevitably produces a wrong or offensive-sounding interpretation. Readers shouldn’t be fighting the writer to understand or oppose their world view. They should develop ways to go with the flow so that they fill the shape that is the writer’s mind.
I could teach people to write good essays, but I don’t feel that a conventionally good essay is all that good — at least to the point of being something I would like to teach. Rather, writing a good computer programme serves this logic of essay writing better than writing essays in English. I’m either for or against positivism — but not much for this mid-way land which requires a being for and against. The Eastern way is more for an epistemological holism that doesn’t separate emotion from logic) and phenomenology.
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My last paragraph should read as follows:
I could teach people to write good essays, but I don’t feel that a conventionally good essay is all that good — at least to the point of being something I would like to teach. Rather, writing a good computer programme serves this logic of essay writing better than writing essays in English. I’m either for or against positivism — but not much for this mid-way land which requires a being for and against discrete propositions. The Eastern way is more for an epistemological holism that doesn’t separate emotion from logic and phenomenology.
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I’m too tired to process any intelligent text at this point but I just saw the picture you posted most recently on your blog and noticed that you and I look very similar. I even thought “Where did she get a picture of me?” when I first glanced at it. 🙂
Here is the picture I’m talking about: http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com/2011/12/jennifer-f-armstrong.html
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bloggerclarissa :
I’m too tired to process any intelligent text at this point but I just saw the picture you posted most recently on your blog and noticed that you and I look very similar. I even thought “Where did she get a picture of me?” when I first glanced at it.
Here is the picture I’m talking about: http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com/2011/12/jennifer-f-armstrong.html
Oh, yeah, I’m looking quite foreign in that picture!! I change nationalities like I’m changing my clothes.
So you are telling me I’m Slavic in this picture?
I thought it might be Ye Aulde Portuguese coming through due to the aging process. 🙂
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Well, maybe I look Portuguese, too. I’d never say no to that. 🙂 Portugal is fantastic.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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