Something funny happened the other day that made me think about the ideal mindset for language learning. I was joking with a student about going out and buying a jalopy.

"What is a jalopy?"
"Oh, it's an old, beat up car that's practically worthless."
"Oh. We have a word for this. We get it from English. We call it 'sick crab.'"
"Sick crab?"
"Yeah. It's an English word."
"Oh. Hmmm... I guess those are English words, but they don't mean that in English."
"You don't know this English vocabulary?"
"No, I know it, I would just never use it that way."

Meanwhile, in my brain, the following conversation is playing out...

"They call a jalopy a sick crab?"

"Why?"

"I don't know. A lot of English words get borrowed and then re-purposed so that they don't quite make sense. Maybe it's like that?"

"That doesn't make any sense."

"It could make some sense. I mean, does it make any more sense than 'buying a lemon?'"

"I guess..."

"I mean, maybe if you sat down to a fine crab dinner and then it turned out the crab you ate was a sick crab, and then you're like, 'Oh man, I ate a sick crab. I'm so sick now!' Maybe it's like that?"

Finally, one of them offers a dictionary that shows the spelling.

"Oh! Scrap!" (The word 'scrap' has only one syllable, but thanks to epenthesis, some ESL learners may insert a vowel to break up the [skr] cluster, resulting in two syllables, or 'sick crab'.)

We all laughed at the misunderstanding, but it made me think about the mindset we need for language learning. Sometimes, when learning a language, we might get frustrated with expressions that make no sense or with grammar rules that aren't consistent or with native speakers whose handwriting is too hard to read or with people speaking too fast. Nevertheless, sometimes we just have to roll with the punches, accept whatever language facts we run across, and just not fight it. 

I notice this with children learning their first language--my three-year-old readily accepts almost any new vocabulary I teach him, and then he quickly busies himself with using it in new contexts. Sometimes I hear him using words he must have heard in a movie or in a conversation he was eavesdropping on. There is this kind of appreciation and welcoming of the new and foreign that we often see fade as we get older.

I guess what I'm saying is, sure, it's silly to think of sick crabs and jalopies (or lemons!), but sometimes we just have to run with it if we're learning another language and not get too embarrassed when we get it all wrong.

-Bill

Ray Stantz was my favorite Ghostbuster as a kid, and I never forgot that scene where he "chose" the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. Just like Ray in that scene, these images just kind of pop into my head when I stop to think about certain expressions and phrases in English.

Anyway, so a week ago, as I sat down to a particularly delicious looking pizza dinner, I said, "I'm going to go to town on this pizza!" and then I stopped to think about what my ESL students might think when they hear phrases like this. This was the image that popped into my head:

I drew more comics as I thought of more English expressions, and so I decided to make a section of my website devoted to these little sketches. I hope you get a kick out of them--but not a literal one involving a foot. Gosh, these things just creep up on you. Oh man! Creeping idioms! Like Night of the Living Dead or something... Okay, I'll stop.

If you have any expressions that you think would make a funny comic, drop me a message and I might try my hand at it, so to speak (or literally).

-Bill

I was reading a fellow ELT blogger's thought-provoking entry about assessment that got me thinking about the confines of curricula but also about how I have not seen other somewhat obvious ways the curriculum objectives can be met. It's easy to get a big head because we have degrees and certificates and good English. If students bristle at an assignment or don't like some activities in the class, I've found myself adopting an attitude of "well, I'm the expert. You might want to cram for the IELTS/TOEFL/MELAB/[insert language proficiency test here], but that won't help you in the long run." But sometimes it's good to listen to students and that yields a lot of fruit. One time my students were all slacking on an essay I was having them write, and it was a day for the rough draft and half of them had essays, and the other half didn't, and the rough drafts that were brought to class were not very good. I just asked them point blank: "Okay guys, this is terrible. What's the deal? Why aren't you getting this done?"

They said they were all so busy writing Statements of Purpose/Letters of Intent for graduate schools they were applying to and that they were spending all night filling out applications and writing letters.

Normally, I deploy a tried-and-true lecture/guilt trip to my students about how I did graduate coursework while I was teaching while my wife had just given birth to a baby while I was totally burned out and exhausted while I had to study for a teacher certification test to get my ESL endorsement AND while I was applying for jobs worrying if I would be able to feed my family! "We all have responsibilities outside of this class" and blah blah blah.

But I took a different route and got off my high-horse and said, "Well, a letter of intent is no different than a persuasive essay--probably one of the more high stakes persuasive essays you'll ever have to write! Forget about this other essay. We're writing statements of purpose!"

"Really?"

"Yes."

"What do we do?"

"Print off your statements of purpose and bring them to class tomorrow. We're going to read them and make them better."

I left class that day feeling a little uneasy. What if I've just called their bluff and then they don't do this assignment either? Should I plan a backup lesson? But somehow, something felt right, almost like Harry drinking that vial of Felix Felicis. The next day, every student brought in an essay! I went from a mediocre 50% to a 100% completion rate for the assignment. Students were engaged and asking questions and eager to share and get feedback. No one was off-task or checking their phones. I was really pleased with myself for being so clever but then I stopped and thought about it, and really, I was just listening to the students and giving them what they wanted. They had to learn about persuasion, and they did--they just weren't writing about gun control, or school uniforms, or the death penalty.

Have you ever stopped to listen to your students and come up with a win-win situation in the end? Leave a comment and tell me about it!

-Bill

Long time, no post! It has been a busy few weeks, and then I contracted the Cold of Doom that made me wish I had some HiberNol. I've finally managed to get over it, but my voice is still not 100%.

Anyway...

A few recent conversations have made me think more about the teaching of pronunciation. I read an Arteaga (2000) article back in grad school that claims pronunciation instruction has been relegated to "stepchild status" (p. 340; this is actually my all-time favorite scholarly quotation regarding pronunciation teaching). There are a lot of theories as to why pronunciation instruction sort of takes a back seat, but I think multilingual classrooms make pronunciation instruction difficult to tackle. For example, why teach the p/b distinction when only half your class has trouble discriminating between those sounds? In this regard, I prefer teaching a class of students that are all from the same language group--sure, I might have more difficulty keeping them from using their first language, but I know any pronunciation lessons won't be irrelevant to a large cross section of the class. Still, my classes are usually very linguistically diverse, so I have to focus on things like word stress and other suprasegmentals that usually pose problems to many language groups coming to English.
 
But pronunciation teaching of individual sounds is still important as I will illustrate in the following situations I have encountered, some recent and some not so recent. How can the errors in following dialogues be explained? (Hint: phonotactics or Best's (1995) Perceptual Assimilation Model).

Dialogue 1
"I like playing board games."
"Oh, me, too. I really like Mona Bowly."
"Mona Bowly? What game is that?"
"You don't know Mona Bowly? It's an American game. It's very bobular. Everybody knows it."

Dialogue 2
"My motto is, 'It's my life.' Do you know 'It's my life'? Actually, it is from a famous American musician called Joan Bone Jobi. Do you know Joan Bone Jobi?"

Dialogue 3
"People will understand you if you say, 'He don't know,' but it isn't correct."
"How they understand me if it not correct?"
"It has more to do with status. Do you know the word 'status'?"
"Yes. Uh huh." (nodding from the whole class).
"Okay, what is it?"
"You walk up and down them."

Dialogue 4
"Mecca, it's an important city for Muslims. Do you know the Hajj?"
"Of course. I know about the Hajj."
"As you know, Billy Graham goes to Mecca. If you are Muslim, you must go to Mecca one time in your life."

(click Read More at the bottom to see the answer)