Re: An unresponsive publisher

In message <1iletn5.195k8dctl4ks3N%zeborah@xxxxxxxxx>, Zeborah <zeborah@xxxxxxxxx> writes
Helen Hall <usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Actually the best Welsh courses I've been on are the ones that use as
little English as possible. Zeborah would know more about teaching a
language when you don't speak the students' native tongue, but if you
want to learn to speak a language, then you need to focus on that
language rather than trying to translate word for word.

In the hakwon I taught in, we cheated a bit for the students who could
neither speak nor read a word of English, by team-teaching: one English
and one Korean teacher. Team-teaching in itself has its advantages
because you can model dialogue and show them that the proper response to
"What's your name?" is "My name is ___". We tried whenever possible to
teach only in English, but with those very new classes, sometimes it
simply saved ever so much time for the Korean teacher to occasionally
switch to Korean for a minute: mostly for explaining "We're going to
play a game now and these are the rules," or "This is an English class
so you can't speak Korean at all," but very occasionally for explaining
the English itself.

Thanks for explaining. Of course in Welsh classes, the tutor is always bilingual, so one person can play both roles. However, it does mean that some students can bog the tutor down into speaking too much English.

Once they'd settled in for a few months (and mind you they only had
about 4.5 hours of lessons a week, so this was hardly intensive) we
changed to the normal class structure where the English teacher takes
the first half of the class and the Korean teacher takes the second half
(or vice versa; essentially the two teachers swap classes midway through
so every class gets its share of genuine native speaker accent). At
that point there's *no* Korean spoken by either teacher, unless the
class is extremely badly behaved. It's all flashcards, and miming, and
echoing, and practising little model dialogues -- oh, and we sang lots
of songs. Songs are brilliant. The Maori I know best is from songs.

We don't do songs, but I love the way my current Welsh teacher does the classes. I was very sceptical at first, having been in more traditional classes, but she uses stories. We read the stories, we learn the stories by heart, we make sentence cards and choose a sentences then work out how to mime it, we have to say the sentence in response to the mime, we play word Bingo. It's great fun!

Everyone else (even
the one who must have had some kind of learning disability, because he
tried so heartbreakingly hard) was keen to make themselves understood
even when they weren't keen to get their grammar perfect. One girl, I
remember how excited she was learning colours: she kept going through
her pencil case, "Teacher, this blue pen. Teacher, this white eraser.
Teacher--" and I was hard-pressed (and reluctant!) to stop her so I
could pay some attention to the rest of the class.

This is where it gets really hard learning a language when the native population is bilingual. If you try going into a shop using the equivalent of, "This blue pen. I want!" they'd immediately switch to English rather than let you struggle.

I know things change in the brain as people age. But honestly I think
the main thing that changes is that adults aren't nearly as excited
about saying "This blue pen, this white eraser, this red pencil,
this..." as children are.

Very true.

And they let their fear of making mistakes
get in the way of taking risks. (I would speak a heck of a lot more
Korean, and better Korean, if it weren't for that.)

Oh, yes. That is a real problem, especially combined with the fact that the natives just switch language unless you're pretty fluent. :(

And immersion, when the only way to communicate is to learn the language
and take those risks, makes a tremendous difference. Granted I crammed
Mongolian from a phrasebook for a number of hours while waiting for the
plane to Ulaan Baatar, and this gave me a good headstart. But being
immersed in the language when I got there -- and particularly getting
myself into seriously iffy situations(1) where it was either me speaking
Mongolian or them speaking Russian, which Did Not Help -- I learnt a
heck of a lot of Mongolian.

That must have been an amazing experience. All I know about Mongolia has been learned from the TV series The Long Way Round in which Ewan McGregor and Charlie Borman motorcycled around the world.The place looked both totally amazing and really scary. I can totally see how that sort of situation would accelerate language learning though. I was only in a non-touristy part of Portugal for a few days, but I learned enough words to be able to buy water from the local shop. :)

Helen
--
Helen, Gwynedd, Wales *** http://www.baradel.demon.co.uk
.

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