Help! Non-native English speakers: How is English taught in

[FBM]

No, the Spoken form is the poor relative, we focuse heavily on written tests, so even if you can produce English text and translate something in English, you still have problems understanding a native speaker, and you have a dreadful accent... ask Pappa and Rachel.

Also, there's a big problem in spoken form : the focus heavily on a BBC correct version of Queen's English that I've never seen a native speaker speak outside of TV.

Gotcha. I've heard that France has been particularly resistant to English compared to your neighbors to the usually-frozen north. Would you agree with that?

Edit: Holy crap. You guys rank even lower than Korea, Japan and (just barely) China. http://www.ef.edu/epi/

[Hermit]

your country's schools? The Korean system sucks balls. They start in third year of elementary school, but by the time they get to university, most of them still can't actually communicate much more than "My name is..." (with barely comprehensible pronunciation, no less).

I'm teaching two classes now about how to teach English conversation skills. I want to tell them how Scandinavian countries in particular are so successful at producing students with high levels of English competence. Problem is, I don't know what is actually done in those classrooms. Here, everything is rote memorization and paper-based testing. Please enlighten me so that I can enlighten my students.

English is my second language. Lessons began in fifth class. The first time our English teacher walked into class for the first time he said "Good morning, girls and boys." In English. He never uttered a single word in German in the entire time he taught us. That included teaching us how to spell. I remember him asking "How would you spell 'mouse'"? The proposed solutions were many. Considering that English is not particularly phonetic compared to German or Latin, and literally a mongrel language, the proposed solutions were numerous, but we eventually got the drift. We also learnt English grammar and vocabulary that way. During his lessons we had to stay continually alert and active, trying to guess the meaning of what he was saying. His method worked very well, I think, for that very reason; there was no rote involved.

The only exception was to single out students who had a problem rolling the "r"s and who pronounced "th" as "ze", and make them practice by imitation. He did that without making them feel ridiculed or put down in any way.

Having said that, I still had problems understanding the people whose native tongue was English when I came to Australia. Nothing to do with their accent. They just spoke too bloody fast. I also walked around with a dictionary wedged under my right armpit for the initial month or two in the new country. Not even four years at school sufficed to equip us with a large enough vocabulary to be able to tell a story of, say, what we thought of a film we saw on the telly last night without hesitating while groping for the right English equivalent. I guess that is where rote learning would have come in handily, but I was always too lazy for that sort of thing.

[Svartalf]

I'm not typical, I have 30 years of intensive practice including a major in the university.

[Svartalf]

No, the Spoken form is the poor relative, we focuse heavily on written tests, so even if you can produce English text and translate something in English, you still have problems understanding a native speaker, and you have a dreadful accent... ask Pappa and Rachel.

Also, there's a big problem in spoken form : the focus heavily on a BBC correct version of Queen's English that I've never seen a native speaker speak outside of TV.

Gotcha. I've heard that France has been particularly resistant to English compared to your neighbors to the usually-frozen north. Would you agree with that?

Edit: Holy crap. You guys rank even lower than Korea, Japan and (just barely) China. http://www.ef.edu/epi/

Yeah, back when I was looking for a job, I used to rail against those employers who can't recognize a really skilled person as opposed to those morons with the basic school "proficiency".

[JimC]

I'm not typical, I have 30 years of intensive practice including a major in the university.

But I would still bet that, on average, more Francophones are better English speakers than Anglophones are English speakers...

[FBM]

English is my second language. Lessons began in fifth class. The first time our English teacher walked into class for the first time he said "Good morning, girls and boys." In English. He never uttered a single word in German in the entire time he taught us. That included teaching us how to spell. I remember him asking "How would you spell 'mouse'"? The proposed solutions were many. Considering that English is not particularly phonetic compared to German or Latin, and literally a mongrel language, the proposed solutions were numerous, but we eventually got the drift. We also learnt English grammar and vocabulary that way. During his lessons we had to stay continually alert and active, trying to guess the meaning of what he was saying. His method worked very well, I think, for that very reason; there was no rote involved.

The only exception was to single out students who had a problem rolling the "r"s and who pronounced "th" as "ze", and make them practice by imitation. He did that without making them feel ridiculed or put down in any way.

Having said that, I still had problems understanding the people whose native tongue was English when I came to Australia. Nothing to do with their accent. They just spoke too bloody fast. I also walked around with a dictionary wedged under my right armpit for the initial month or two in the new country. Not even four years at school sufficed to equip us with a large enough vocabulary to be able to tell a story of, say, what we thought of a film we saw on the telly last night without hesitating while groping for the right English equivalent. I guess that is where rote learning would have come in handily, but I was always too lazy for that sort of thing.

That's very much in line with modern language acqusition theory, in which most of the instruction is inductive. I feel that I can guarantee you that you performed much better upon your arrival in Australia than any of my students would. As for the role of rote memorization, it has been shown to be virtually useless for anything except the short-term, when it is used for test-taking. Very little of what is memorized is available spontaneously in unplanned conversation compared to what is learned inductively. In the sort of class you describe, students acquire intuition about the language, whereas the deductive manner in which my students are taught gives them none. They are shockingly piss-poor at figuring out the meaning of something from context. When I urge them to figure something out from the available clues, they are like fish out of water. They want me to just give them the answer so that they can memorize it.

[Svartalf]

I'm not typical, I have 30 years of intensive practice including a major in the university.

But I would still bet that, on average, more Francophones are better English speakers than Anglophones are English speakers...

[FBM]

Yeah, back when I was looking for a job, I used to rail against those employers who can't recognize a really skilled person as opposed to those morons with the basic school "proficiency".

Yeah, it's much the same over here. There's a test that allegedly tests English proficiency (TOEIC), but it's all listening and reading comprehension, no spoken or written production. Problem is, you can get a very high TOEIC score without having even a child's level of real-life conversation skills. It's a travesty, and everyone knows it. Nobody has the balls to buck tradition, however, so on we plod.

[FBM]

I'm not typical, I have 30 years of intensive practice including a major in the university.

But I would still bet that, on average, more Francophones are better English speakers than Anglophones are English speakers...

I was about that, too.

[JimC]

I'm not typical, I have 30 years of intensive practice including a major in the university.

But I would still bet that, on average, more Francophones are better English speakers than Anglophones are English speakers...

Bugger!

you all knew what I meant, right...

[FBM]

I think you inadvertently proved what you inadvertently said...

[Svartalf]

I'm not typical, I have 30 years of intensive practice including a major in the university.

But I would still bet that, on average, more Francophones are better English speakers than Anglophones are English speakers...

Bugger!

you all knew what I meant, right...

Yes I did

[Hermit]

English is my second language. Lessons began in fifth class. The first time our English teacher walked into class for the first time he said "Good morning, girls and boys." In English. He never uttered a single word in German in the entire time he taught us. That included teaching us how to spell. I remember him asking "How would you spell 'mouse'"? The proposed solutions were many. Considering that English is not particularly phonetic compared to German or Latin, and literally a mongrel language, the proposed solutions were numerous, but we eventually got the drift. We also learnt English grammar and vocabulary that way. During his lessons we had to stay continually alert and active, trying to guess the meaning of what he was saying. His method worked very well, I think, for that very reason; there was no rote involved.

The only exception was to single out students who had a problem rolling the "r"s and who pronounced "th" as "ze", and make them practice by imitation. He did that without making them feel ridiculed or put down in any way.

Having said that, I still had problems understanding the people whose native tongue was English when I came to Australia. Nothing to do with their accent. They just spoke too bloody fast. I also walked around with a dictionary wedged under my right armpit for the initial month or two in the new country. Not even four years at school sufficed to equip us with a large enough vocabulary to be able to tell a story of, say, what we thought of a film we saw on the telly last night without hesitating while groping for the right English equivalent. I guess that is where rote learning would have come in handily, but I was always too lazy for that sort of thing.

That's very much in line with modern language acqusition theory, in which most of the instruction is inductive. I feel that I can guarantee you that you performed much better upon your arrival in Australia than any of my students would. As for the role of rote memorization, it has been shown to be virtually useless for anything except the short-term, when it is used for test-taking. Very little of what is memorized is available spontaneously in unplanned conversation compared to what is learned inductively. In the sort of class you describe, students acquire intuition about the language, whereas the deductive manner in which my students are taught gives them none. They are shockingly piss-poor at figuring out the meaning of something from context. When I urge them to figure something out from the available clues, they are like fish out of water. They want me to just give them the answer so that they can memorize it.

True. Yet, there is a place for rote learning. Take Latin, for example. It's a beautiful and elegant language. It is also extremely consistent. Exceptions are few and far between. However, you'd waste a lot of time trying to come to grips with it if you tried to learn its conjugations and declensions just by doing and using intuition. Learning the correct endings of words by rote to begin with saves a lot of time on one's path toward fluency and competence. Even by remembering a short, rhythmical ditty as a memory bridge will soon teach you when to use the ablative. It then becomes second nature to not say "ad nauseum". I really wish I had put more of an effort in to learning it, but rote learning is anathema to anyone who is as lazy as I am.

[FBM]

True. Yet, there is a place for rote learning. Take Latin, for example. It's a beautiful and elegant language. It is also extremely consistent. Exceptions are few and far between. However, you'd waste a lot of time trying to come to grips with it if you tried to learn its conjugations and declensions just by doing and using intuition. Learning the correct endings of words by rote to begin with saves a lot of time on one's path toward fluency and competence. Even by remembering a short, rhythmical ditty as a memory bridge will soon teach you when to use the ablative. It then becomes second nature to not say "ad nauseum". I really wish I had put more of an effort in to learning it, but rote learning is anathema to anyone who is as lazy as I am.

I can't disagree with you there, but Latin is a dead language. Modern second language acquisition theory is much more geared towards real-life communication, rather than academic work. I do tell my students to memorize what then need to for success in academics, but I emphasize to them that most (not all) of that is practically useless for achieving face-to-face fluency, which is what most of them desire most. The problem is that they don't distinguish between those two very different purposes, and thus use inefficient study methods. That is, they study in ways that will help them academically and expect that skill to automatically transfer to their real-life conversational skills. It just doesn't work that way, according to research.

That said, even modern language pedagogy recognizes that the adult has cognitive capacities that children don't, so that adults may speed up their language acquisition with conscious study. The question is a matter of emphasis. Here in Korea, the emphasis is on conscious study (memorization) of rules and vocabulary, with little regard for the learner's innate capacity for subconscious language acquisition (development of intuition). Judging from what you and Sælir describe of your early English education, the teachers were giving priority to taking advantage of your innate capacity, using conscious learning as a supplement. That's what I try to do over here, and what I try to teach my students to do when they become teachers in the future. The research and resultant theories are useless if they aren't applied.

[MiM]

We start learning a third language in third grade. For almost everyone that language is English, some choose French, German or Spanish. I'd have to ask my kids how it is taught today, but if you like me to, I will.

Another very important reason why Nordic people are so good at English, is that we use subtitles for foreign material on TV and in the movies. Only cartoons and films for smaller children gets dubbed. Add the interwebz to that, and especially kids learn English extremely fast.