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Native teachers without linguistic talent

 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
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tractor
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Norway
Joined 5455 days ago
1349 posts - 2292 votes 
Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan
Studies: French, German, Latin

 
 Message 17 of 106
10 June 2010 at 1:07pm | IP Logged 
ANK47 wrote:
I would rather have someone who knew nothing about the principles of language (read grammar)
teach a language class than an educated professor. The uneducated guy will speak to you in the only way he
knows how while the professor will simplify things for students because he "knows how to teach". Languages
aren't something where someone needs to be taught. You just need someone to speak the language.

I disagree. Learning language in class without some structured teaching, where the students speak some form of
broken target language and where the teacher is incapable of explaining why something is wrong or not, is a
waste of time. For a conversational class at an advanced stage, speaking alone may work well though.

Edited by tractor on 10 June 2010 at 11:01pm
6 persons have voted this message useful



Cainntear
Pentaglot
Senior Member
Scotland
linguafrankly.blogsp
Joined 6013 days ago
4399 posts - 7687 votes 
Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic
Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh

 
 Message 18 of 106
10 June 2010 at 1:34pm | IP Logged 
ANK47 wrote:
I would rather have someone who knew nothing about the principles of language (read grammar) teach a language class than an educated professor. The uneducated guy will speak to you in the only way he knows how while the professor will simplify things for students because he "knows how to teach".

Not true. We all tend to simplify or otherwise distort our language when speaking to learners. We become conscious of speaking "correctly" and "clearly" rather than naturally.

It takes a trained linguist (or actor) to speak natural(istica)ly while speaking consciously.
6 persons have voted this message useful



anamsc
Triglot
Senior Member
Andorra
Joined 6205 days ago
296 posts - 382 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish, Catalan
Studies: Arabic (Levantine), Arabic (Written), French

 
 Message 19 of 106
10 June 2010 at 5:22pm | IP Logged 
I have conflicting feelings about this. On the one hand, I'm definitely not a proponent of the L2-only approach, especially when teaching a language that's foreign to the country and especially at beginner levels. I think it's important for teachers to be able to explain complex topics in the students' L1, and I think translation is a useful tool, even at advanced levels. (I remember the time a teacher tried to explain the word for "birch" to us--she finally told us to look it up when we got home.)

However, I agree with those posters who said that having a teacher who speaks your language can be dangerous, since they might just want to practice/show off with you. I had a Catalan teacher in Barcelona who insisted on speaking to the American students only in English, the Portuguese students only in Portuguese, the Italian student only in Italian, and the Spanish students only in Spanish. The only time she spoke Catalan was when introducing the vocabulary (and then she would say, "This word is 'acelga' in Spanish--how do you say that in English" and we would have to wait while she wrote down the vocabulary in English, Portuguese, and Italian for herself to study). This was infuriating, for a number of reasons. One is that the only languages the class had in common were Spanish and Catalan, so everyone only got part of an explanation (the parts given in their language and Spanish).

I think if you have a teacher who is a language-lover, the class could end up becoming a language exchange. In fact, I'm going through a TEFL course right now, and I'm a little worried that I will fall into that if I teach abroad.
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carlonove
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5988 days ago
145 posts - 253 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Italian

 
 Message 20 of 106
10 June 2010 at 7:35pm | IP Logged 
I started writing a response to this thread but started a new topic here.

Edited by carlonove on 10 June 2010 at 7:40pm
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Solfrid Cristin
Heptaglot
Winner TAC 2011 & 2012
Senior Member
Norway
Joined 5336 days ago
4143 posts - 8864 votes 
Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian
Studies: Russian

 
 Message 21 of 106
10 June 2010 at 11:44pm | IP Logged 
Perhaps I am just too demanding when it comes to accent, but I have listened to two ladies today who were Scottish and English, who have both lived here for 20 years, and are married to locals, and speak Norwegian with their families and work colleagues every day, and who still make beginners' mistakes in Norwegian. They not only have a very notable accent, but they make word order mistakes and mess up the articles, and conjugate both adjectives and nouns in a wrong way. And that is actually quite amazing, given the simplicity of the system.

It makes me a little pessimistic when it comes to the "near native fluency" ideal that we all seem to be striving for. I will therefore ask again: Do the rest of you know foreigners - teachers or not - who have come to your country as adults, and still have obtained near native fluency - or is that an unreachable goal?
1 person has voted this message useful



Volte
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
Joined 6441 days ago
4474 posts - 6726 votes 
Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian
Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese

 
 Message 22 of 106
11 June 2010 at 3:34am | IP Logged 
Solfrid Cristin wrote:
Perhaps I am just too demanding when it comes to accent, but I have listened to two ladies today who were Scottish and English, who have both lived here for 20 years, and are married to locals, and speak Norwegian with their families and work colleagues every day, and who still make beginners' mistakes in Norwegian. They not only have a very notable accent, but they make word order mistakes and mess up the articles, and conjugate both adjectives and nouns in a wrong way. And that is actually quite amazing, given the simplicity of the system.

It makes me a little pessimistic when it comes to the "near native fluency" ideal that we all seem to be striving for. I will therefore ask again: Do the rest of you know foreigners - teachers or not - who have come to your country as adults, and still have obtained near native fluency - or is that an unreachable goal?


It's a rarity, but it happens.
1 person has voted this message useful



skchi
Groupie
United States
Joined 5747 days ago
57 posts - 86 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: French

 
 Message 23 of 106
11 June 2010 at 6:29am | IP Logged 
Solfrid Cristin wrote:
Perhaps I am just too demanding when it comes to accent, but I have listened to two ladies today who were Scottish and English, who have both lived here for 20 years, and are married to locals, and speak Norwegian with their families and work colleagues every day, and who still make beginners' mistakes in Norwegian. They not only have a very notable accent, but they make word order mistakes and mess up the articles, and conjugate both adjectives and nouns in a wrong way. And that is actually quite amazing, given the simplicity of the system.

It makes me a little pessimistic when it comes to the "near native fluency" ideal that we all seem to be striving for. I will therefore ask again: Do the rest of you know foreigners - teachers or not - who have come to your country as adults, and still have obtained near native fluency - or is that an unreachable goal?


I know a couple of people from Eastern Europe that moved to the US as adults. They do have slight accents, but it's not hard to understand them. Other than the slight accents, I think they have near native fluency.


Edited by skchi on 11 June 2010 at 6:30am
1 person has voted this message useful



Deji
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5442 days ago
116 posts - 182 votes 
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Hindi, Bengali

 
 Message 24 of 106
21 November 2010 at 7:02pm | IP Logged 
I would like either a teacher who really mostly speaks their own language, or someone who is well-educated in both
languages. If you read literature in Bengali (or Hindi) in which dictionaries are very inadequate, you are dependent
on your teacher's word translation. This can be quite inadequate. For example, when reading a combined verb (eg
two verbs) I really want to know the independent meaning of BOTH verbs--both together and separately. My less
educated teachers just say the combined meaning, as it is in that context, for both verbs. Also crude translation can
be a problem. A word which should be translated as "overwhelming" gets translated as "a lot".

So one ends up often with the worst of both worlds: a teacher who provides crude English synonyms, because of
inadequate grasp of English, but also speaks English quite a bit in class, because of impatience when students don't
catch on in Bengali.




2 persons have voted this message useful



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