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British monoglots! | ||
Tags: Monolingual | United Kingdom (UK) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5453 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 33 of 43 31 May 2011 at 10:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Your European brethren are first and foremost learning English. Thus, it is quite irrelevant that German and Swedish or German and Dutch are relatively similar languages when the Germans are learning English (and neither Swedish nor Dutch). Likewise it doesn't matter that French and Italian are similar when the French are learning English.
Exactly! As Volte said, plenty of the points you made are valid, but not all of them are. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6011 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 34 of 43 01 June 2011 at 2:35am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Well, I refer to other Brits, because I believe I'm a better teacher than everyone else... but that might be just my ego. ;-) (Anyway, in a few weeks I'll see whether I can succeed in teaching a friend a language I don't speak yet, and if I can't, I'll shut up. ;-) ) The Communicative Approach now seems to be our preferred method. When I was in high school (almost 20 years ago) the CA hadn't quite taken hold, but we did have a very phrase-orientated course, and we were taught a lot of words, and not a lot about what to do with them. As a result, most of our teachers couldn't really hold a conversation with the people whose language they were supposed to be teaching.... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| FuroraCeltica Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6865 days ago 1187 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 35 of 43 01 June 2011 at 1:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think it was a British judge in India who first noticed the patterns in what we now call Indo-European languages 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| fnord Triglot Groupie Switzerland Joined 5033 days ago 71 posts - 124 votes Speaks: German*, Swiss-German, English Studies: Luxembourgish, Dutch | Message 36 of 43 01 June 2011 at 4:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Virtually everyone (!) who has contributed to this thread so far has listed either a romance or Germanic language as his mother tongue. I think it's safe to say that native speakers of English have - on average - more contact and interaction with speakers of romance and Germanic language than with "far-away" languages such as Persian or Chinese. I do not believe that average people (unlike maybe some language enthusiasts) do actively decide to learn a languages just because it is similar to their own. Yet I do believe that complexity and difficulty make many people quit a language at some point.
I wouldn't discount the importance of grammatical reasons. If you learn a closely related language, you look for patterns and concepts that match your own language, while also noticing the differences - which leads to languages being labeled as being "easier" or "harder" to learn. Language learners are comparers. Similarity and simplicity compared to one's own language can be highly encouraging to the learner. And, vice versa, added complexity and difficulty can be discouraging. Edited by fnord on 01 June 2011 at 4:29pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5226 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 37 of 43 01 June 2011 at 7:31pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Who doesn't think he's a better teacher? ;-)
That's interesting. How can you teach what you don't know? Are you waiting until you get to some level before trying to teach anything, or do you mean you are just not conversational but know a bit of it?
Wow, that has to be as ridiculous as it gets (please, don't prove me wrong :-) So, you (or rather, they, since you meant other Brits) have improved from being terrible teachers to just mediocre. All hail the Communicative Approach :-) My chronology here is pretty similar, so the CA is dominant now, but I'm not sure about high schools, and I don't imagine CA classes taking place there, really. Perhaps it is just that we're too old and we have contact with 'adults' only. I'll try and find out the next time I go to a language school to get a certification; many students are high schoolers so they must know what's going on in there. Anyway, I was about to add that teachers being bad shouldn't be held as an excuse for students being terrible, but I think I'll leave that kind of bashing for another thread where it's not OT, 'cos it isn't a Brits alone thing either. Stay tuned... Edit: I quoted myself instead of fixing some typos here - that's message 40 deleted :( Edited by mrwarper on 02 June 2011 at 5:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| dragon32 Newbie United Kingdom Joined 4954 days ago 12 posts - 21 votes Speaks: English* | Message 38 of 43 02 June 2011 at 10:29am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Sure, most of the British population are monoglots but we didn't ask for English to become an international language. There are other areas in the world where one language dominates over a wide area and speakers of that tongue don't rush to learn less-spoken ones.
It's not a British attitude or even an English-speaker's attitude....it's a human one. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 7015 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 39 of 43 02 June 2011 at 5:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
WARNING: severe cynicism coming up...
When students fail, it's ALWAYS the teacher's fault, since s/he didn't try hard enough, didn't do this or that, etc. When students pass, it's NEVER the teacher's fault, since the students are very clever, motivated, hard-working, etc. Just another one of the things that make teaching so much fun :) Edited by patuco on 03 June 2011 at 5:24pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5226 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 40 of 43 02 June 2011 at 5:29pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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@patuco EXACTLY!
One thing that's currently killing me is that my current employer will let me do pretty much as I like in my ESL classes, which is a great opportunity to snap out of useless evangelisms WRT methods and the like, and yet I hit the students' wall 95% of the time (yes, kind of like the 'teacher, leave them kids alone' wall ;) So far very few of them (fortunately) have had the cheek to claim that them not advancing is my fault, but it really drives me up the wall. I mean, of course it's possible it's my fault, but before I change a method / approach / whatever I'm usually interested in seeing it fail, which pretty much requires them to try in the first place, wouldn't you think so? Interestingly enough, my most conflictive students (I've had others equally lazy but they were manageable) are university professors themselves. Go figure... yeah the fun in teaching. Now I can't help opening another thread to ramble about language students ;) Edited by patuco on 03 June 2011 at 5:25pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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