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Teachers with no linguistics training | ||
Tags: Native Speakers | Language Teaching | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes  Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 9 of 11 27 April 2011 at 12:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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When I studied French at the university in the seventies our institute suddenly got a native Romanian teacher, who announced a series of courses. I went there, and we were 5 persons in all (including 2 or 3 teachers). Before the year had ended I was the only one left, and we also got a new native Romanian teacher with whom I had lessons for two years. So in a sense I did hijack a course, which among other things meant that we only spoke Romanian, and that we concentrated on language itself rather than the texts we used - i.e. he corrected my pronunciation, answered questions about grammar and idiomatic expressions and so forth.
In contrast I also followed conversation classes in French with a full room of students (mostly with a literary text basis), and I also followed courses about specific subjects - including French occultism with a native French teacher. I learned something about the subjects and wrote some essays, but I didn't really learn to speak French. When I had to pass my oral proficiency exam I had long ago dropped the classroom and instead I took an interrail tour instead. On a scale from 0 to 13 my note shot up three points and I passed. So I don't believe in classroom conversation classes - the thing I want is focused drilling with a clear purpose and/or listening to native speakers around the clock, not listening to other students' unstructured babbling about something irrelevant for a few hours each week. However in both situation my teachers were highly trained and skilled and experienced and all that. Now what about having an untrained native speaker as your 'teacher' (or mentor)? Well, native speakers are generally quite unaware about the structures of their language - they just know what's right or wrong according to their own linguistic instinct. So if you need to understand something about the structure you have to build it yourself, and that can in principle only be done by some clever interrogation done by you, almost like a linguistic fieldworker does - and I can not really see that happening in a classroom setting. But being a student who do your own homework studying vocabulary, grammar and style by intensive methods, and who supplement this with encounters with a native speaker who can say whether you are heading in the right direction, could be quite efficient. Edited by Iversen on 27 April 2011 at 12:42pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Haukilahti Triglot Groupie Finland Joined 4965 days ago 94 posts - 126 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Polish | Message 10 of 11 27 April 2011 at 2:01pm | IP Logged | ||
This is the most important advice. Having a native speaking teacher/tutor can 1) motivate and give to you a schedule ("I want to finish lesson 43 before next meeting with tutor"), 2) guide and correct, 3) provide you with that vital "real life" (as opposed to tape) listening, comprehension and conversation practice that every self-learner misses. You will do your "real" study in your own time anyway, which you will organize as you find best. Edited by Haukilahti on 27 April 2011 at 2:02pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tangerine Newbie England Joined 5212 days ago 19 posts - 38 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 11 of 11 27 April 2011 at 6:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've been studying Mandarin for quite some time now. My method is:
1. Learn the vocab and grammar structures for the lesson in my textbook, flashcarding both for subsequent, iterated review. 2. Have a class with a native speaker tutor, in which I read the text provided, answers questions about it, do the oral drills/exercises in the book while the tutor corrects grammar/vocab/pronunciation mistakes, rephrases, suggests alternatives. Often free discussions about the topic of the lesson ensue, giving me speaking and listening practice. My tutor is majoring in Chinese As A Foreign Language, but to be honest all of the tutors I have met studying this have absolutely no idea how to teach. I am an English teacher myself, and I have to train my tutors to do what I want. I would say you absolutely need to get the teacher to stop speaking English as much as possible. As a beginner, you may need the teacher to translate here and there (although i fully support the immersion/natural method, at times it can be easier and quickly translate during the elementary stages of learning, but after that, languages may diverge so that translation could be significantly misleading). I suggest you get a textbook and do the learning of the vocab and grammar yourself. Save your questions for the lesson. Then, in the lesson you want to spend as much time doing drills and exercises as possible. Repetition is key to learning the basic structures. (as a teacher, it sometimes feels awkward to keep drilling beginner students, but they need it and often enjoy it). Ensure that the tutor knows that she can just jump in and correct your mistakes at any time, you do not mind. (you will have to reinforce this message a number of times, probably - and keep smiling when your nth mistake of the day is being corrected:)). As you progress, there should be less and less English in the clasroom and you should start having chats/discussions about the topics that arise. I suggest you do not spend any time writing/listening to tapes/CDs etc or much time reading as you can do that at home. Hope this helps. Edited by tangerine on 27 April 2011 at 6:15pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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