successful language learners
Successful language learners | Jake Kimball | April 18th, 2001
A controversy erupted in the newspaper when a study abroad seminar was held in Seoul recently. The consensus was that it's nearly impossible to learn English in a non-English speaking country. I for one disagreed as I have met or taught many advanced learners who had never studied or traveled abroad. I've also met some people who have studied abroad and spoke, well, not so well.
What do you think? Are those of us in EFL countries just spinning our wheels or what?
Jake
Re: World Englishes | Jake Kimball | April 19th, 2001
To clarify a bit about my last post. I mentioned non-English speaking countries. What I was really referring to was the list of Inner Circle countries, as opposed to the Outer Circle or Expanding Circle countries. There's some good reading on that topic in Sociolinguistics and Language Teaching (Chapter 3).
The controversy I noted was due to the large number of Koreans who attended a seminar on study abroad and emigration that then produced a series of op-ed pieces in the newspaper. Most TESOL practitioners agreed that English (I guess any language for that matter) has too many irregularities, exceptions to the rule, too much slang, etc and that only by living in one of the Inner circle countries can one learn English properly.
One point never mentioned in the editorials was that of Konglish. It occurred to me (thank you Raymond) that street signs here are not a reliable source of English as they are generally not 'real' or 'proper' English. Konglish as a pseudo-language does have an enormous stranglehold on many learners here. Konglish takes its form from various languages such as English, German, Japanese, and Chinese.
How do you handle the interlanguage that crops up in learners speech? Is it worth correcting or should we let it stand as a valid language variety? I mean, even though what is said may be unintelligible to native English speakers, it is perfectly understood by other L2 speakers within the same community.
Jake
Reply to Jake | Pinkie | April 19th, 2001
You wrote, "How do you handle the interlanguage that crops up in learners speech? Is it worth correcting or should we let it stand as a valid language variety?"
I'm no expert on this sort of stuff, but I'm in a posting mood today. My view (I imagine pretty conventional) is that that there's no simple answer to these questions: whether or not mistakes/errors should be corrected at a given moment (and how) surely depends on a wide range of factors relating to each particular student's needs and "level", classroom context, task type, etc etc. On this sort of thing, I personally find Ellis's "Instructed Second Language Acquisition" very useful. Other books, anybody?
You also say "...even though what is said may be unintelligible to native English speakers, it is perfectly understood by other L2 speakers within the same community". I can't imagine many contexts in which the aim of language learning is as minimalist as this! Or am I not understanding you right?
Best wishes,
Pinkie
Spain
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