Hello there and welcome back to this week’s blogpost.
One of the strangest things in my teaching career has been the request, ‘I’d like to learn English, but don’t want to do any grammar’. So, the students wanted to learn the language but not use it correctly. I would gently remind them that it would mean I wasn’t really doing my job if I neglected to teach the grammar of the language. I generally managed to persuade them that we would just look at the basics of ‘grammar’ and they often accepted that decision.
If we studied certain aspects of grammar, I’d find text book exercises to practise or if possible try to find real life examples in newspapers or other media. Not always easy, as newspapers and the like have a slightly different grammar and register from that of a text book, so I often had to adapt the authentic texts slightly, which technically stops them from being authentic, but let’s not go there.
The other difficulty with correcting students’ errors is that native speakers do not always follow the grammatical rules of their language. So, the students would be taught some grammatical rules in class, then outside the school would hear a native speaker contradict the rules that had just been learnt. I generally refer to grammar ‘rules’ as ‘guidelines’ as they can be broken or bent in so many ways.
‘Register’ is quite an interesting item of language to consider as it depends on the context, the people present and in some cases the status of the people involved in the conversation. It also depends on the type of media it is presented in. When I first started teaching very few people used emails and Facebook, Twitter and YouTube had yet to come into existence. I haven’t taught using the English language in social media yet, but I am sure that is something to be considered for the future. Sometimes my students translate directly from their language into English (which I discourage as it does not always work). A direct translation can sometimes omit certain nuances of the language, but a lot of the time it seems to omit the politeness of the language as well and students seem bemused as to why their utterances come across as rude to the listener. Even then our language etiquette puzzles non-native speakers. We advise our students to say, ‘Thank you’ and then expect them not to be surprised when the response to that utterance is ‘Don’t mention it’. Yet, if they don’t mention it, the implication is that they are rude.
Lexical (or vocabulary) errors are much more easier to correct these days as you can instantly find a picture or a photograph on the internet to explain the word(s) in question. In my early days, I spent ages trying to elicit ‘The Shroud of Turin’ to my students in one lesson. All my actions and explanations were met with very blank stares. My next step was to draw an illustration on the whiteboard. Not a good idea if you had an idea of my drawing skills. Surprisingly the students understood the meaning from my drawing. I don’t know how either, I’m just glad they did.
For pronunciation, I used to ask the students if it would be ok to record them. I did this quite a lot with my IELTS’ trainees. If they were agreeable, we would have a mock speaking exam that was recorded and then played back to the students. I would instruct the student to listen for any errors they thought had been made (this also applied to lexical and grammatical errors). Often the student would have the same list of errors as I had noted down which they were pleased about and happy that they could pick up on the same errors as their teacher. I used my laptop then to record the students. Today you can use your phone/the student’s phone or online apps. When I first started to integrate technology into my lessons, I used an app called Vocaroo (https://vocaroo.com). It’s quite basic, but it still exists today, unlike so many other apps that have fallen by the wayside or have been superseded. Vocaroo is very simple to use and can be integrated into other applications. Students seem to like this app as they can use it at a moment’s notice on their devices. I also advise students to download a version of Adrian Underhill’s phonemic chart on to their devices. This gives pronunciation sounds with examples. It’s quite useful. I am a Londoner, so my pronunciation of the word ‘book’ would be different to some of my colleagues who come from the north of the country, so there is not really a fixed pronunciation of particular sounds. If it sounds like the meaning of the utterance will be impeded by mispronunciation, then it is best to correct it.
Many years ago, I purchased a book called ‘Correction’ by Mark Bartram and Richard Walton, published in 2002 by Thomson. I was looking at it again recently and it still has lots of useful insights.