steveeeeeeeee wrote:

Oh yeh, immersion isn't going to magically make you speak a language you don't know, but it can make the vocabulary you have stored in the back of your bonce come to the fore very quickly and effectively, especially if it is very important that you get something across and/or need help from people who don't speak English. I generally need a couple of days somewhere before that language comes to the fore, really doesn't help if I have English-speaking company. From a language-learning POV.

steveeeeeeeee wrote:


Haha, I've had that pleasure myself. Definitely a challenge.
In answer to the original question, 1) I teach in Bulgaria, and meet very few people with much good to say about secondary education there, but the standard of fluency of English amongst young people seems fairly good on the whole (granted, my experience may not be based on a very representative cross-section of society).
2) I think by a 'culture' of ESL, Gramski is talking about more than just the time and money people spend studying English, and the number of native teachers. After all, Korea has long been one of the most popular places for teachers to go, with the most and best-paid jobs, where most time and money is spent by parents and students studying English, yet their results in international comparative tests are still crap. Why? Largely down to the ESL 'culture' there, i.e. the way English is taught, both in secondary and private schools, both by Korean and native English teachers.

Yeah, that's exactly what I'm on about. When I was in Japan a couple of months ago, I was reading stuff by a guy called Brian McVeigh who was absolutely scathing about the "standard" method of foreign language learning, which was based (IIRC) entirely around the method for learning Mandarin (which obviously is a bit special because the characters are the same).

Korea's a great example (albeit one where secondary education is actually pretty good, at least in math/science) - 1% of GDP is spent on English lessons, but they consistently get the worst scores on TOEFL.

Yes, unfortunately they teach English exactly the same way they teach maths and science.
Except they pay some unqualified white guy a lot of money to do it.

zbigniew wrote:


Ah the TEFL teacher. The horror stories coming out of Korea add the balance to that.

How do they stream the classes with you Steveeeeeeeee?

The kids that have the best English but not necessarily the best results here are the ones who have English as part of their life, music, cinema and TV shows, the ones with the widest vocabulary are those who play strategy games.

As an English speaker it was very difficult at the beginning learning Turkish as most people had more English than me and wanted to practice, this is still the case. The advice of the Education Minister at the weekend, go to Sultanahmet and practice your English with tourists.
Generally since I have been married, my wife is Turkish, the environment I am in has changed and I have to use Turkish more.

I'm in a similar situation AE, a week at Sr. Stev9e's is like an intensive conversation course, I really notice an improvement every time I go there.

Regarding zbigniew's comment,



I guess I forget about the fact that there are a hell of a lot of unqualified ESL teachers out there. Any teacher in any part of the world with the full suite of Cambridge teaching certificates (CELTA, CELTYL, DELTA) must be delivering roughly the same quality of language teaching, but I guess those teachers are the minority. It's just that in my work-place, having such qualifications is the norm.



Through the flawed but incredibly useful Common European Framework levels (A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2).

Wyatt picked me up wrong earlier, in no sense was I saying that teachers were exclusively to blame (though you will get poor examples in every profession). After all, no matter how enthusiastic or dedicated the teacher, even they can communicate little passion if the curriculum to a great extent works to nullify their endeavours through rote learning.

The CEF, our school is trying to implement that lock, stock and barrel. It has a lot of validity but it is no curriculum or syllabus, just a useful set of guides for the learner and teacher to measure progress.

The EFL teacher has a lot of the blame for poor education and rightly so, I look back in horror at my first years teaching and think how bad I was.

Turkey is full of some awful teachers, we just sacked a complete nutcase from our school, as the VP I had to actually physically intervene in the class as I was scared for the students' safety. This is a sadly not uncommon incident when you put unqualified teachers, not even a CELTA, who speak not one word of the language in with students who will do what teenagers do. Press buttons and test limits, the reaction of most teachers is to shout and scream back, raising confrontation levels and creating more conflict.

Slightly gone off topic, sorry for that.

A key problem with the CEF and schools is that it's designed primarily for adults and the the "can do" statements reflect this.

There are also problems with the amount of "can do" statements a student can achieve. The "can do" statements of A2 are incredibly easy to do, but it's a huge jump between those abilities and the ones required at B1. But then a student is supposed to have twice as many teaching hours to progress to A2, which is about right, but it leaves B1 levels consisting of students with seriously varying abilities.

But overall, it works well and to have a universal scale for languages is a great idea. It just needs more investment, the scales and "can do" statements need revision and re-working constantly, what was decided a over a decade ago is not relevant now.

I don't know much about this, but I have to say, English racing drivers saying "for sure" gets right on my tits.
No one speaking English as a first language has ever said "for sure" when "of course" or "absolutely" or "yes" would do.
If that's lingua franca it can fuck right off.

As you were.

I reckon the day isn't far away when a native English speaker giving a speech at a global conference could possible require an interpreter to interpret their native UK English into lingua franca English.

It's not quite the same thing, but a few months back, people at work needed somebody to read an English text out loud. It was nothing official, they just wanted a voiceover for a film they'd made, for test purposes only.

As the only native English speaker at the company, I'd have thought I'd have been an obvious choice. I don't speak RP, but neither do I sound like Bomber off of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.

However, I was the obvious choice not to do it – because "nobody understands an English accent". So they ended up getting one of the locals to do it. It would be unfair to say that he sounded like Herr Flick, but he wasn't far off. Yet everybody was happy with the end product, so who am I to complain?

hobbes wrote:


What annoys me beyond belief is British Formula one commentators getting even the simplest driver names wrong. In the more exotic cases I can understand this, but why on earth do they for instance insist on calling Vettel "Vet-TEL" (caps indicating stress), while it is actually pronounced "VET-tel"? The English language provides the correct sounds to make this name, and it is not that hard.

My son seems to have ended up deeply modern-languages-averse, which is puzzling and disappointing to his parents, one of whom comes from that French-immersion culture of Anglophone Canada, and the other of whom is me, for whom languages are the bollocks. Ah well. The girl's looking promising...

What's the score with modern-language learning and teaching in British state schools these days? I occasionally read reports that the percentage of pupils opting for languages is down to single figures, or as good as.

Modern languages were dying on their arse when I was at school in the 1970s and 1980s and I could never really understand why. You had the chance to go on cut-price weekends and exchanges to France; you had language assistants coming over on their year abroad and being exotic and playing the guitar and revealing how bad the "proper" teachers were at French; you could piss about in the language lab; you could do all sorts of stuff.

You never got any of that in, say, Biology. At our school, we didn't even get to cut up any dead rats.

Smallcaps wrote:

In my opinion, the British in general are very, very poor are pronouncing foreign things.

I've had several rows with my wife over the correct pronunciation of paella. Apparently by saying it correctly I'm pretentious. Even though my pronunciation is how it's commonly said in the US - Americans are generally much better at pronouncing foreign words.

Hmmm, I agree with the first half of this, but not so sure about the second. I mean, take, for example, croissant. cruh-SANT is much further away from the original than KWAH-sont. Neither is brilliant, but I'd say the Brit one is better.

Yeah, but the French and Germans call me Phileeep, (which is better than Kiwis who call me Fulup, admittedly) both of which are miles away from how it's properly pronounced, so I'm cool with VeTEL.

"Vettel", roughly translated, means "hag" or "old bag".

Or have I just done a Frank Beard?

hobbes wrote:


There all so far away from the real pronunciation of Hobbes though aren't they?