An Example of White Guilt in ESL

Actually, she also speaks French. But avoiding idioms is not her cup of tea. 

This very confused article is really about the importance of knowing idioms and cultural allusions. These are generally the last things taught, and even native speakers, as E.D. Hirsch discovered, can be seriously deficient. Unfortunately, the autor of the article does not himself seem to understand the issue, and veers from talking about thwe differences in English dialects to the supposed need for English speakers to learn other languages,

As to native speakers of English learning another language, there is no harm in that. But English is the international language; there is no other language that would benefit native English speakers nearly so much as English fluency would benefit non-English speakers, and it is unreasonable to expect this.

English speakers might want to avoid idioms and cultural allusions when communicating with non-native speakers, just as they might want to simplify their vocabulary and grammar; but this is not an ideal solution. There is a reason why idioms and cultural allusions are common elements of all languages. First, they are efficient; a speaker or writer cannot explain everything, and must rely on a certain base of shared knowledge. The larger that base is, the faster the business of communication can be transacted. It is much faster, for example, to say someone is a “dog in the manger” than to explain that he or she is being unreasonable in this particular way. Second, idioms and cultural allusions are colourful and memorable; they imply vivid images and stories. This is why good writers and good speakers use them extensively and often. Each idiom tells an anecdote.

For the same reason, the typical ESL students loves to learn idioms, They are the most fun part of learning any language. In any case, not knowing them cuts students off from the texts they are usually most interested in: Hollywood movies and popular music.

Specifically, the article begins with the problems of integrating recent immigrants into UK and US society. It is absurd in this context to expect their fellow citizens to curtail their speech and writing to make things simpler for them. What is called for, instead, is a thoroughgoing ESL programme that includes idioms and cultural allusions. Nobody who wants to live comfortably in the USA should be ignorant of what “in the ballpark,” “out of the ballpark,” or “a bsllpark figure” means. This would mean they know nothing of baseball, the national sport. That does not imply a good integration.

In other words, Cameron is right. The author of the article is barking up the wrong tree. If you catch the idiom.

Why We Need to Teach Standard English

This recent video is not well-written, but it expresses an argument I have read hundreds of times. It is the conventional wisdom in linguistics and TEFL. And it is quite wrong.

The basic claim is that there is no right or wrong in English, no better or worse accent, and it is prejudice to value or teach any one form of English over any other.

This ought to be self-evident nonsense. If it relly does not matter, why teach English at all? It follows that whatever form of English the student now speaks, however non-standard is as good as any other. He or she uses mostly Korean grammar and vocabulary? Who are we to impose our ideas of propriety on him/her? Teaching is cultural chauvinism. They are simply speaking “Mexican English,” or “Gulf Arab English,” or “Korean English.”

To continue with the erroneous assumptions of the article:

“The problem with what we called the “standard” form is that it is always made by whoever is in power at the time. If there are two major dialect groups, but one is the working class and the other is the ruling class, it’s the ruling class who gets to make the dictionaries and decide what is 'right' or 'wrong' to say. “

This is commonly claimed, and it is not true. It is Marxist cant. The ruling class might have such power if they wanted it, but they naturally has no desire to sound like everyone else. If they did, how would they be recognized as the ruling class? An upper-class English accent is very different from RP (Received Pronunciation, the British standard, aka BBC English). In the US, Thurston Howell III speaks with a distinct and recognizable posh accent. So did the Kennedys.

The standard pronunciation is not chosen by the ruling class, but by professionals in the field of communicating: broadcast journalists, actors, direcrors. The written language is determined by professional writers and editors. It was ever so. Check the Oxford English Dictionary for their citations. Perhaps these are a ruling class in a sense: they rule over language and usage.  

The video supposes that valuing RP or General American (the American standard) is simply discrimination. But here is why it is important. Language existsts primarily for communication. Accordingly, the most widely and easily understood dialect is the most useful to know. Learn Ebonics, and no doubt you can speak effectively to other urban blacks. Everyone else is going to struggle. Speak Standard, English, and urban blacks will understand about as easily; but so will everyone else, including non-native speakers from India or Lapland. Which is more valuable to know?

It is an interesting fact that most Norwegians claim to understand spoken Swedish, yet most Swedish say they cannot understand Norwegian. Why? Because Sweden is a larger country, and Norwegians are used to hearing Swedish on TV and radio. Swedes do not get much Norwegian TV. Similarly, cable TV news, pop music, Hollywood movies, and so forth, ensure that everyone worldwide has little trouble with RP or GA. Give them a rural Yorkshire accent, though, and even other native speakers will struggle.

And why shouldn't employers discriminate against you if you only speak ebonics and not standard English? Your communications skills are intrinsically less valuable.

Some argue that this is not fair to minorities. They must learn the majority dialect. It is easier for the privileged people with white skin, because they speak the more useful dialect from birth.

But this too is not true. RP is spoken as a native dialect by only 3% of the British population. Native speakers of GA are restricted to a portion of Iowa. For all the rest of us, it is a matter of learning a second dialect. The article tacitly admits this without realizing it by speaking of how we all “code shift.” We generally learn the standard dialect in school.

Accordingly, it is completely correct to judge those who speak in inappropriate circumstances in a non-standard dialect as less well educated and probably less intelligent. This is not discrimination; this is a good and useful marker, like hiring only those who have completed high school.

The fact that language changes over time is perfectly irrelevant here. Nobody so far as I know is opposed to this. The issue is whether the changes are useful and follow the logic of the language, or are  unnecessary noise, hindering communication. This is generally what the professional communicators decide, and why they are needed. There is expertise in language just as in anything else.

The Growing Problem of Foreigners Not Knowing How to Think

German (left) versus Chinese techniques of exptressing an opinion, graphically illustrated. More at bsix12

Recently, I attended a conference for English teachers, and a talk on the need to “teach our students critical thinking skills.” This is a growing movement within EFL (English as a Foreign Language). And it is alarming.

We are not talking here, note, about grade school kids, or high school kids. These are college and university students.

Can we assume that these students really “do not know how to think critically”? Isn’t there an obvious danger that what we are really seeing, given the EFL context, is a tendency to think in ways unfamiliar to us EFL teachers as Westerners? Isn’t it racist, flat-out racist, to assume that we are the experts on “how to think,” apparently on no better grounds than that we Westerners?

But let’s suppose the students—EFL students everywhere, apparently-- genuinely do not know how to think. Should we, as English teachers, be telling them? If the average university student “does not know how to think,” on what grounds can we assume that the average English teacher does? We have no qualifications, and have never been tested ourselves, in the subject. How much do we really know about formal logic, logical fallacies, formal debate procedure, and the syllogism? You want someone with qualifications to teach you how to think clearly and incisively, you want a philosophy grad, not an English major.

Finally, where do we get off deciding what the students need to know? Our students have signed up to learn English. That’s what we tell them we are here to do, and that is what they are paying for. Where do we get the right to instead make them spend their time “learning how to think” as we would like?

German versus Chinese approach to problem-solving.

This is symptomatic of a larger problem we face in the EFL field. In the normal course of things, as the EFL field has grown, it is universities and linguistics departments in English-speaking countries have set themselves up as the "experts" to train aspirants for this "profession." With the trainers being the resident instructors there.

This means that those who are training people for careers in EFL either 1) have not themselves ever taught abroad, or, 2) if they have, have decided they would rather return home. In other words, they are self-selected for not being good at dealing with foreign cultures.

Among other problems, this bias means that the standard TEFL/TESOL training ignores altogether the one most important issue faced by people in the field: how to deal with a foreign culture.

Nor, catastrophically, do they learn anything about comparative lingustics, because their trainers know nothing about it. Asa result, the field tends to treat EFL students as though they have never previously known any other language; as if before they started learning English they could not read or write.Besides being terribly insulting, this means we spend a huge amount of time--about half of all class time, by my reckoning--"teaching" EFL students things they already know from their first language: skimming and scanning a reading passage, composing a paragraph, listening for details, and so forth. At the same time, we ignore any issues that are likely to cause them special problems: things like the difference in how tone is used in Chinese and in English. To teach at all efficiently, any teacher of EFL should have a basic knowledge of their likely students' first language--training should involve at leasto ne course in comparative linguistics. This need not require all the heavy lifting of vocabulary aquisition. But they should know the basics: word order, how stress is used, what phonemes are available, and so forth.

Ultimately, the solution is simple: TESOL training should be offered and taken, by native speakers, but at universities in non-English-speaking countries. Nor would this be difficult to do: the expence of moving abroad could be more than offset by the cheaper cost of living while studying in a country like Cambodia or Costa Rica.