Robin,

I have found that the quickest route to understanding students' language problems and solving these problems is active error analysis. Here is an article that I wrote on the subject from one of my newsletters. At this time I have speakers of four unrelated languages in my adult class. I ask them questions about their languages such as "What is the closest sound to this one in your language?" "How do you say this in your language?" etc. and we do quick comparisons. Putting the structures of English and L1 next to each other on the marker board is productive. This seems to help a lot and students generally find it interesting to see how different languages work. At the same time, I learn a lot about how different languages function to better help the students. It is not necessary to be able to communicate in these languages, 

I am quite comfortable in Spanish and am functional in several other unrelated languages. However, I tend to avoid using the students' languages in a classroom situation. My aim is to create dependency on English, which can be done very early in training.
It is not necessary to be able to speak students' languages. However, a teacher who has learned any second language as an adult, gains great insight into the whole language acquisition process first hand and is generally a better instructor.


                                    
     ESL Error Analysis Classifications

 

Errors made during the production of a new language can serve as a key to improving instruction and the selection of appropriate exercises and materials to accelerate the language acquisition process. A conscientious instructor can do a better job of teaching by finding out the causes of problems, in order to solve them. Errors fall into three categories:

 

L1-First language problems:  These are problems on the phonological, structural and semantic levels caused by basic differences between the native and target languages. Since most ESL students in the U.S.A. are Spanish speakers, we can look at a few of the common problems of Spanish speakers learning English. Many of these problems are predictable and most are fixable.



Phonology-Spanish has some basic phonemes in common with English, but when these basic sounds are found in different word/syllable environments they change their forms. These variations are called allophones. For example voiceless stops /ptk/in initial position are aspirated in English and not in Spanish. A little puff of air follows them as in "pill, till and kill." This feature is important acoustically to English speakers. The entire vowel system is different. English has eleven vowel and three diphthong phonemes and Spanish has five vowel phonemes. They are all different. None of these vowel sounds are produced the same way in both languages. Spanish speakers have a difficult time distinguishing, identifying and producing; hid and heed, hid and head, hayed and head, head and had, had and hod, hod and Hud, hawed and hoed, hood and who'd. Common consonant problems include distinguishing between Yale and jail, choose and shoes, etc.



Structure: Spanish puts adjectives after nouns, "el libro grande" is an example, which may result in "the book big" in English. Spanish uses "no" as a negative in almost all situations. English has "don't, doesn't, not, isn't, aren't," etc. in different structural contexts. Spanish speakers will tend to use "no" in most English structures. These are just a few examples. Speakers of other languages will have some of the same problems, but not the same general inventory of problems.



Semantics-English and Spanish have many cognates, most from Latin, but often carrying different meanings or implications. These are caused "false cognates" and can be problematical. 

 

L2-Second language (English general) problems: There are certain sounds and structures in English that are almost universally difficult for speakers of many languages including Spanish. A fairly large inventory of all of these common problems could be made. Phonology-A common area of difficulty for speakers of all languages is the English /r/ sound as in "ring, very and near." Spanish speakers will make a "flap,"  which means brief contact with the roof of the mouth. Speakers of other languages may make flap, velar or uvular sounds in its place. The /er/ sound of American English in words like ""nurse, world and her" is also a problem for speakers of many languages. English is especially rich in final consonant sounds. We have many final fricatives such as /f-th-s-sh-v-TH-z-zh./ Many languages, including most Eastern Asian languages, have no final fricatives. Speakers of Asian languages often have great difficulties both distinguishing and producing these sounds. Most of their words end in vowel or nasal sounds. English has many final consonant clusters in words like "threats, scratched and stitched." Many languages have no final clusters. Structure: English has certain structural features that in combination are unique to our language. Notable features include "do, does, doesn't, don't auxiliaries necessary in used forming many questions and negatives.   

 

?-problems: We call these "Who knows?" problems, because there is no obvious reason why they should happen. They are not consistent and can happen to any student at any time! Causes of most problems can be tracked by patient ESL instructors. These can't.

   

Ted
www.tedklein-ESL.com 




  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: robinschwarz1 at aol.com 
  To: englishlanguage at nifl.gov 
  Sent: Monday, December 01, 2008 3:46 PM
  Subject: [EnglishLanguage 3185] Re: ESL Teacher Training




  This has been an interesting discussion on teacher training.   I believe the original question was not whether a teacher needed to be bilingual or not, but whether a teacher needed to know some basic concepts about learners' languages.  Much of the discussion veered off to the bilingual question and then to TESOL preparation, which may or may not, in my observation, be sufficient to provide a teacher with not just the knowledge, but the insight to examine a learner's language to see where challenges for learning English may lie.   

  I think of a teacher I coached a few years ago who could not understand why her student had so much trouble with a certain sound  and when I pointed out to her that the learner's language did not have that sound, the teacher literally whined at me, " Do you mean I have to KNOW about my learners' languages?"  Or the speech pathologist who characterized a student's inability to hear or pronounce  the p/f contrast (which does not exist in his language) a "speech impediment."     These are just the kinds of attitudes that very good question seemed to address.  

  In my own work looking at what causes adult ESOL learners to struggle in learning, I have found that lack of awareness of certain features of learners' languages often causes teachers to either teach inappropriately to some students, or worse, as illustrated above, to seriously misunderstand challenges learners face in dealing with English and with instruction.   For example, since we know that phonemic awareness and mastery of the alphabetic principle is key to fluent and competent reading in English,  if a teacher is not aware that a learner may be literate in a non-alphabetic language (which does not mean a language that uses different letters than our alphabet, but rather a language that uses a writing system in which individual figures represent larger chunks of sound than just a phoneme-- either a syllable or an entire word, as in some Chinese languages), then the teacher may not understand why that student struggles with spelling in English or with the c oncept of "sounding out words"--i.e. phonics.   Problems such as not understanding the concept of a "middle sound" or of stringing sounds together to make words arise when the phonemic concept is not understood.   Quite a few languages have diacritics (little marks) to indicate stress or even tone, where English has none of those and learners are sometimes baffled by that difference.  There is research evidence to show that readers whose languages are highly regular have a hard time learning to read English accurately because they do not deal with the huge variety of irregularities in English spelling well.  Again, if the teacher is aware of this basic difference, he or she can help learners who read in a highly regular language pay attention to and figure out a way to remember baffling differences of pronunciation of simliar spellings such as bomb, comb, tomb, etc.    

  Other features, such as grammatical order of words in sentences or certain concepts of grammar, differ either a lttle or a lot from language to language and depending on the learner, may pose significant problems in moving to the the new language.  Recently a teacher I have coached asked a translator to translate the concepts of subject, verb, object into the language of some of her learners.   When asked whether she thought she could do that, the translator commented that those concepts don't translate directly because the sentences in the language are not constructed on that principle.   Thus direct translation could further confuse rather than clarify things for the learners.   

  No one is suggesting that a teacher be fluent in all the languages of the globe, but the awareness that the differences exist and the willinginess to help learners explore the differences so both teacher and learner can learn about how the differences need to be understood in the language learning process can go a very long way towards more successful learning and teaching.   

  I have found that a reading of the Wikipedia entry on alphabetic languages ( which includes a classification of several kinds of non-alphabetic languages, too) is  quick way to raise one's awareness of these concepts without having to become expert in a given language.   

  Robin Lovrien Schwarz, Consultant in Adult ESOL and Learning Problems 

    


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