Right, Ted-- I think this is a terrific way both to address puzzles across languages and to engage the learner in active language learning.    This, to me, is one of the soft skills teachers need or can use that Mary Ann Florez was discussing. 
Robin Lovrien Schwarz   


 


 

-----Original Message-----
From: Ted Klein <taklein at austin.rr.com>
To: The Adult English Language Learners Discussion List <englishlanguage at nifl.gov>
Sent: Wed, 3 Dec 2008 8:41 am
Subject: [EnglishLanguage 3210] Re: ESL Teacher Training
















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 fun
ctional 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, mos
t 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 quest
ions 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 s
ound, 
  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 becau
se 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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