My Work Study job at NSCC is as a tutor in The Loft, the school’s writing center. Many of the students we have stopping by are ESL and foreign language students, sometimes working their way through ESL classes, sometimes in the standard English classes.
As English is their second (sometimes third or fourth) language, we do a lot of work helping them navigate their way through the various intricacies and oddities of the English language…of which there are many. It’s fun to do, and at times, it can be quite funny, as well. Nothing makes you really think about just how goofy our language is until you’re trying to explain it to a non-native speaker.
For instance, it wasn’t until I was working on deconstructing part of a girl’s paper where she had written about people who were being murdered by their feet that I really thought about how nonsensical the phrase “my feet are killing me” really is. The best part was that her usage was perfect, describing how people felt after a long day standing in lines — but it only works if you use the phrase just so. Move it around and reword it, and it turns into something entirely different.
I’m also running into an issue that I certainly wouldn’t have predicted beforehand, in that at times I speak a little too precisely. Yesterday I had an ESL student in who was working on hearing the difference between “can” and “can’t” when listening to spoken English. One of the key points her teacher had touched on and that her exercise mentioned was that most people tend not to pronounce the final ‘t’ in “can’t” — rather, it’s usually just a very brief pause after the word. She had a list of sentences that she wanted me to read, some of which used “can” and some of which used “can’t”.
The only problem was that my diction is unusually good. Between having parents who share a love of the English language and spending years in a professional children’s choir, I speak far more precisely than most people do, and I was pronouncing the ‘t’ every single time. “No, no,” she would say. “I hear the ‘t’ — do it again.” Eventually, we were both laughing, as I had to try to explain how difficult it was for me to intentionally mispronounce the word. It’s incredibly difficult for me to do. In the end, I had to suggest that she find a different tutor to work that particular exercise with.
On the flip side, though, I’ve had a couple of the other students quite happy to work with me, precisely because my diction is that good. Apparently I’m easier to understand than many other English speakers, as long as I don’t go too quickly. I see a lot of pronunciation drills in my future….
“Everybody Wants the Same Thing” by Scissor Sisters from the album Ta-Dah (2006, 4:22).
I know exactly how you feel. Having spent a fair amount of time in the Filipino community where english was a second language and had a hard time explaining why ‘Piece of cake’ and ‘cake walk’ meant the task was easy.
Having hosted exchange students, I’ve found that I have to watch what I say, including the use of phrases such as “play it by ear.”
With enough experience, I think you can tell the native language of the speaker by his/her English “mistakes.” For example, one of our students used the verb “make” a lot when she first arrived. (She was from Germany.)
Hi Michael,
I was a professor of computer science for 20 years before returning to the private sector. About one third of my students were ESL. Eventhough they were to have passed the TOFEL before taking my classes, little uniformity existed in the level of their language ability. My parents were also sticklers about proper diction so I, too, had mixed reactions from my ESL students. However, I wasn’t trying to teach English, though inevitably I was teaching it, but be understood. My hat’s off to you for your willingness to work through the frustrations.
On another topic, several months ago I briefly exchanged e-mails with you regarding your father-in-law, Harold Ward. As a youngster, I swam at open swims for a couple years at the Oak Park, IL YMCA when I took the train up to Oak Park to help an elderly aunt (I lived in a rural area south of Crete, IL.)
Then in the fall and winter of 1979 I lived in one of the rooms at the Oak Park Y and swam after work, after I obtained an engineering job with AT&T Long Lines in downtown Chicago. That room at the Y got me out of a jam becaue my wife and first child were staying with our house down state until we sold it but I had to start the job. I remembered from my childhood about the rental rooms at the Oak Park Y, and, lo and behold, I was able to get one.
During our converstation, you said your wife, Harold’s daughter, was pleased to have found someone, in a round about way, who had memories of the area and that I was probably there when her father was there.
In any case, I’ve been accumulating a lot of material related to the social changes between then and now for both personal and research reasons. I’ve hoped from time to time hoped she might have time to write some of her memories about her father and the Y.
As an aside, I’ve corresponded with the recently transferred Y director from the Harvey Y. That’s where I spent most of my childhood years swimming. He told me the south suburban area is now almost entirely black and very depressed economically. He said the Harvey Y has the only pool still open. Seems even the pool at Thornton HS was drained.
Well, thanks for your time. I look forward to hearing from you.
Regards,
David
I had an entertaining thought while reading to KAS last night, and this thread popped into my head. Can you clip your diction while doing dialects? e.g., while attemting a silly southern drawl, hows your attention to detail?
Huh…I haven’t got a clue. I’ll have to try to listen to myself (or, since thinking about how you talk tends to affect how you talk, have someone else listen to me) sometime when I’m goofing around.
It may be a bit tricky, though, in that my southern drawl and my Monty Python-inspired British tend to be close enough that they often end up sliding into one another if I’m not careful. Once that starts happening, I’d assume that all bets are off. :)