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).
