Broken English Teachers

September 6th, 2007

I teach English in Japan. If you thought that English education in Japan was lacking, check this story out and weep quietly to yourselves. Yes, it’s true. English education in America has reached a new level of shameful.

Let’s play a game. What’s wrong with the following sentences, other than the fact that they were uttered by real, living English teachers in the state of Arizona?

1 – “How do we call it in English?”
2 – “You need to make the story very interested to the teacher.”
3 – “My older brother always put the rules.”
4 – “Sometimes, you are not gonna know some.”
5 – “If you have problems, to who are you going to ask?”
6 – “Read me first how it was before.”

(Answers are below for those who need them, and those from these Arizona public schools.)

Some teachers’ English was so poor that even state officials strained to understand them,” the assessment found. “At a dozen districts, evaluators found teachers who ignored state law and taught in Spanish.

Here’s the hat tip chain. Ready? Bryan at Hot Air found it via Mark Krikorian at National Review Online’s The Corner, who referenced Alan Wall at VDare, who linked to a different article about it.

Answers to the quiz:
1 – How do we say it in English?
(What do we call it in English?)
2 – You need to make the story very interesting for the teacher.
3 – My older brother always set the rules.
4 – Sometimes you will not know the answer.
5 – Who are you going to speak with if you have problems?
(If you have questions, who will you ask?)
6 – Read me the original sentence, please.
(“Read the beginning of the story to me.” <- This would also work if the topic isn’t grammar, but the plot of a story.)

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  • Number 3 should be "sets"!

    And should 5 start with "To whom", but I always get my whos and whoms confused!
  • Ha ha ha - Ken Y-N, you're not under investigation here! But you make fair points. So, allow me to address them.

    I said "set" for number 3 because I assumed that it was meant to be in past tense. ("Put" was, so I left "set" in the same tense.)

    And 5 could be phrased in any of those ways. I just chose something I felt would be more common in a school setting. Either way, I think we all know that you don't ask "to" someone. Yikes. :-)
  • I'm always shooting off on tangents. Sorry in advance.

    I think the 'who' versus 'whom' rule is antiquated, at least colloquially. It's one of those questions that my Japanese adult students loved to ask about. Another one was 'the' pronouned 'thuh' or 'thee'. In actual use it doesn't matter, except that we use 'thee' to emphasize something as being number one, sort of like spoken italics. "Catch-22 is not just a book, it's the book!" (Here, I'd pronounce it as 'thee', wouldn't you?)

    I've found that having training in teaching English often doesn't mean a whole lot if the teacher hasn't gone through second-language acquisition themselves (especially teachers in Japan). I think the JET program should make learning Japanese mandatory, not optional, as should all of the 英会話. I've recognized so many peculiarities in English after struggling through difficult concepts in Japanese. I think to myself, "Why do they say it like that in Japanese? Wait a minute, why do we say it like that in English?"

    Example off the top of my head:
    レポートを書かないといけない。 (To my Western brain sounded initially like, "I won't write a report can't go," and then became, "I can't not write a report.")

    "I have to write a report." After acquiring the pattern in Japanese, I look at this in English now as, "I am in possession of the act of writing a report." The 'have' probably throws off a lot of beginning students of English.

    Of course, there are some very talented English teachers who didn't need to study a second language, but overall, I have this impression that an English teacher in Japan (even a university professor) who hasn't studied a foreign language themselves is a bad English teacher. (My bias is showing)
  • Alex, I largely agree with you. The same things come up with a pronounced "ay" or "uh," neither, and either. They all become points of contention. The thing is, while many Japanese teachers of English can nitpick about really particular things in English, their students still can't speak it.

    I'm just put out that it's happening in America too. The students who can't speak the language, not the teachers who know it academically, obviously. Sad.
  • Deas, good point about the past tense - I didn't think of that and without context either past or present is OK.

    Alex, about the and thee, many Japanese get taught that thee is used when the noun starts with a vowel. I should find a survey on that, but casually chatting with cow-orkers I find most of them were taught that way, and believe it to be a rule that native speakers follow. I remember that Tony Laslow talked about it in one of the ダーリンは外国人 books - ダーリンの頭ん中に, IIRC.
  • The thee before a vowel rule is definitely around, but super subconcious for most of us. I didn't know it until I looked up "the" in a Japanese dictionary.
    Lots of lingual rules are related to sounds. Lots of stuff being affected by what is "voiced" and "unvoiced" (throat vibration stuff). Never noticed until I had to teach the language.
  • Um....I still call that bogus. You looked it up in a Japanese dictionary, dude. I definitely never learned it explicitly in school. And I believe that I say "thuh" before words like "ocean," while I sometimes say "thee" before words like "news." Hmmm. Then again, I'm wrong all the time.
  • Kathy
    oooh the /thuh/ vs /thee/ issue came up for me a few days ago too...my ninensei girl who is doing a recitation contest asked me about it when I was telling her to pronounce the like /thuh/ all the time...she was definitely taught that rule but when I was speaking naturally I found I say /thuh/ almost all the time...although /thee/ before words that start with a vowel also sound fine- I feel like I can always use either in that case, and it still sounds natural to me.

    The linguist in me wants me to remind you that language is always changing and maybe it was more common to say /thee/ before words starting with a vowel sound but perhaps the pronunication is just leveling out to a more common /thuh/ sound using the "shwa" phonetic sound (which I can't type with this Japanese keyboard but represents the /uh/ sound in IPA..International Phonetic Alphabet). But because it still sounds fine to say /thee/, I would say it is still in the process of switching and it might be some time before /thee/ disappears (except as a word used for emphasis), if ever. Of course, this is just my theory...don't actually know if it's disappearing. The only definite fact for me here is that language changes and is always changing.

    Can you tell I am I'm a Descriptive Grammarian rather than a Prescriptive Grammarian, or what? =P
  • I’m a Descriptive Grammarian rather than a Prescriptive Grammarian


    Watch your language! This is a family friendly blog! Ha ha ha. I kid, I kid. Nice comment. It's kind of fun to know that other people deal with this stuff. Sounds like the "it's obsolete as a strict rule" crowd has another member.
  • well I definitely seem to follow the rule, even if I never knew it before Japan. But I'm not from the South. Cough.
  • I....am. Cough cough.
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