Discussion Groups / ESL Teaching / June 2005

I hate to be the spanner in the works here, but this subject is near
and dear to my heart. As most of you know, I am an American working in
Greece.

The majority of Greeks in Greece insist on the innate superiority of
British English to American English. There are many reasons for this,
but most of them have to do with the fact that a cetain amount of
anti-Americanism permeates the culture here. The Brits are also
disliked (don't get me wrong), but the prejudice is much stronger
against Those Who Have Come From Across The Great Waters.

A large number of Greek upper middle class university students go to
Britain for a year for postgraduate training. When they return, they
often find employment easier and end up in positions of power. It may
have to do with the real or snob value of a one-year UK education, with
superior upbringing, with the better connections their better-off
families have, or whatever. It's a simple cultural given here. Go to
the UK, get a better job more easily.

So we have a relatively sizeable number of people who have some inkling
of how things are said and written in Britain, or at least how they
WERE said or written at some fixed year in the past.

This creates a dilemma for my students. The following hypothetical
situation will illustrate it better.

Say I have a student working in an entry-level position in a bank. The
manager has done an MA program(me) in the UK. Now, say, my student,
with a BA and certified at Cambridge ESOL Advanced Level (CEF C1,
somewhere around 525/213 TOEFL, 800 TOEIC) is tapped to do a quick
translation for her boss. My student writes "skillful" in her work, not
knowing any better, and the male manager, always on the alert for ways
to asset his superiority over his female subordinates, taps on the
paper when he sees it.

"This isn't English," he smugly declares. A small smirk. "This is
American! They don't speak English: they speak...well, they have
degraded and bastardized the language into nothing more than a cheap,
low patois. I'VE been to Britain. They write 'skilful'. That is what is
correct."

I actually heard a Greek bank employee with barely comprehensible
pronunciation in English voice this attitude to a customer a few years
back. The customer, being wholly ignorant of English, nodded in
agreement. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

OK, in my hypothetical situation, the manager is clearly a low pig, the
student is an idiot for believing him, and the society is full of
contemptibly ignorant notions of language for condoning this kind of
attitude, but is it our job as teachers to simply judge them all from
our higher moral ground and move on?

Not to get into high language theory here, but people do use language
as a cultural indicator. It divides as well as unites. In my view, the
best thing to do in my kind of situation (and similar situations exist
worldwide), is to teach as much English as possible. That is to say,
where I recognize markedly British forms, to teach them as British and
where I know language items are markedly American, to label them
likewise. Another part of this is being deliberately consistent in my
language choices. This is far, far more important in the writings skill
than in any of the other three.

Granted, I cannot become perfect at recognizing these forms, but a few
hundred bucks invested in usage manuals and computer resources, some
basic computer corpora training, and hours of reading, asking and
answering questions have given me quite a leg up on the competition.

There is also another aspect of the profession here to consider. Our
willingness to expose the fact that English is spoken differently by
different members of our language community and the fact that we know
enough about the language to comment on it and back up our comments
with references to authoritative printed materials raises our student's
confidence in us to an enormous degree. Once again, not to get into
high theory, but this lowers student's resistence to accepting our
language input and corrections. The theory is called lowering the level
of the (socio-) affective filter.

I don't think I'm missing the point here, but if I am, please, feel
free to tell me. It would be a relief from all this writing and reading.