Discussion Groups / ESL Teaching / October 2004

(Me too.) That's probably true, and may become more so according to
how much the student's home culture has absorbed western language and
(popular) culture.  Students from the Far East have to start by
learning the Western alphabet, but while those from Taiwan and Japan
have always been exposed to advertising which uses written English
(googling 'Jingrish' or 'Jinglish' brings up any number of mildly
amusing examples), people in China maybe be totally unfamiliar with
Western letter forms.  There are also problems caused (as you say) by
the wider gap between European and Oriental languages  in many
features of the language, expressed when students speak or write.

One way this comes up is the way students, especially from China, give
up before the end of multi-syllable words.  A student told me recently
she'd lived in the US, in "See-ah".  It took me a while to work out we
were talking about 'Seattle' and I then had to explain that if she
didn't say the full set of syllables, people just wouldn't understand
her.  I think this may reflect some feature of the student's first
language (Franke?), but it may also be a feature of a lack of basic
comprehension of the function of language as a communicative tool.

You can always tell when students come from a language learning
culture where the language is studied as if it's an isolated, academic
subject, rather than something you use to communicate with people.
Such students may find it a shock to be in class with a
Western-trained teacher and find they're expected to talk.  This
phenomenon isn't exclusive to Far Eastern students by any means, but
you do get fairly regular conversations like:-

Teacher:- "Good Morning class! How are you today Andy?"  (students
from some Far Eastern countries - China, Taiwan, Thailand - often
adopt Western forenames).  "What did you do at the weekend?"

Andy:- [sucks teeth, looks at floor, giggles.  Long pause.] "'What -
did - you - do -  at -  the -  weekend?'"

Teacher:- [smiling encouragingly] "That's right - what did you do at
the weekend Andy?  Did you go shopping?"

Andy:- "'Did - you - go - shopping?'" [gestures in space with
forefingers of both hands while mouthing the sentence, as if
attempting to adjust its word order in mid-air; turns to friend and
speaks rapidly in first language;  grabs wildly for electronic
dictionary].

Teacher:-  "Fine.  Maria, what did you do at the weekend?"

What's depressing and frustrating here is that there's been zero
communication.  The example is a typical 'warm up chat' activity in
the first moments of a class before the main activity starts; the
teacher doesn't want to spend half an hour parsing the question.  It's
not occurred to Andy (who is at a level where this SP question
shouldn't present him any problems) that the teacher might genuinely
want to know how he spent his weekend.  In his classes in his home
country Andy has only had to speak English as part of a *drill*, and
he's confused by having to look for an autonomous response.  Shouldn't
he have a picture in the book or something to tell him how to answer
the teacher's question?  It may not occur to him either, that in terms
of human to human interaction and courtesy, he's actually being bloody
rude.

The above is a wicked stereotype, but it does happen; however, many
Far Eastern students are lively and outgoing members of class.  I've
also noticed a difference over the 20 years since I first started
teaching English; in particular Japanese women, who used to be
terminally shy in class, are now generally enthusiastic and confident
participants.  What is unfortunate is where you get a class dominated
by a particular language group.  Where this happens in an English
speaking country (it's inevitable if the teacher is in the students'
country) it's probably the least ideal of situations;  this is,
however, what often happens with PRC Chinese students on
English-medium courses in Europe.

I think there may be a myth that Far Eastern students work harder and
are better motivated than their European colleagues.  What is true is
that in most countries the Education system places far greater demands
on students than the various European ones (though what Spanish
Medical Students go through sounds like sheer hell), so the students
have no choice but to work like slaves.  Several Far Eastern students
have told me that its a popular option to study at a Western
University because once you've learnt the language it's much less hard
work. Maybe this means we always get the dossy students...

DC

Actually, I believe both Chinese and Japanese (I don't know about
Mongolian) are *much* easier languages than English. Especially the
phonetic systems are much, much simpler. The Chinese phonetic system is
actually very hard for us to learn, because it's totally different from
any of the european languages, being a tonal system; still, the number
of syllables is very limited and there are almost no contractions, let
alone irregular ones (just think about it; in every english sentence a
native Englishman or American will leave out dozens of letters, and
merge every word with those around it in hundreds of different ways.)

The Japanese use a sound system which is even easier for a westerner to
learn than those of most, if not all western languages: they use only 9
consonants, w, r (or l, they make no difference; in songs or very slow
speech you'll hear l more often and in rapid speech r), y, m, h, n, t, s
and k, and 5 vowels (aiueo), but they combine them *only* in the form of
a consonant and a vowel; they have no concept of loose consonants
whatsoever. Their phonetic writing consists of characters for a
consonant and a vowel (ka, ki, ku, ke, ko, etc.), 5 for the vowels, and
1 for 'n'. The only contractions they make are the leaving out of 'i'
and 'u', in a completely regular way.

And think about pronunciation; in english, you'll have to learn the
writing and pronunciation of just about every word separately --- in
chinese and japanese, pronunciation is completely regular.

And apart from all this, even the words are much easier to learn: most
of them are compounds, made of chinese characters; if you learn a couple
of characters you can make lots of compounds with them, which are easier
to remember than our words if you already know the two characters (or
sometimes more) they are comprised of because those characters convey
meaning.

I do know that I have missed some things that make chinese and japanese
quite difficult too, and that the story I just wrote might not sound all
that easy to you in the first place, but the point I'm trying to make is
that it will be a *lot* harder for a japanese, and especially for a
chinese student to learn english, than the opposite.

Comments welcome.

Sytse Wielinga