A half-baked thought on education.

Tonight my adult class uncovered something I was probably better off not knowing.

Okay, the lesson was on describing abilities.

The sentences structures in the book were “Are you able to . . .,” “Can you . . .,” and “Do you know how to . . .” I pushed “Can you . . .” hard, and they were curious why. They thought that being so direct in English was rude.

I told them it was not.

This then led me into a conversation that I thought someone with a relatively high level of fluency and reading comprehension would know about English by now.

First, Korean is a very intensely hierarchical language. This hierarchy is based largely on age, partially on profession, and very largely on gender. Person (I, you, he, she, it, we, they) is implied by context. Your social status relative to that of your listener is not. This is what you need to know about Korean for this discussion.

Second, English is not technically a hierarchical language. However, there are subtle hints that a native speaker uses to indicate relative standing. For example, using Latinate rather than Germanic words, other completely abstract vocabulary choices, sentence structure choices (less direct, more use of “to be” = more formal, etc.), and so on.

So in a high school English course, one of my students had it put into his head that asking a simple present tense question to an older person is rude. And maybe it is. Some casual investigation showed that this is a somewhat common belief in adult ESL students. The application “May I ask your age?” was the first sentence that came into his head when discussing the difference between “Can” and “May.” Now, think about how much time you spent, when you were developing your English-speaking capacity, to the difference between direct and indirect questions. This led into the discussion I want to have now.

I (and virtually everyone else) was taught using a model of language that assumes “direct translation” is the goal.

Direct translation assumes that somewhere, there is a word in every language that has a very simple, direct 1:1 ratio with a word in every other language. This is demonstrably false, as anyone who has ever studied a classical language in a literary sense will tell you. I spent a whopping 3 years translating Greek and French literature as a poor student of the classics, and I’d guess half of the class time was spent arguing over which of about 3-4 words in one language was the best fit with little to no worthwhile justification for them.

What is the answer? Language is not translatable. The notion of translating as anything rather than a delicate art is utterly fucking stupid. This is why the King James Bible outsells The New American Bible year after year, this is why Thomas Hobbes’ translation, complete with “He was wrong here” footnotes, of Thucydides’ History of The Peloponnesian War is still in print and selling. Granted, The King James Bible and similar works are in the public domain, which surely contributes to their popularity (i.e. “They’re cheap”) but there is no doubt that it is an amazing piece of literature in itself.

So where does this leave me with education in foreign language? There needs to be some new model. I am vaguely aware through a professor from the university that the mainstream of language education is aware these problems exist, but beyond encouraging a “hands-on approach to teaching” with very little in terms of ideology. Maybe someone has presented all this and I’ve yet to be exposed to it.

The approach we took, especially with the younger children, at my first hagwon certainly smacked of a non-translation model. No dictionaries, only repetition, flashcards never had any Korean on them, hell, nothing had any Korean on it, and most importantly, the Korean teachers spoke English most of the time. However, the trouble in that school (as in my current school) is what to do once a student has a basic grasp of grammar and a fair-sized vocabulary. You can’t keep playing memory games and singing songs indefinitely. Intermediate language courses are my weakness, and I’d like to think there is something about them that makes it not “just me.”

Little kids are easy. They will do *ANYTHING* repetitive if you convince them it is a game. They sing stupid songs indefinitely. They dance. They touch body parts that you tell them to. (shut up) They imitate you, unprompted. There is no self-awareness whatsoever.

Besides all that, they’re fucking adorable.

Adults are also relatively easy. Treat them like adults, encourage questions, take them out for drinks/snacks/whatever occasionally, and be their friend. They’ll be forced to learn more because they will have the human need to talk with you more, because you seem like an alright person.

Intermediate level students present a number of challenges, and I have only found one strategy to address it. That one strategy has failed with exactly one class, and here’s a discussion of all that’s wrong with intermediate ESL.

When kids can sort of speak English, their strengths and weaknesses are the result of their previous education. Adults generally know how to tell time, months, days, years, basic verb tenses, Subject-Verb-Object order, and so on.

Intermediate students lack these in completely unpredictable ways, and are frequently adolescents. That’s my problem with intermediate students in a nutshell. Lack of control.

However, much like adults in general, adolescent males tend to deal well when I’m just their friend, slow down and simplify my standard speech slightly, etc.

Adolescent girls, in my experience, are a much tougher nut to crack. The ones who are motivated work regardless. The other ones don’t talk. Or whisper. And claim they don’t understand questions they simply do understand. That is my weakness as an educator. Early middle school girls.

Okay, I stayed up way too late writing this. I wrote about what I wanted to write about, and I have some left to ruminate about.