My thoughts on English language teaching
By Adam Borowski
I am a proponent of “chunk-teaching.” It makes sense to teach as a phrase, rather than breaking it down into individual words. Song lyrics often contain all sorts of chunks English learners can memorize. But song lyrics are not enough.
Newspapers
Newspaper articles are an ideal teaching tool, because they are filled with chunks, thriving in their natural milieu. From black-top readers, who are generally interested in serious news stories and want to read an opinion that agrees with their own; to red-top readers, who enjoy gossip and intrigue, there is an abundance of collocations, phrasal verbs, fixed phrases and idiomatic expressions people use every day. Newspapers are also great slang teachers.
Well, who cares about slang?
I can hear you scoff at the suggestion. Just remember that slang is an integral part of the language; in fact, slang just might be the most difficult part of any language to master; slang is ever-changing, you often won't find it in the dictionary, so you need to interact with someone representing a particular linguistic community to learn it. You thought fancy words are difficult to learn? Anyone can look up a fancy word.
Newspapers are mainly written for native speakers by native speakers.
The question arises: who is classified as a native speaker?
The answer isn't as obvious as you may think.
Nativism
Citizenship determines who is a native English speaker ― and who is not. Surely, an American passport holder is a native English speaker? Not necessarily. The U.S. has no official language. What if the U.S. passport holder is an immigrant from a non-English-speaking country? What if your mother is an American, but you were born in France? You never visited the U.S., but your English does not contain a trace of a foreign accent. What if you went to international schools, where you were taught exclusively by educated native speakers? What if you are a brilliant autodidact from a Chinese village?
Granted, native English speakers are the purveyors of culture ― but culture is not tied to a particular piece of land by a divine diktat.
If we disregard the passport-citizen criterion, there are probably millions of people around the world, who qualify as native English speakers. English language testing is prescriptive in nature (this is the correct grammar, end of story), rather than descriptive (how does the language actually work in the real world?).
As a result of the global prescriptivist mindset, many people are all-too-familiar with the following sentence: “Look, we know your English is excellent, but these are the formal requirements, you need to take this test, otherwise you won't be able to study here, work here,” et al.
Intelligence
Intelligence is the ability to observe various patterns, draw conclusions from these observations, and then applying these conclusions in life. Gifted students have the brain power to overcome the limitations imposed on them by the mainstream education system; gifted students have the brain power to attain native-like fluency in another language. But the gifted need help, they need an intellectual incentive, otherwise their intellectual prowess is going to wither away in the classroom.
Multilingual native English speakers are exactly what the gifted need; while it may read like a sentence written by a posh school girl, native English speakers who have a first-hand understanding of other cultures are invaluable assets on many levels. Advanced learners have already mastered the intricacies of grammar. Immersing themselves in the language found in newspapers is a logical progression. We need the ELT field to be more newspaper-oriented.
Adam Borowski (
adam.borowski1985@gmail.com
) teaches English to students on all levels of advancement. He is author of “Existential Tableau: The Entire Novel.”