Help! Non-native English speakers: How is English taught in

[FBM]

your country's schools? The Korean system sucks balls. They start in third year of elementary school, but by the time they get to university, most of them still can't actually communicate much more than "My name is..." (with barely comprehensible pronunciation, no less).

I'm teaching two classes now about how to teach English conversation skills. I want to tell them how Scandinavian countries in particular are so successful at producing students with high levels of English competence. Problem is, I don't know what is actually done in those classrooms. Here, everything is rote memorization and paper-based testing. Please enlighten me so that I can enlighten my students.

[Sælir]

Here in Iceland you don't really have to start teaching English until the kids are in 6th grade (12 years old). The rules are that they have to start at that age.
But schools (that want to succeed (so mostly all of the ones I know about)) start a lot earlier.
I have cousins (not the right word for them but stupid English doesn't really have another one for them unless I just use relatives) started in 1st grade (6 years old) and they had no problem talking to my stepdaughter when she first came to Iceland (they would have been 9 years old at that time).
I don't know how they were taught though.

My son just started this year (in 4th grade, 9 years old). I can't really comment on how he's doing since he speaks English just fine now (with English spoken at home all the time).
He is doing some writing exercises (weather, family etc) but not much else.

I used to teach in elementary school a long time ago (the same one my cousins are in (in the asshole of the universe, a town with 1700 people) and what I think made the most difference was that we start early speaking the language in class. Depending on when they start learning it we start using that language as the class language after around the first year so that the kids are not just writing but they get used to hearing the language.
In year 6 (12 years old) English would be the only language spoken in that particular class (unless you need to explain a word to the kids).

The younger you are and the more exposure you get to the language the more you'll learn

[Xamonas Chegwé]

"A town with 1700 people" counts as a vast, urban metropolis in Iceland! That's practically half of the population!!!!11!!

[Sælir]

Hey

No, that is not true!!

I will take you there when you finally come for a visit

[FBM]

Your system would be the envy of Korea, Sælir. Yes, younger is definitely better, but the quality and nature of the input is crucial, followed by unforced and personally meaningful output.

Korean elementary schools do tend to emphasize speaking more, but since most of the teachers are shit at it, the students wind up with fossilized mispronunciations. Also, elementary-level classes aren't taken too seriously. Their "serious" education begins in middle school, and that's where everything turns to reading comprehension, grammar and rote memorization of lists of mostly useless vocabulary. My students without exception tell me that they never actually spoke English to express their own ideas in class. And the Ministry of Education wonders why they produce students who are incompetent in even basic English for real-world applications.

If you don't mind, Sælir, could I get your permission to show your exact words to my students? I teach in the English Ed. Dept. of our university, so my students will be English teachers in the future. I want to inspire them to do better than what has been done here.

[FBM]

http://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/new ... id=2980006

[Sælir]

Why isn't Iceland on the list?

But, sure, you can show it to them

Concerning the speaking part it hasn't been that long since schools also hired people to teach just because they had lived abroad (Britain or US).
I suppose that can be both beneficial and not. You might get a fluent speaker but that person hardly ever had teaching credentials
They were mostly hired in small places in the countryside since it is often more difficult to get qualified teachers to come and live there.
Most of them were fine anyway and kids ended up being able to speak better English.

But...

I do remember one even from when I was teaching (2001-2002) who had lived in Canada for a long time. His English was great but we had to let him go when he started threatening to throw the 12 year old kids out the window and when we found out that coffee wasn't the only thing he had in his mug in the mornings

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Hey

No, that is not true!!

I will take you there when you finally come for a visit

Probably been there already. I got around a bit last time.

[FBM]

Well, some 12-year-olds need to be thrown out a window.

The situation you describe is similar to what still exists in some parts of Korea. When I first got here in '96, all you needed to be legally employed as an English teacher was a 4-yr degree in something. Anything. Universities were a little more demanding. Nowadays, though, the field has grown and attracts more and more people with advanced degrees in language education. It's getting better, but the teachers who get the first whack at the kids are mostly Koreans who have little communication skill. Of course, they learn to imitate their Korean teachers' pronunciation and scrambled phrases (such as "as possible as I can") and ignore what we native speakers say.

Thanks for letting me share your words!

[Sælir]

You think?

This is not really a place a lot of people go to.
It is called Neskaupsstaður.
To get there you have to drive up a mountain and go through a tunnel up there.
And you can't get out of town any other way. It is closed off in the other direction.
Oh, and in that town they have the hospital for this quarter of the country which is great in the wintertime

[Xamonas Chegwé]

You think?

This is not really a place a lot of people go to.
It is called Neskaupsstaður.
To get there you have to drive up a mountain and go through a tunnel up there.
And you can't get out of town any other way. It is closed off in the other direction.
Oh, and in that town they have the hospital for this quarter of the country which is great in the wintertime

No. Not done that one. I remember you telling me about it before now.

[Svartalf]

Not really sure... we start at the same time as middle school, you Merkins would say 6th grade... but while you get a proper cover of grammar or whatnot in middle school, the level in high school still suxxorz... I was better than my 9th grade (last year of middle school) teacher, simply because I had started working on English on my own and had better grasp of vocabulary and some unusual grammatical forms than she did. I breezed through high school and the first 2 years of university (yes, an English major).

Our system produces people that are half decent with written English, but still suck with the spoken form of the language.

[FBM]

Not really sure... we start at the same time as middle school, you Merkins would say 6th grade... but while you get a proper cover of grammar or whatnot in middle school, the level in high school still suxxorz... I was better than my 9th grade (last year of middle school) teacher, simply because I had started working on English on my own and had better grasp of vocabulary and some unusual grammatical forms than she did. I breezed through high school and the first 2 years of university (yes, an English major).

I was hoping you would post here. In your middle and high school English classes, was the focus more on developing oral communication skills first, or was it more about memorizing vocabulary and grammar, then taking written tests?

The natural order for learning the 4 language skills is Listening>Speaking>Reading>Writing. Here in Korea, they fuck it up by starting with Reading, then going to Listening, then Writing and generally skip over Speaking altogether. I'm wondering what order you picked up the 4 skills in France...

[Svartalf]

No, the Spoken form is the poor relative, we focuse heavily on written tests, so even if you can produce English text and translate something in English, you still have problems understanding a native speaker, and you have a dreadful accent... ask Pappa and Rachel.

Also, there's a big problem in spoken form : the focus heavily on a BBC correct version of Queen's English that I've never seen a native speaker speak outside of TV.

[JimC]

Not really sure... we start at the same time as middle school, you Merkins would say 6th grade... but while you get a proper cover of grammar or whatnot in middle school, the level in high school still suxxorz... I was better than my 9th grade (last year of middle school) teacher, simply because I had started working on English on my own and had better grasp of vocabulary and some unusual grammatical forms than she did. I breezed through high school and the first 2 years of university (yes, an English major).

Our system produces people that are half decent with written English, but still suck with the spoken form of the language.

You are vastly better at English than I am at French, that much is clear. We had a few years of French in high school, but it wash't treated very seriously...