Chat room slang in Jamaica

In this post in January we debated whether there is a place in writing today for abbreviated English of the type found in emails, text messages and chat rooms, or whether this is just a menace to ESL students and teachers.

Well, according to the Jamaica Observer, this type of English is becoming a problem in Jamaican schools, as it creeps into students’ essay writing. One teacher, quoted in the article, blames the problem on a lack of reading: “If you ask students to read a novel, the first thing they ask is ‘how many pages, Miss? Is it long?’ Everything is about instant gratification.”

What do you think? Would students use less chat room slang at school if they read more and watched less TV? Have a look at the article and post a comment below…

Of the 6,912 known living languages listed in the Ethnologue, a total of 516 are classified as nearly extinct. The Ethnologue classifies a language this way when “only a few elderly speakers are still living”.

Yoruba language, spoken by the Yoruba, large ethnic group in West Africa, is not on the list, but according to Dr Frederick Fasheun, it soon could be. Dr Fasheun is the facilitator of a recent two day summit held in Nigeria to discuss the future of Yoruba language and culture. In this article in the Nigerian Tribune, he says he regrets that the Yoruba have abandoned their language in favour of English (among other languages).

He believes that it is time to teach and study Yoruba language in the country’s education system so that it does not “become vestigial and gradually go into extinction”. He also warns that Yoruba culture is being threatened in the face of a “rampaging American subculture”.

So, what, if anything, should we do to prevent Yoruba making the Ethnologue’s list? Is this an inevitable result of the globalisation of English language and American culture? Should we just accept this and watch the number of known living languages get smaller? Are we, in the English teaching profession, contributing to this? What do you think? Post a comment blow…

Here’s a story which should serve as a warning to all of us about the importance of reading the contract before accepting a job. Jamie Doom writes about an ESL teacher who agrees to help out at an “important cultural exchange celebration” only to find that she has signed up for a kickboxing tournament…

Hopefully noone reading this has experienced a “misunderstanding” of such magnitude, but although this story is, (I hope!) fictional, it does highlight an important issue. It is all too common to see stories and forum posts on the web from teachers who have arrived at their new school, only to find that things are not quite what they expected, with “extra” duties or financial costs that they weren’t aware of when they signed up.

Sometimes, no matter how careful you are and how many questions you ask before accepting a job, this is unavoidable - sadly, there are a number of schools across the world who seek to exploit and deceive. Disreputable businesses exist as much in TEFL as in any other industry.

But you can certainly minimize the chances of being caught out, by thoroughly researching the school that offers you a job. Talk to other teachers at the school (if the employer has nothing to hide, they sould have no problem giving you contact details for one or two of their current teachers), join TEFL forums, do a search for the name of the school on the internet…

Here are some things which should set alarm bells ringing:

- Are they willing to offer you a job without speaking to you first?
- Are they unprepared to put you in contact with current teachers?
- Are they expecting you to accept a job offer without seeing a contract?
- Are they asking you to send them money?

Above all, read the contract carefully and ask the employer about anything which is unclear. A reputable employer should be only too happy to answer any questions you may have.

For a more detailed guide to finding your first TEFL job and what you should look for in a contract, have a look at our Introduction to TEFL.

Our story today comes from Seoul, where an English teacher at a language institute is alleged to have stolen lectures from another school. She allegedly attended pronunciation training classes at the other school for 3 months, hiding her identity, and then delivered exactly the same classes at her school. She is now accused of copyright infringement and theft of business secrets.

The accused teacher claims that she did not deliberately hide her identity, and a spokesperson from her school says that he doesn’t understand how attending classes at another institute for personal development can infringe copyright.

Her accusers, however, apparently showed some of their students transcripts of the accused teacher’s class, and they all agreed that the content was the same in both classes.

This case aside, how far should teachers go when applying other teachers’ methods in their classes? The article quotes one English teacher who took several lectures for non-native English learners prior to teaching a TOEFL preparation course, in order to “learn how to run a class and attract students”. Clearly there is a difference between using a few techniques and activities in your own classes that you’ve learned from other teachers, and copying a school’s entire methodology word for word. But where should we draw the line? Post a comment below…

Happy New Year to all our readers!

Our first post of the year comes from the Times of Oman, which reports on a talk at the British Council given by Sidney Callis, a British communication specialist. According to the article, he asserts that emails and text messages are beyond his comprehension, as they do not follow any form or pattern, and these forms of communication have no place in business writing today.

What do you think? If you’ve ever written or received an email or text message with a sentence like “i dont no wot u r doing”, you more than likely know that it is shorthand for “I don’t know what you are doing”, and would write it correctly in any more formal correspondence. But what about ESL students who spend hours every day in chat rooms on the internet, who may get so used to this shorthand that they fail to learn or recognise correct grammar and spelling?

Does this type of language have a place in writing today, or is it just a menace to ESL students and teachers? Post your opinion below…

According to the Education Guardian, discerning students, influenced by economics, global terrorism and even the threat of avian flu, are choosing to study English in Australia, New Zealand and Malta, rather than the UK.

What’s more, fewer students overall are going abroad to study English, as the quality and availability of private schools and language education in state schools around the world continues to improve, and countries become more self-sufficient in providing English language education.

In fact, according to the report, non-native speaker English teachers now outnumber native speaker teachers globally.

As well as the cost of studying in the UK, another factor turning students away, according to the report, is the declining interest in British cultural references in teaching material. Is this the end for red phone boxes, London buses and fish and chips in our text books? What do you think? Post a comment below…

In a recent post, we suggested that complacency was finally catching up with English speaking countries, as businesses start to lose out competitively due to lack of foreign language skills in their employees. The US Department of Education stated that “critical need foreign language skills are necessary to advance national security and global competitiveness”

Well, it seems Conservative Party leader David Cameron is thinking about addressing this concern in the UK too, with a suggestion that the Party would bring back compulsory language lessons in British schools. At the moment, pupils can choose to stop studying languages at the age of 14, which has led to a sharp decline in numbers going on to take Modern Language GCSE exams at the age of 15 or 16.

With the US Education Department’s goals of increasing the number of Americans with critical language skills, and now Cameron’s hint at a policy pledge, are we seeing the start of a much-needed reversal in attitude towards foreign language learning?

What do you think? Post a comment below…

The Prague Daily Monitor reports that Czech babies as young as 14 months are having English classes in 10 cities across the Czech Republic, with plans to introduce classes for even younger students. The youngsters attend a 30 minute class once a week, where they listen to simple English songs and memorise words and expressions in the form of a game. The aim is for the students to learn English as their second mother tongue.

How young is too young? Should more countries follow this example and introduce language classes for babies? If so, how far should this go? In this article, Marco MacFarlane discusses the problems that immersion teaching (teaching learners exclusively in English) can cause in children who have not yet mastered their mother tongue. He talks about te condition known as “subtractive bilingualism”, in which the first language is “actually eroded by the learning of the second, and both languages remain relatively underdeveloped”.

What do you think? Post a comment below…

According to the US Department of Education, over 200 million Chinese children are studying English, compared to 24,000 American children studying Chinese. Of course, the population difference between the two countries accounts for a little of the difference, but still, the discrepancy is huge.

In the same report, the Department of Education states that “critical need foreign language skills are necessary to advance national security and global competitiveness”, and proposes establishing grants and training teachers under President Bush’s “National Security Language Initiative”.

Complacency, it seems, has finally caught up with the US and other English-speaking countries, for whom the global dominance of the English language provided a competitive advantage for so long. In today’s increasingly globalised world, where the ability to answer the phone, write an email or negotiate in more than one language brings such obvious advantages, businesses with monolingual employees will surely lose out.

What do you think? Post a comment below…