Everyone who has tried to teach their own languge to speakers of another probably has a strong memory of the first experience at it. One's mother tongue was learned unconciously in infancy and early childhood and what we normally think of as "English Classes" in our primary and secondary schooling were, in, fact, a series of "literacy" lessons, actually culminating in the study of literature. The sense of self-doubt, frustration and challenging of assumptions when attempting to transmit a behavior as complex as a language to a perhaps disinterested and nearly always somewhat resistant class or individual is remarkable.
My first class of foreign English students were Korean. It was October of 1967 and I was a young US Air Force member stationed at Kunsan Air Base, in the (then) very rural southwest of that country, in North Cholla Province. I had been approached at the base's service club by a young Jr college Student and her friends who were there on a visit with their church group. I accepted without knowing what I was getting into, and unaware of where this would eventually lead.
My first attempts to teach English were thus in a small room in an old Korean home, on the heated "Ondul" floor around a small table. Typically, in such a situation a few older and more capable students wish to banter with the teacher and not be corrected, while the others listen silently, ignored and in need of much more basic, systematic instruction. But the "expert" has put this class together and runs it, so we ignore his ego at the peril of loosing the class. Perhaps this was all the better, as I wasn't sure where to begin anyway! Most of us have been there and done it. Even if we have taken a certification course in TESOL the real overseas classroom comes as a surprise. My God, they are so smug and confident in their culture, I almost haven't got one! Why, they really don't know any English! Oh, yeah, they have been raised speaking Korean! Or Japanese, etc. The realization hits you as if it were a crime, as if millions of minds are being deformed or bonsai-ed, cut off from ever having a completely developed idea,all because of growing up in another language in which things cannot be "known" as you would wish.. The classic Colonialist impulse! Again, if you have been there, you know what I'm talking about. And there is a difference between knowing in your brain and knowing in your bones....one must fight this notion, which will return again and again....
In the 36 years since then I have been more-or-less involved in teaching English as a second or foreign language (the distinction often escapes us but it can be useful) to students mostly of Mandarin-speaking Chinese, Korean, and most recently (22 years!) Japanese backgrounds. It has had its highs and lows and I would be lying if I said I was always happy in the English classroom, that I wouldn't rather be somewhere else....I have taught varied other subjects, academic and other.... I have even taught people to fly airplanes, both the basics and advanced stuff. On the balance I must say that teaching one's own language can be rewarding and challenging and in my case it has been both. I have taught various types of classes both inside and outside of the USA and in these pages will share, over coming months, my experiences with all of you. Let me start with an anecdote.
While learning Japanese at the University of British Columbia in summer, 1981, a professor joked that we knew over 800 words after his intensive course, and that we should theoretically be able to "speak". At least his Chomskiian theoretical background told him so; "a person knowing more than 800 words", he stated confidently, "is already an intellectual". "Rubbish", I thought to myself; I knew full well that small children have already got a vocabulary of tens of thousands of lexical items, well on their way to their full adult vocabularies of as many as 100,000 words. And Lin Yutang once wrote that educated Chinese also had vocabularies of about the same (not individual charcters, but the words represented/formed by groups, mostly of two, characters. The good professor was displaying the characteristic optimism of the generative grammar scholar, minimizing the importance of this virtually unclosable lexis gap.
Yet there is no pablum either in functionalism, no hope of salvation through pragmatics or Discourse Analysis. We cannot "leap over" language so lightly and reduce it to a "this is/these are" system on the one hand, or a bunch of idioms and idiotic posters on the other, thinking our students to be somehow "programmed" for real learning later on.... I remain a proponent of "Teach the Language" and at heart a mild structuralist after Widdowson, finding it easy to present functional language in structural order, and finding that the new behaviour is more likely focused upon and learnt this way. Still, language is more than a bit chaotic and very imperfect, being the behavior of an animal and having that organic roughness and fuzziness that is found on the surface of all natural order.
(Along this line, excuse me if I vacillate between US and British orthography, a self indulgent habit of mine I enjoy. And I promise not to correct you when you say in your incorrect American way"there 's (sic) a lot of people who don't agree." of course I naturally say that too, as I am American and I don't speak consciously; rather I talk like I did when I was a kid, touches of South and North Philly (early childhood within sight of the PSFS building and Billy Penn) ....
Unlike many North American teachers, I enjoy teaching with British ESL materials and recommend them to teachers working outside the US, even in countries like Japan where "American" English (whatever that is) is "recommended" (though even after years of training most of the local educators can neither distinguish nor produce either dialect's pronunciation features. The name of the language is still English. I also advocate the British approach to dictionaries, with a true phonetic notation based upon the IPA in some form or other, noting whatever pronunciation or more than one. American ESL publishing still ahs a long way to go to catch up with the major British ESL publishers. I especially admire the integrity of the Cambrigde and Oxford University presses, although they too now have their share of opportunistic coursebooks, loaded with fluff 'for the Japanese'.Now we have an American version of the Headway series and I am teaching it in an academic ESL program in Naples, FL (as of winter 2003/4) along with the Spectrum series and various supplemental texts.
I originally wrote this as I just returned from a year's assignment at Beidaihe, China, in Beijing Foreign Studies University's seaside center there. Books were among our biggest problem. Terrible scissors-and-paste plagialized texts...a most eggregious case being a version of the Cambridge English Course minus communicative activities, just reduced to a listening text. Oxford University Press was notably still offshore in Singapore, while Cambridge and Longmans were representing other ESL publishers in negotiating low-cost local production of the flagship texts, a promising development. Side By Side and Expressways, that workhorse of "Workplace ESOL" programs here in the USA are solidly entrenched, and now CUP's "New Interchange" is finding wide acceptance. The recordings of our licensed version of Interchange from BFSU ran too slowly, and they don't always understand that the Level "One" is above the "Introduction" level. That is very confusing. It should be re-numbered as a four level course. Ditto the American Headway series. In China, there was an eagerness and hunger to learn the language that is sadly lacking in Japan, where the hopeless JETS program ruins the livelyhood of competent expatriot teachers while pouring a fortune down the drain inviting unqualified "assistants" fresh out of US and Commonwealth University. These young puppies don't rock the boat; it's all about Japanese control there. In China, native speakers are usually free to TEACH and excersise authority. And to fraternize etc.
Students come to a teacher because they don't know something and wish to learn, ideally. Teachers shouldn't be angry or surprised to find their students ignorant of the subject or lacking in the behavior being taught, or resistant; that's the work! And students shouldn't feel daunted by not knowing or being competent from the first; they are there to learn it, not demonstrate behavior or knowledge from a previous life.
Recommended serious beginning level ESL coursebooks, for adults and young adults, annotated:
Oxford University Press:
1. Headway Elementary (American Headway I)(last units a bit dense but overall excellent, honest book, great structural focus and overall course design integrity. Needs teacher, not presenter. Split Editions. Is a good carry on from Longman's "Discoveries I." (below) excellent Video.
2. New Interchange I, Cambridge University Press, 1998-. An honest grammer based course covering everday functional areas, 200-America and world. Teaches grammar notionally and through communicative activities expanded from focused presentaion. Good work on reading and lexiacl development. Course video supplement available. I prefer the excellent Side-by-Side video for supplementation.
2. New Cambridge English Course 1. Split editions. An honest grammer based course covering everday functional areas, 1990s Britain. Needs teacher, not presenter. Great listening and decoding work with mumbling and codeswitching, unconcious speech stolen from daily life all over the British isles, Europe, Antipodes and the Americas. Moves through tenses in a systematic, strategic way. American teachers are challenged by this excellent book. The material of book 2 in particular seems uneven in Japan. That's why a teacher is provided, and should be more than a "presenter". Video is linked to students' book review lessons, very awkward to present for many types of class.