Prescriptivist views of
language are alive, well and, apparently, worldwide. A student
approached me yesterday. He's a bright kid in one of my strongest
classes. He often comes to talk to me and, unlike some of the others,
wants to talk about stuff that interests him... mainly movies and
comics. This time though he started by telling me how sorry and
ashamed he was. I was baffled. I had no idea what he was apologising
for. After some questioning it seems that after our last conversation
he had gone home and been working on a Chinese website that teaches
English grammar. Here he had read that you must absolutely never say
“I know” because it is appallingly rude. You must always say “I
understand”. He had used the former rather than the latter when we
were talking.
I reassured him that
this is complete nonsense, just somebody's wrong-headed idea, but he
didn't seem convinced.
*
I'm still having real
trouble teaching some of my classes. The levels are just so
ridiculously mixed. My classes are what is labeled “senior two”,
which means the kids are sixteen and seventeen. Each week I have
dumbed the lessons down a bit more to try to find the level they can
cope at. This week I have been teaching a lesson that was designed
for, and successfully taught to, “junior 1” in other schools.
That's eleven-year-olds. Some of them still can't do it. The only way
for me to simplify it further is to teach primary school or
kindergarten lessons.
In every class I have a
few students who are pretty good, a few students who are OK and a lot
of students who can't do their end of the conversation that goes
“Hello.”
“How are you?”
“I'm fine thanks,
and you?”
“ I'm fine too.”
And that's the very
first conversation every Chinese kid learns in kindergarten.
Three-year-olds, come up on the street and initiate that one.
*
Teachers regularly ask
me grammar questions. They are often quite interesting and though I
(almost always) know the answers, occasionally I can't easily
explain. And some give me a little pause for thought.
Like the one today.
The teacher showed me
four sentences in turn and asked me what the differences were.
Sentence one was this: A bicycle has two
wheels.
That was nice and easy.
I didn't explain it in exactly these terms but the gist of it was that
it is saying that any member of the class “bicycle” will have
two wheels.
Sentence two was this: The bicycle has two
wheels.
My immediate
interpretation was the obvious one.
This particular member
of the class “bicycle” has two wheels.
Sentence number three
was: A horse has four legs.
Just like sentence one
my immediate interpretation was that it means that any member of
class “horse” has four legs.
And, of course,
sentence four, predictably, was this: The horse has four
legs.
Unlike the “bicycle”
example my interpretation here was that “horse” is a member of
class “animal” and that all horses have four legs.
He nodded. My
assessment was in line with what he'd read.
What he wanted to know
was
a) can sentence two
carry a similar interpretation to sentence four and vice-versa (The
answer is of course, yes)
and b) why did I pick
the different interpretations rather than the same one.
And that's where I
couldn't answer. I could only say that they seemed like the correct
interpretations to me even though the other one remained a
possibility in each case.
