The power of context

Many times, when people learn English, they think about the big goals that they have: they want to get better jobs or maybe they want to move to another country. Sometimes, though, learning another language is useful because it helps you survive inside a context that isn't your own.

Here's the scene: it's 14:43 on a Saturday afternoon. The weather is really nice outside, which means that the bars and restaurants in my neighborhood are full of people.

If this were Canada, this bar would be twice as wide as it actually is, and the space would be big enough that people with kids, baby carriages and big backpacks could move freely throughout the bar without touching other people. In Canada, people try really hard not to touch people they don't know. We just don't do that. But I'm not in Canada; I'm in a very crowded bar in Malasaña, in Madrid, and beside me there is a small blonde woman with the very big purse. And that purse is ending up in my back more often than I would like.

This means that I have two options.

I can be Canadian about this and pretend that this is not happening. If I act Canadian, I have to pretend like neither the bag nor the woman are there, that the bar is not crowded and that everything is tolerable.

After spending over ten years in Madrid, however, I know that being Canadian in a Spanish city is...well...it's worse than useless.

"Excuse me," I say. She doesn't respond."

"/eI/!!" I shout.

One sound, one syllable, not really a word but delivered at high enough volume and pitch to let her know that if that bag ends up in my kidneys again, something nasty is going to happen.

She turns around and looks at me as if I'm crazy. I stick my right eyebrow up and stare her right in the eyes.

This is the power of context that makes language learning so important. If all you do is think about what individual words mean -- and not what the words can do -- you're never going to learn to really manage a language enough to get what you want. And that's why we, as human beings, have language. Language gets us what we want.

We assume that "getting what you want" has to be something big and important, but those big, important goals might not be realistic for most of us. For most of us, we just want the small things, even if it's as something as small as not being uncomfortable in a bar.

Corrected

Teachers correct students because, well, it's our job. The truth is that we correct you students for a lot of reasons. We have to do it because you need to know when you're doing something which could make you look stupid or prevent people from understanding you.

We don't correct you to humiliate you. We don't correct you to make you feel bad about your English; if we keep correcting you about a mistake you continue to make in class, that's a sign that you need to start paying attention to that word or structure and change what you're doing.

We don't correct you to start a fight. Of course, if you want a fight, I'll give you one:
"That's not how you say that in English."
"But we're not in England!" And you get a smug look on your face because you think you've made yourself look smart at my expense.
And that's when I say something that's really bad in Spanish and ask you, Can I say that? Do you understand what I mean when I say that? Because I know that I can't say that. What do you gain by doing something that you know is wrong?

You pay me to be honest with you. You pay me to give you quality service that is meant to help you improve. Not telling you when you make a mistake isn't just bad service: it's dishonest. It's counterproductive. It's unethical.

I understand that being corrected can be frustrating and, at times, embarrassing. That's why I don't correct every single thing you do wrong. But please, if there's something wrong, pay attention to what we're saying. If you choose to ignore what I tell you, one of two things is going to happen: either you're going to get bored of hearing the same corrections over and over again, and you'll quit; or you'll just stop talking, rather than using the tools you get in class.

It's your choice. I can't choose not to correct you, though. That's not my job.

Participle adjectives: One easy rule

Here's one easy rule that will help you remember the difference between past participle adjectives (bored, relaxed, satisfied) and present participle adjectives (encouraging, falling, irritating):

PAST PARTICIPLE ADJECTIVES are common when you talk about the way you prepare food:
fried fish, a chopped liver sandwich, roasted chicken, baked apples, sautéed mushrooms, Cajun-style blackened trout, stuffed eggplant, poached eggs, percolated coffee, well-steeped tea.

PRESENT PARTICIPLE ADJECTIVES are common when talk about functions or qualities:
working-class children, baking dish, hiking boots, biting sarcasm, sleeping bags, swimming suits.

These are shorter ways of providing defining relative clauses:
trout that has been blackened using a Cajun style
apples that have been baked
a sandwich made of liver that has been chopped
boots that are used for hiking
bags which are meant for sleeping
dishes which are used for baking food.

How bad is it if you DON'T learn English....really?

It's not a disaster if you don't learn.

Spaniards put themselves under a lot of pressure to master English. Why this is, I don't know. It's not like they speak a language that is useless beyond its borders. It's not like there's so much trade between Spain and English-speaking countries – companies from English-speaking countries do not dominate employment in this country.

There is a lot of embarrassment and fear about being left behind.

There's a lot of jealousy directed towards people who have mastered English. Worse, there's a lot of resentment towards people who make an effort to improve their English. Why this is, I don't know. But it's sad to see it happen.

I don't want anyone to think that they're totally incapable of learning English. (Spanish students of English say this a lot, but I have yet to meet someone who shows it's true.) But being able to do something, and having the time, the determination and the interest in doing something well are different things.

If you decide to learn something, and you say that you're doing it to improve your future, remember that you basically enter into a contract with two people: yourself, and the teacher. The teacher's responsibility is to create a positive, educational environment that helps you get you where you want to go, literally and/or figuratively.

It's YOUR responsibility to do what you can to make sure that happens.

And if it doesn't happen, and you don't learn to speak English perfectly...ask yourself this: What, exactly, have you lost? You can probably still communicate fairly well. If you had to go to London tomorrow, you'd probably do all right in the airport and at the hotel and in a restaurant. So what if you'll never be able to negotiate a multi-million dollar deal, or act in an Oscar-winning movie, or any of that stuff? Do you want to commit to the amount of work and study and practice that a person needs to be able to do that effectively?

Trust me...there's no shame in answering "no." Unless you're marrying someone who speaks English, unless you're going to work for an American company or you're moving to an English-speaking country, "good" is good enough.

The teacher still has a lot to learn.

I try not to say that I know everything. A lot of times, I don't. And there are a lot of times when I really, honestly feel that I will never, ever, know everything.

I have a student who hates grammar. I don't think that "hate" is too strong a word, here. This is a problem in classes, obviously, because grammar forms a big part of commmunication: if you don't have the structure, it's very difficult to communicate well.

I just found out why this person hates grammar. As a kid, this person was taught by priests who would physically abuse the students when the students made mistakes. From what the student told me, humiliation made up a big part of classroom time; students were not given any kind of positive feedback or encouragement while they were in class. They just tried NOT to get beaten up while they were learning. Thirty years later, grammar still means humiliation, still means revealing how stupid you are....

How can you fix something like that?

How much is the teacher RESPONSIBLE for fixing things like that?

We have come to an agreement that we will focus on vocabulary and expressions for the next little while. Vocabulary is safe, it's not risky or dangerous. I know that this is not effective teaching, but there are times when being a teacher is less important than being a facilitator and coach.

Part of me thinks: This is not my problem. But it is my problem. I have an unspoken contract to help this person as much as I can, and if grammar is not helping, well, it'll just have to wait for now.

Oh, Spain...if only you guys had gone through the 1960s and had the benefit of educational psychology...we wouldn't be dealing with the scars, forty years on...

In the meantime: vocabulary, and lots of it. Let's see if that helps.

One for the football fans:

Sorry to have been silent so long, guys! Things have been busy around here while we prepare for the communication skills course this weekend and next weekend. In the meantime, here's one for you Barcelona FC fans...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2011/feb/16/pep-guardiola-barcelona-arsenal

It's not you, it's me. Uhh....No. Wait. It really IS you, after all.

Teachers are normal people, most of the time. We laugh, we cry, we have good days, we have horrid days. Generally speaking, if you're working with human beings, you have to be able to accept that people are going to behave like people. And sometimes, being humans, they have human ways of dealing with problems. Or not dealing with them.

I just had class with a student who I'll call Oxford. Oxford is a very successful lawyer who's had senior positions in the Spanish government. Oxford has a hell of a time with English, however - it takes forever to get sentences out, there are a lot of problems with vocabulary, and I do wonder about Oxford's ability to handle information. For the past two years, Oxford has had conversation classes, but it never occurred to me to ask Oxford why the classes had to focus on conversation and nothing else.

I think I learned the reason why today.

Since Oxford is setting up a lot of meetings, I thought, OK, maybe a lesson on taking notes and manipulating written information would be a good idea. No way. At first, Oxford didn't resist directly; Oxford asked a lot of questions and didn't quite get the idea behind reading a text and condensing information into notes. It was as if my questions were bouncing off Oxford at every angle, like a basketball that has too much air in it - you could get close to the net, but not in it.

It turns out that Oxford doesn't read. I don't really know the reason why. When reading the newspaper, for example, Oxford claims to scan for the most important words, but once Oxford more or less understands the article, that's it. The newspaper goes in the garbage.

Okaaaay...what about law school? Or laws? Or legal briefs?

Same thing.

(Pause.)

Okaaaaayyyyy....

So we have fifty minutes left of class, and the class has just hit the wall. Oxford cannot or does not want to do the exercise - I'm still not sure why. But then it occurs to me: Maybe Oxford has some kind of reading disability or dyslexia or something. The best thing would be to ask Oxford what's going on, but that's not a good idea: Oxford keeps getting more and more agitated.

Boom. The exercise goes in the garbage.

Next plan: Listening. I decide to improvise a listening exercise from something we did the other day, but there's a problem: the academy has lost the CDs for that textbook. All right. Oxford wants conversation? That's what we'll do, then. This would be a good plan, except that Oxford is now in such a bad mood, conversation becomes a one-sided, somewhat understandable monologue about steel, Chinese manufacturing, how evil Coca-Cola is...you get the idea.

So what do you do in those situations? The same thing, I imagine, that parents do when their kids have tantrums. I just sat there, nodded, tried not to look at the watch too often, asked questions slowly, and tried to understand Oxford as best I could. At the same time, however, I kept thinking, Where is this coming from? Why is this student behaving like this?

The reason why is probably irrelevant. But when you first start teaching, it's really, really, really hard to realize that, just like us, students are going to have horrible days. Students are going to react badly if they feel they're being attacked. Students will get frustrated if they don't see why an exercise is important, and when a student explodes, sometimes the best thing to do is to try to be sympathetic and not pass judgment.

I don't know if Oxford will ever make progress; in some ways, that doesn't matter. Oxford still attends classes, and that's the most important thing. The second most important thing is that we, as teachers, do not think that you are crazy or weird or unstable or nuts because you have days like that. We all have days like that.

"Some days, you're the windscreen; some days, you're the bug." -- Mark Knopfler

"BAD" marketing!

You know how I'm always complaining that people shouldn't use words like "good" or "bad" to describe things? Here's another example: this isn't bad marketing - it's sloppy and careless.

This ad was taken from this morning's edition of EL PAÍS. It's an ad for women's intimate care products. My Webster's Dictionary defines "chilly" as: "unpleasantly affected by cold" and "lacking warmth and feeling."

Not to be rude, but I really wouldn't want something lacking warmth and feeling in my, er, girly bits.

You have to see them to believe them....

I have no idea how many native English speakers actually live in Madrid. There should be enough native English speakers that SOMEBODY could have prevented these mistakes from happening.

Some thoughts about being afraid....

Lourdes and I went to see "The King's Speech" last night. If you've got any doubts about seeing it, please, do - it's wonderful. One of the best parts of the film is watching Bertie (Colin Firth) struggle against his conviction that he will never, ever, stop stammering. There he is, the man who was about to become the King of England, and he's absolutely paralyzed by the fear that his throat and mouth will stop working and he won't be able to express himself.

As the movie progresses, however, you see that isn't the case. When he's relaxed and isn't focused on his fear, he communicates quite well. But the minute fear starts taking over his brain, he's a disaster. He remains completely convinced that he's going to mess things up, and, sure enough, he does!

Sports people call this "choking". You're playing well, you're doing a really good job - but then something happens that brings in that moment of doubt, that feeling that maybe you're not good enough, and BLAM! Everything comes apart. I'm not going to name any names, but we've all seen it: in tennis matches, in football matches, in (ummm, ehem...) under-23 international ice hockey championships playing against the Russians...you're winning, you're doing well, but ten or twenty minutes later, those doubts have started to control your brain, and you're dead.

How do you fight it? Don't allow yourself to be fixated on failure.

Imagine yourself in a moment where you're speaking English fluently and without being self-aware. You're relaxed, you're doing well. If you can visualize it, you can do it.

Kill your inner editor. Everyone has a voice from the past that tells them, "You're no good. You don't know anything. You're a failure." Now, imagine yourself telling that person to shut up. Imagine yourself asking that person, "How do you know? Why should YOUR failure influence me?" Inner editors are very powerful. They're also irrelevant and totally useless. Keeping your inner editor will never help you, but getting rid of that person is extremely satisfying.

Be fair to yourself. It's easy to focus on what you didn't do well or mistakes that you made. How many times do you congratulate yourself on doing things well? How many times have you focused on your successes, rather than your failures? Replace your inner editor with your inner grandmother:

The teacher said you did a great job with the role play on Monday's class!
You got an 80% on the last test - that's 10% better than you did last time!
You used those new phrasal verbs properly!
The guy from London said that your English sounded a lot better on the phone!

It doesn't matter if these things would sound stupid to someone else. They're not for someone else - they're for you and for you only.

It's just like the sports coaches say: Attitude gives you altitude. The most important muscle you have is the muscle that is located between your ears.

"Really, the greatest fear is fear itself." - Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

"Our greatest fear is not that we are powerless. Our greatest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure." - Marianne Williamson