You Don’t Need Grammar to Speak English

Our new student was a handsome young gentleman from Columbia. Pablo was only nineteen years old but he seemed older. He was smart, friendly, kind and everyone loved him. 

One morning early in October Pablo was very late for class, which was unusual. When he got to his seat, he sat down, immediately stood up again, sat down, then stood up again – which was even more unusual.

“Pablo, do you have something to tell the class?” 

He did.

Using broken English and an array of animated gestures, Pablo told the story of coming to school that morning.

We learned he lived in the industrial outskirts of town. He waited for his bus that morning at the usual time. The only other person at his stop was an elderly woman. Without warning, she made a deep coughing sound, grabbed at her chest and fell to the ground. She was having a heart attack. Pablo didn’t know what to do. 

The teenager had been in Canada for three weeks and someone was going to die because he didn’t speak English. 

He ran to a nearby industrial building and banged on the plate-glass lobby window. The security guard saw him and unlocked the door. Breathless and scared Pablo pointed backwards over his shoulder and shouted, Woman!  Heart!  Bus!

The security guard unclipped his cell-phone from his belt and dialed 911.

I asked my star pupil, “How long did the ambulance take to get there?”

“Five-and- half minutes,” he answered.

“How is the old woman?”

He cupped his hand over his nose and mouth like an oxygen mask and breathed deeply. “She good”, he smiled.

The other students clapped but I wasn’t quite finished. “Pablo, how much grammar did you use?”

He thought for a minute and answered, “Zero.”

We were learning about important words and how they carry the day. With or without grammar woman heart bus - in any order - provided enough information for the security guard to get help. Speaking English isn’t anything like writing it. Situations, context and gestures supply critical information and grammar isn’t necessary at all for successful speaking.

Pablo quit school.

We didn't see him for several months then he dropped by class for a visit. It was nice to see him. (His speaking skills were amazing.)

“Where did you go?” I asked him.

“I thought I need grammar for people to understand me”, he said, “But I don’t.”

“No you don’t,” I agreed – “but where did you go?”

“I got a job”

Newcomers are so self-conscious about their accents and making grammar mistakes, they won’t speak English at all. It’s a crime, because neither is important.  

The other students were dazzled by Pablo and they intellectually accepted what I told them about grammar (Pablo was living proof), but they couldn't imagine themselves following his lead. For one thing, few people are as confident or out-going as Pablo. And let's face it, it is much safer to sit in English class and learn grammar than it is to go out in the world and speak English. You don't need grammar to speak English, you need guts.

BREAKfast of CHAMpions

Mara had been living in Canada for thirteen years, but she never learned English. Her husband learned to speak English at work. Her four children had learned to speak English at school but Mara was a stay-at-home mom with little opportunity to integrate. She was extremely self-conscious about her heavy accent and limited language skills. There are many, many woman newcomers like Mara.

Mara was isolated but she wasn’t stupid. She quickly learned that husbands cannot beat their wives in this country and she learned about social services. Eventually, with help, she threw out her abusive husband and enrolled in English class. With four children, a violent ex-husband and no English skills I could only imagine how difficult her life was, but it never showed. She was always cheerful, caring and turned out like a queen. Mara had class.

One morning several weeks into the term,  Mara was not her bubbly self. She dragged herself to her seat and plunked herself down. The whole class immediately sensed that something was wrong.  I asked her what was the matter and she told this story.

It was her eldest son’s 16^th birthday and she wanted to do something special. She wanted to take her little family out for a meal but she didn’t have enough money to pay for a dinner. She took them out for breakfast. At the restaurant each of her children ordered their food then the server asked Mara what she wanted for breakfast?

"Coffee and an pekundaneesh” she responded.  The server asked her several times to repeat her order. Beginning to feel uncomfortable, Mara repeated, “Coffee an pekundaneesh.” The server finally turned on her heel, scoffed, “Why doncha speak English?” and walked away. Mara was humiliated. The celebration was ruined.

She told the class she was never going into a restaurant again.

 After we talked about her disappointment and concluded that some people are simply unpleasant, we resumed our lesson on word stress. Maria learned that there is one and only one ‘stressed’ syllable in any word. She learned that the stressed syllables are higher, longer and louder than other syllables, and if the word stress is missing or in the wrong place, native speakers cannot understand what is being said no matter how perfectly the individual sounds are pronounced. Before we dispersed for morning break Maria stood at her desk and shouted, “PEcan DAnish!”

She had pieced together what went wrong at the restaurant the day before.

Monday morning Mara bounced into the classroom, her happy, effervescent self. Everyone noticed. How was your weekend? With her hand on her hip and her index finger wagging, Mara filled us in.

“Yesta day, I go back to dat restrant, I see dat lady and I say to she - I wanna PEcan Danish. An she bring me!”

The classroom erupted in applause. When the noise died down, she made a graceful curtsy before taking her seat.

I can only imagine the kind of courage it took for gentle Mara to go back and face that crabby waitress. Her triumph over word stress and restaurants was a triumph for us all.

No One Cares About Your Accent, Except You

Native English speakers don’t care about accents because individual sounds aren’t important in English. If English is not your first language this is tricky to understand because each and every sound is critically important in your first language. Not so in English! People can actually say the wrong things in English and no one cares because no meaning is lost.

If someone at work said, “Zer is a meeting on Vensday”  - everyone shows up the day after Tuesday.

Or asked, “Ven is your birseday?” – without hesitation, we just tell them the day we were born.

Native English speakers actually hear those things correctly because the meaning in English is not in the exact pronunciation of individual sounds, it’s somewhere else.

The meaning in English is in pronouncing some syllables louder, longer and higher than the rest of the word. These qualities are known as stress. Not stress like I have too much homework, the baby is crying or the house is a mess and my in-laws are at the front door - a different meaning of stress.

My favorite example is banana. There are three syllables in the word ba na na but they are not all equally important. The first na is louder, longer and higher than the second na. So the word sounds more like    ba NA na   That’s the stress I am talking about and if it is missing – native English speakers don’t know what you are saying. BA na na doesn’t mean anything, ba na NA doesn’t mean anything, neither does BA NA NA. 
You can pronounce individual sounds wrong all day long and native speakers don’t mind a bit. They think your accent is charming. But if the word stress isn’t there, native English speakers don’t know what you are saying and they can’t guess.

Stop worrying about your accent - no one cares about that - start worrying about word stress because if it isn't there you sound like a sewing machine to English speakers and they can't

understand what you are saying.

The English Phonetic Alphabet

“Come. Now!” the receptionist shrieked and disappeared down the hall. I left my students and trotted behind her towards the computer lab. I could hear a man shouting.

This is a friendly, polite little ESL school, nobody shouts here?

When we entered the lab, the technician looked up at us and snarled, “I can’t understand what she’s saying!” before turning on his heel and stomping away from a trembling young woman.

The computer room is lined with second-hand office computers that often need attention.  Grace Chan, a graduate of our school is employed as a teacher’s assistant to organize the language software and load discs into the computers. She stood alone pointing to a bulky old unit and whispered, “Too soun. Eeychoo. Too soun.” A single tear rolled down her porcelain cheek. She was ashamed of her accent and humiliated by the encounter with the red-neck technician.

I asked her what was wrong and she repeated, “Too soun. Eychoo. Too soun” pointing to the old computer.

“Can you write it down?” I asked, and gave her a pen.

In bold clear letters she printed E-C-H-O, and everything made sense. The computer was making two sounds; it had an echo. Grace knew the right word, but that didn’t help her. No one had ever told Grace that English letters don’t represent sounds. Spelling is random and no one can speak English from reading it.

For an honors graduate from a prestigious language school – you’d think this might have come up before? While it is not a secret that English is idiotic, teachers don’t address the issue because they don’t know what to say. Sometimes they repeat crazy things that someone told them like, i before e except after c, When two vowels go a-walking the first one does the talking or my personal favorite, Sound it out. But none of those sayings are really true so they just make the situation worse.

It turns out, the solution is easy - a new alphabet; a set of letters where each symbol represents one and only one sound (like other more sensible languages). Then people can read what English words sound like.

There is an International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) that was developed in 1888 and it has one symbol for each sound but the symbols are odd and confusing. No one likes them. IPA was on the right track but it didn’t work for English.

The recipe for an English Phonetic Alphabet is simple, 40 ordinary computer keyboard symbols, one for every sound in English and voila a brand new, easy to use, Latin alphabet-based English Phonetic Alphabet for reading the sounds of English. Now why didn’t I think of that?

24 consonant sounds:

/b/-boy, /CH/-church, /d/-dog, /f/-five, /g/-goat, /h/-house, /j/-July, /k/-king, /l/-lemon, /m/-money, /n/-number, /ng/-ring , /p/-people, /r/-red, /s/-summer, /SH/-shoe, /t/-time, /th/-the, /TH/-think, /v/-visa, /w/-woman, /y/-yellow, /z/-zebra, /Zh/-genre

16 vowel sounds:

/Ay/-gray, /a/-black, /Ey/-green, /e/-red, /Iy/-white, /i/-pink, /Ow/-yellow, /o/-olive, /Uw/-blue, /u/-mustard, /^/-wood, /Oy/-turquoise, /Aw/-brown, /Er/-purple, /Ar/-charcoal, /Or/-orange

There’s nothing to it.

Summary

·         English writing and English speaking are separate languages

·         Writing it down is an acceptable strategy if speaking isn’t working

·         /ekOw/ was the word Grace needed

·         Remember to fire the bastards that make your students cry

Lost in English

I got lost. I never get lost! I am one of those people with a ‘good sense of direction’. My dad used to get lost between the kitchen and the bathroom, but not me. I don’t even get lost in foreign countries. Orient yourself to some permanent feature, count the number of streets, match up the symbols and Bob's your uncle – you’re there. Well none of that worked for me last night.

I was meeting my editor west of Toronto at Café du Lac for an appreciation dinner.  After glancing at a google-map to get my bearings I learned 2350 Lakeshore Rd. was between Brown’s Line and Dixie.  I didn’t need any more information than that. From the main highway I took a big road south to Lakeshore and turned right towards Brown’s Line and Dixie. The restaurant wasn’t there. The numbers were all wrong. I kept on driving and stopped at a pizza place (they know where everything is because they deliver) They never heard of Café du Lac. That was a bad sign. I turned around and drove back towards Toronto past Dixie and Brown’s Line, then asked at another pizza place and they said, “Keep going…” By that point, I was very disoriented and very late. Eventually the numbers started to make sense. I got to Etobicoke, 2350 Lakeshore West. and the restaurant – 45 minutes late. I was embarrassed, apologetic and rattled. How could I have screwed that up so badly?  Easy, my map was broken.

At the restaurant we had a nice glass of wine, Sandy was generous and forgiving, dinner was fantastic and the evening was salvaged. Driving home I was still haunted by the experience of being lost and I mentally retraced my steps to try and figure out what went wrong. Turning right onto Lakeshore towards Brown’s Line, was the tipping point. All the numbers were wrong and that was the first clue that I ignored. My original sin was leaving out a critical W in my google search which in turn provided me with a faulty map. Then I followed the map, disregarding all other evidence. Street numbers and maps are two sets of information that I trust – and they didn’t jibe, so I had to choose. I chose wrong. I made bad decision after bad decision till I was hopelessly lost on the correct road with the correct street-number! I felt frustrated and stupid.

English is like being lost.

Whether learning or teaching English the information you have doesn’t lead to where you want to go. The students’ experiences doesn’t ring true with what their teachers tell them. In the classroom we teach “Good morning. How are you?” and in the hall we say “Yo, wasup?” There is no connection between what we teach and what we do.

What we teach is writing and what they experience is speaking. In English – they don’t jibe.

The original sin, the disastrous right turn, the false assumption that created the whole ESL mess is that English is one language, that English writing and English speaking are connected. They aren’t. Lost in English is how ESL learners feel all the time.

The restaurant was a short distance from my disastrous right turn. Had I chosen to pay attention to the street-numbers and ditch the map, I would have turned around and been early for dinner.  But I didn’t. Eventually, I had to accept the map wasn’t working and when I changed my strategy, I found the restaurant.

Teaching people to speak English requires a new strategy. The alphabet, spelling and grammar is a broken map. None of that wonderful writing information is ever going to get students to  dinner. To coin a familiar phrase, you can’t get there from here. Until we change our strategy and teach speaking as speaking, students and teachers feel frustrated, stupid and hungry.

English is Stupid, Students are Not

The TESL Ontario  Conference at the Sheraton Centre last weekend was a huge success. I spent the week re-ordering sold-out materials and sending emails to contacts we made at the show. I was particularly excited about a conversation I had with the Toronto Star representative who suggested I submit a story to the paper. I submitted this story but have not heard back from them. I don't think I have journalist style. Any recommendations are appreciated.

English is Stupid, Students are not

Judy Thompson

I knew something was wrong the very first time I stood in front of an ESL (English as a Second Language) class and tried to teach them the verb to be. On the board in big tidy letters I printed: I am, you are, he is and so on. I thought it would be a good idea to pronounce the words as I was printing them and I couldn’t do it. I could not say I am exactly as it was printed. I said: I yam, you ware, he yiz…I didn’t know what to do. I took the coward’s way out and switched topics. A vocabulary lesson on the names of vegetables became my refuge. It was four years and thousands of hours of teaching before I understood what happened that first day and the answer was so simple I felt a bit silly that I didn’t figure it out earlier.

English writing and English speaking are different languages. As a native English speaker with a university degree I was aware that English could be tricky with ate and eight and the same word match could be a noun or a verb etc But I had no idea that speaking English and writing English were completely different languages and what we teach in school is writing.

Manuel was a wonderful student of mine from South America. He was a doctor in his country and he was brilliant. At his age it was unlikely that he would practice medicine in this country but he was committed to working in his field in some way. I was teaching an intermediate class at the time. He was only in my class for a few months before he advanced to the higher levels. A year later I ran into Manuel in front of the library and we chatted. School was going well, no job yet… I was disheartened by our conversation, broken-hearted actually. Manuel didn't speak any better or differently than he did when he stepped into my classroom the year before. He had passed all his speaking tests but the bottom line was - he couldn't speak English any better than the first day he arrived in Canada. He was smart, hardworking and enrolled full-time in a top level English school. Why couldn't he speak English?

It was right in front of my eyes but I couldn’t see it. The alphabet, spelling and grammar are important skills, but they are writing skills only and never lead to fluency in English. Students study these skills for years, wonder why they can’t speak English and they feel stupid. For native English speakers, fluency is in place before they start school and therefore never formally taught to speak. I never had a speaking English lesson in my life and no idea technically how English speaking worked. Unfortunately the relationship between letters and sounds in English is so loose, no one can learn to speak English from reading it. If that were possible – Manuel would be a doctor in Canada today.

What I had to figure out was how spoken English works exactly – differently from writing? It took me years to understand that and how to teach it. Only six simple rules govern all of spoken English. They are straightforward and easy to add to existing ESL courses. The rules are laid out along with classroom exercises in a speaking guide I wrote in 2009 called English is Stupid published by Thompson Language Center. The book has been a breakthrough tool for ESL teachers in Canada and around the world. It is my fondest wish that this book finds its way to students like Manuel who I didn’t teach to speak English when I had the chance.

English is Stupid provides the context for all aspects of the English language. Lessons and questions are easily addressed as either speaking or writing issues; speaking works like this and writing works like that. The very best English programs are like fine bottles of wine.  Understanding the difference between written and spoken English is the corkscrew. No good bottle of wine is any use without it.

Judy Thompson teaches Speaking Canadian English at Sheridan College.  She offers training to teachers and students in workshops throughout Ontario and Quebec. The next Thompson Certificate Training program Speaking English 2.0 is on November 27 in Toronto. Contact www.ThompsonLanguageCenter.com for more information.

To see Judy in action view: TEDxOakville - Judy Thompson - Three Secrets You Need to Know About Spoken English

                 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcX2AwH3cG8

Alpha and Omega - The Beginning and the End

The genesis of the whole notion that English speaking works differently from writing began in front of my first ESL class the moment I couldn't say I am exactly as it was printed. (I say I yam)It was years before I learned that Linking was the explanation for what was going on and I learned about that in Lydia Aiello’s pronunciation class.
Like most of my great opportunities I stumbled into this one by accident. Lydia was casting around the staff room for a supply teacher for her Friday Pronunciation Class. “I’ll do it!” The eagerness of my response was a measure of my ignorance about the task. “Are you sure?” she said, “It’s pronunciation?” No problem I assured – beginning to wonder what I had gotten myself into. Lydia is one of the most gifted teachers I have ever known. She left a lesson plan so complete a monkey could have followed it and the photocopying was done. I needn’t have worried. The lesson was about Linking and I don’t know about the students but it shifted my universe.
Lydia was chock-a block full of fascinating foibles about the way we speak English and I was hooked. Why doesn’t everyone know this I wondered? The following term I team-taught Lydia’s Friday Pronunciation Class on alternate Fridays and I was exposed to an entire curriculum of pronunciation. (Lydia has since published her method and exercises in a photocopiable workbook called Word Pals.) Then I signed up for Katherine Brillinger’s Teaching English Pronunciation certificate course and my fate was sealed.  My love-affair with how speaking works blossomed into a life-long romance.
A big break happened for me in 2002 when the well-dressed strangers from head office paid our site a visit looking for teachers to go overseas. Everyone was excited about the possibility and I knew they would never choose me over the experienced teachers who had expressed interest. I submitted my application anyway. The situation was reminiscent of the old army cartoon where a row of soldiers are lined up facing the Sgt. and he asks for, “Volunteers to step forward”. All the soldiers but one stepped backward. I was chosen to go to South Korea by simply standing still.  
I spent the winter teaching Korean English teachers about pronunciation and things I had learned from Lydia and Katherine. When the Korean school year started in March 2003, I taught 500 middle-school boys every week at Nonsan Middle School. There were 13 classes, 35-40 boys in each class and we met once a week for 45 minutes. My contract was up at the end of April so I would be standing in front of each class for a total of 4½ hours before I left the country. I had a progressive principal – Mr. Kim. He gave me carte blanche and it was daunting. I asked myself, “How can I affect these boys’ relationship to English for the rest of their lives in 4½ hours? Has that book been written? No it hasn’t. Can I even do it? I thought I could. 
The first thing they absolutely had to have was a functional phonetic alphabet. The ABC’s are only for writing. I had used the International Phonetic Alphabet long enough in Lydia’s class to know it was a pile of crap. I invented a more user-friendly English Phonetic Alphabet, and we started with that. The next thing I thought they needed to know was that English is a stress-based language and how speaking works at the word level. We also had time to cover how sentences worked with important words and unimportant words. Grammar isn't useful for speaking English, only for writing (and moderately useful at that). By the time I left, hundreds of 15 year-old boys were chatting away in English to the surprise and delight of Mr. Kim. Bear in mind, Korean school-children are trained to receive information and study - at school they don’t even talk Korean!
Something was obviously working and that was good, now all I had to do was convince the rest of the world to follow my program. When I got back to Canada the administration at my school wasn’t the least bit interested adding a speaking component to their program no matter how simple or important I thought it was. And they suggested I find another job.
Although my school was not interested in my suggestions I took theirs very seriously and approached Sheridan College with an idea for a new course – Speaking Canadian English based on the differences between written and spoken English. They were refreshingly open. If you can fill the seats – we will run the program. The rest is history. We filled the seats and still run the program. The textbook English is Stupid was printed in 2009 is now being taught in 14 countries around the world including the United States, China, India, Japan Italy and Iran.
We introduced English is Stupid at the big TESL Ontario Conference in Toronto only ten months ago. It was very warmly received. The teachers who bought books at our booth last year brought their friends and site managers this year. The traffic was so heavy at Thompson Language Center, the other booth operators came over to see what we were selling. By Saturday at noon hundreds of teachers had heard me speak, the Toronto Star wanted to write our story, the Royal Ontario Museum invited us to present a special education series and school boards across Ontario and Quebec had booked us for presentations.  
Alpha and Omega, the beginning was standing alone at the front of my first class not knowing the difference between writing and speaking and the end is the end of struggling alone to make long overdue changes in this industry.

Speaking English 2.0

Certified training in the Thompson Speaking Method. Saturday November 27 from 9:00- 4:00 in the Music Room at Bloor St. United – 300 Bloor St. W at Huron.

Early Bird $275. After Nov.10 $350. Space is limited.

To register email Judy@thompsonlanguagecenter.com or call (905) 838-1257