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