Week 5: Speed Bumps

This week was a very slow week. The language centers at Stanford and San Jose State didn't get back to me yet and my survey still did not make it into the weekly newsletter. I think I will have to remind the Head of School, because I e-mailed him last week about the survey-- he's a busy person and I'm sure so are the people working at the colleges. However, this week I was able to finish reading Crazy English, so here are some thing's I found interesting and could be relevant to learning English as a second language.

In English there are "Janus-faced words," words with two opposing meanings. These can be extremely confusing for ELLs, especially since many terms evolve every day with different vernacular and slang. Here are some examples:

• with: England fought with (against) France vs. England fought with (alongside) France against Germany.

• left: She left (departed from) the room vs. She was left (remaining) in the room.

Pronunciation can be difficult for ELLs especially if English has phonemes that don't exist in their mother tongues; however, the ESL journey is made worse by heteronyms, words that are spelled the same, but pronounced differently without any differentiating mark:

• read (present tense) vs. read (past tense): /ri:d/ vs. /red/

• insult (noun) vs. insult (verb): /'insəlt/ vs. /in'səlt/

• bow (verb) vs. bow (object): /baʊ/ vs. /boʊ/

These heteronyms are spelled exactly the same, but pronounced differently because they're different tenses, parts of speech, and even because they're completely unrelated words to begin with. So how is an ELL supposed to catch on with all of these nonsensical pronunciations in English? They're taught that ea is pronounced a long e sound, but read can also be pronounced without a long e? As a kid, I also found it really confusing that been is pronounced /ben/, but bean is pronounced /bi:n/.

With an entire book full of contradictions and discrepancies in the English language that native speakers don't even understand, it must be a pain for English-language learners, too.

This week, I also got my hands on a copy of Learner English, a book written for ESL teachers explaining discrepancies between various languages and English that teachers will notice cause problems for ELLs. In other words, it's exactly the book I want. However, the book is written for professors and linguists, so uses many terms I don't understand (it took me a while to get through one page and I still didn't really understand). I think this book will be a huge help for my project, so I guess I'll be digging into linguistics next week! In the book, there is a section about Chinese and a section about "South Asian languages" like Hindi and Urdu. I wonder if the book combined South Asian languages because they are similar enough in grammar and phonetics to be compared to English all together. I'll have to look into that as well, because if so, I might study South Asian languages as a whole rather than just Hindi, which is what I expected to do in the beginning.

Also, I realized while reading that some of the content made no sense to me solely because it is made for BRITISH English-- GAHH!! Another obstacle presents itself, but I will find a way!

Note: In case you don't understand the cartoon, Glasgow is in the United Kingdom (where they indeed speak English) and the English class depicted is in the United States.