Our eldest daughter is in her 1st year of collège (Gymnasium to all you barbarians over the Röstigraben) and some of the stories she has told us about her English teacher make me cringe and laugh at the same time. First of all, she was born here and has grown up completely bilingual English/French; when she was at CO (secondary school), it was agreed she would be given a blanket 6 in her English, as they accepted she probably spoke better English than the teacher. Not only is her current english teacher "boring" (she says some of her classmates actually fall asleep in his lessons), but he has: marked her down on her pronunciation, has corrected her "13-year old boy" in a written exercise to "13-years old boy", pronounced category with the emphasis on the "e", when asked by a classmate what Flappy meant (as in the phone game Flappy Bird), replied that it was a bird with no backbone (did he think "floppy"), pronounced kilometer with the emphasis on "ki", and many other examples I can't recall right now.
I'm not so worried about our daugter, she will always have English as her first language, but this is collège not bloody primary school, the students should have a decent grasp of English, but are plainly being taught incompetently and incorrectly. We've told her if it were to happen again, to quietly approach him after the lesson and explain where he is wrong, so as not to embarass him in front of the class. We also have a parent-teacher open meeting later this month and will say something to him, in our perfect Westcountry/Northern Irish English, of course .
I'm hoping this is an isolated incident and he is just a poor teacher, but an English-speaking English teacher friend assures me such incompetence is pretty widespread in the Swiss school system, and they make it extremely difficult for native speakers to be eligible to teach in public schools.
There, got that off my chest, happy Friday.
Send him a note offering him English conversation classes.
Over the years we have had a similar experience, the last daughter received top marks but she had to attend all the classes.
She had to sit at the back of the class and could quietly do her other homework.
Is a bird without a backbone a turkey twister? Or maybe a chicken breast?
We have had similar experiences with English teaching here too. The teacher this year is actually very good and gave him the option of attending class or not depending on the timing.
He chose to give the 7.30 am oral class a miss ( can't think why ) but he goes to the ones that are during the morning between two other lessons. In these lessons he can either 'help' the teacher, do homework for other lessons or read a book quietly she's also asked him to help with the spoken dialogue tests later in the year so he is doing some preparation for that and is actually quite motivated by it all. He does have to sit the tests but that's not an issue as they are really easy for him.
This is all in sharp contrast to the teacher last year who seemed to be at a loss as to what to do with him and seemed to resent the fact that our son could actually speak better than him ( teachers pronunciation was appalling - gynae pig anyone ). We had a couple if run ins with him and our son challenged him about 'mistakes' which he marked down ( which weren't actually mistakes) but always quietly at the start on end of the lesson so as not to embarrass him in front if the other students.
I think it's pot luck whether you get a good one or a bad one to be honest but there seem to be quite a lot of bad ones out there.
We're not quite at lycée stage yet ( boy is 14) but based on the steady stream of teenagers from the village who come knocking on my door for help I don't hold out much hope of the standard being very high. There is one particularly bad teacher apparently so anyone who has passed through her class has some serious lacunes.
I have to say that I find the choice of course books to be also rather bizarre. One of the girls has a text book of preparation for the 'first certificate' when her level could be described as A2 p/b1 at best.
This is more or less what happened at CO (and currently does for daughter #2). She hardly ever did any homework at home as she had already done it in her English lessons.
She hasn't actually told her current teacher she is a native speaker yet, but she says it's clearly stated on her student profile.
My daughter's teacher insisted she turned up for lessons, as legally he couldn't give her an end of term grading if she never attended. Everyone seemed happy with this arrangement.
My husband (Swiss) was taught to use the word "did" to form the past i.e. "I did write to her" instead of "I wrote to her" ... I've been trying to correct it for years now. He is banned from using the word did.
Primary school teachers who take English only have to have Cambridge First Cert. here- which is totally and absolutely irrelevant to teaching communicative English at beginner level. It's appalling. But certainly at Collège, the teachers should be properly qualified to teach English and have a good semi-fluent at least level. And the good grace to admit that they native students may well have a better level than them and listen to them, get them to work alongside as their 'assistant'.
Mind you, having taught French and German in the UK (native FRench speaker, and B.Ed.Hons trained in the UK)- I can assure you that many of my colleagues in the UK were NOT fluent in either, and made terrible mistakes in pronunciation, spelling and grammar. Some were however excellent teachers who did as above- others were just plain awful. And don't get me started on French (eg from France) mod langs teachers who can barely speak English I've come across in my career, who nit pick on useless points of Grammar and literature, but can barely hold a conversation in English (same with the teacher of the French kids I coach at the mo...).
PS- I often had students in the UK whose parents were French or German, or one parent was- and was told they were bilingual. Their spelling and grammar were however pretty poor- and they often did not do as well as expected at GCSE due to this. Not as relevant in English, where grammar is much simpler- but even so. Just because a child speaks fluent 'whatever language', does not mean they necessarily have a good command of spelling and grammar. This was always even more obvious for those who made the huge jump between GCSE (exams in UK at the end of compulsory schooling) and A'Levels (Bac 'equivalent' starting at 16, in UK (not Scotland)). Students still had to attend- and I 'used' them as assistants and always set separate work or reading for them to do, projects to research and write up, etc.
I feel your pain Paddy- but this is not just a Swiss thing, sadly
PS- did is very useful for questions about the past though- so I would not ban it totally
Yes, kids usually have to attend if they want to keep the grade in their certifs. Mostly, though, Anglophone students get excused from English, don't have to attend, don't get a grade (unless an individual program is arranged, exam prep for example) but get a choice of another language. But that's our canton.
Whaddup with the Flappy Bird obsession..All over the place.
It's cute, though. Chomsky and generative grammarians would love your hb.
I think my daughters just had to show up for the tests, but not go to class.
Tom
There seems to be a rise in "English clubs" springing up in local communities. There are a couple near us which are run by English native speakers for kids of all abilities. They are either affiliated to schools or the local Gemeinde centre and are becoming quite popular for shoring up and supporting kids' learning English or providing a more solid platform for native speakers.
I despair about beginners, aged 10, being only tested in writing- even communicative questions and answers about self, family, home, etc- and basic things like numbers and telling the time, etc. (and as said, even worse in France). Young kids who are so enthusiastic, communicate well, have good listening comprehension- but then are marked down heavily because of minor spelling mistakes in numbers or time. Now who on earth writes/ spells numbers or the time, in any language??? Tragic.
In the UK, we always marked students in all 4 skills, oral, listening comp, reading comp and writing. Up to CGSE, even the writing would be 50% for communication (so minor spelling or grammatical mistakes, as long as they did NOT in any way impair communication would still allow 50% of the mark) and 50% for accuracy (spelling and grammar) so only 12.5% of the total was for absolute written accuracy. Because at that level, a language is first and foremost about ... guess what, communciation. Totally the other way round here, and as said, even worse in FRance, with a very small % of the mark given for oral communication.
No need to correct it; it’s perfectly acceptable. “I wrote to her …” is the more usual form, but “I did write to her …” is also fine.
Hmmmm..
Acceptable is quite a relative term.
I disagree, I would never use "did", unless for emphasis:
"You need to write to your mother"
"But I did write to her" (or just simply "I did")
Any other context, albeit grammatically correct (though I'm not so sure) just looks and sounds wrong. It's an immediate clue to recognise a non-english speaker.
Exactly.
You would never say "I did write to him" in a normal affirmative sentence. It's a dead giveaway that the speaker is a a non-native speaker.
It is used for emphasis or when refuting an allegation.
Something like this used by the boy only yesterday springs to mind.
Me: I thought I asked you to put your jumper away in the cupboard
Boy: but I did put it away, it's not my fault that it fell out again when I opened the door!
In regular conversations where one does not want to stress that something really did happen (contrary to what might have been expected), auxiliary "did" is wrong, imho. The funny thing is, most learners ignore auxiliaries (even advanced students often ignore auxiliaries for negative sentences or questions), so to have one walking around using them all the time is quite logical, in a preventative sense. But pragmatically speaking, human brain will try to make everything regular, even irregularities, and adult brain more so.
I like the wrong irregular past tense creations done by learners who haven't accumulated enough exposure yet. Little monolingual kids.."I buyed it" or others, "what is it mean?". There are too many learners who are too shy to communicate because they don't like to make grammar or pronunciation mistakes, that's too bad.
I think every teacher makes mistakes, even if they are good at their subjects, so to expect them to be perfect (especially with kids who are not really supposed to be in an ESL class at all) is not really fair. But it's too bad they would not use an Anglo-phone kid as a TA, for example, hm. It's a shame when you have a teacher who does not want to work on improving oneself, or shoots down a kid who is obviously better than the teacher. Cheap shot. Makes me happy when kids are better than me, in whatever that is (don't care for the victories in Flappy Bird, though, or elaborate nail accessories).
Well to be fair, there were ample articles depicting the dire situation Switzerland is in pertaining to English proficiency.
And yet it's so hard to find someone that doesn't speak at least a smattering of English here. Can't be that dire.
German and French proficiency in the US is of course- top notch
Some of them, living abroad, hardly speaking a word after living for years in countries where French or German is the language
To be fair, Sandgrounder, where I live in rural CH, very few ('to' edited out thanks to SwissPete ) speak English... and why should they