End of term revels

Today was the last day of teaching before the summer, and my class and I celebrated by watching my favourite episode of Fawlty Towers, "The psychiatrist". Should have had tea and biscuits too, of course, to make it a proper occasion.
Many great phrases stem from Fawlty Towers, most notably "Pretentious, moi?", and "Don't mention the war!".
In the rather cool spring evenings we've had lately, Hubby and I have enjoyed ourselves by watching FT again, one episode per night. We've both watched them a number of times, but they're still absolutely hilarious - I don't think I know any better comedies than this.

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Bad grammar makes me [sic]!

I intend to write more than once about grammar, teaching grammar, learning grammar, etc, etc, as this is a subject that mars my professional life. I mean, I've been repeating the (very simple, this is not rocket science!) rules for concord ad nauseam for 13 years at this academy - and still the cadets don't get it? Of course they are new cadets every year, but still?!

On a more serious note, I often wonder why it is that grammar is so hard to grasp for the cadets. We try to give them a "toolbox", a handful of rules targeting frequent mistakes areas, like concord, it/there, genitive, adverbs/adjectives, who/which etc, so that they should be able to monitor and correct their own language, but I must confess that I am not convinced of the effectiveness of this strategy. (Just managing to write with instead of whit seems to be beyond some learners).

When I was writing my dissertation, I read a lot about Stephen Krashen's theories of language acquisition, and was utterly convinced of his input + 1 thesis (if you are exposed to slightly more complex language than your present level of competence, your brain will "make up the difference", and your competence will develop automatically), and we also have a "monitor", an innate ability to check our own output (parole) against the language system (langue) that will, with exposure to enough language help us speak and write with increasing skill and correctness.

Krashen was criticised by many for being too vague and too optimistic. I still think there is a lot of truth in his theories, even if they have not been sufficiently substantiated. However, most young Norwegians have since childhood been exposed to enormous amounts of English language, in tv, films, music, internet and so on - so the input side of things should be taken care of. Still their performance/parole in many cases has ample room for improvement, and my humble opinion here is that they have never, or at least very infrequently, focussed on language as a system, with rules and conventions, but primarlily on language as meaning. Of course the main point of language is to convey information of various kinds, to be understood, to give out meaning, but for second language learners it must be essential to keep an eye on the standard of their language so that they do not just avoid being misunderstood, but are actually understood. This concludes my musings today. More later.

(pictures courtesy of www.onehorseshy.com and Flickr)

What did I read today? And technical hiccups.

I'm rather pleased with the new assignment type I've come up with - initially as a crisis saving device (what on earth should we do in class today?), but it really seems to work quite well. The idea is that the students go to the school library, which is well stocked with magazines and newspapers of all kinds, each of them selects an article (sometimes I give a broad subject they must choose within, e.g. American politics, navy issues, technology) in an English-language magazine which they read, and then write a short report and post it to me either on it'sl or email. This way all of them are active, everyone reads something they have chosen (but worthy stuff!), and everyone writes something, which I try to give very swift feedback to. I plan to do more of this.

Then a little griping about technical limitations: our precious language lab was of course only half functional this week (what else is new? It never ceases to amaze me that we can put people on the moon, launch intelligent missiles, and I'll never really understand how a radio works, but getting that dratted language lab to cooperate for more than one hour without technical problems is just not possible), so I decided to do the listening exercise (very ordinary stuff, Economist audio article, listen & fill in missing phrases) in a classroom, just play the file from the class pc. This works a dream on my office pc, but not so in the classroom, as it turned out. A flashing message that a sound codec (who's that when he's at home?) was missing. Thus, my class got rather more time to do the "What did I read today"-exercise mentioned above than I had planned for - hope (springs eternal) it made them read more closely and spend slightly more time on their writing afterwards.