Ive never had a local teacher disagree with my prunciation of words. But, many local teachers feel their grasp of English grammar is better than native speakers.
Why?
Because they say the were explicitly taught English grammar and they think native speakers are not.
Well, it’s true in a way.
Probability because they idolise Americans. They wouldn’t dare.
To be fair, many Americans are not explicitly taught grammar in school. The need/requirement to teach English grammar comes and goes every few years, based on whatever “research” has come out about learning (which means whatever the textbook companies and their lobbyists have pushed for). American world language teachers that don’t know how to teach well (TPRS is the way to go people!) LOVE to whine about how they “can’t teach a second language when their students don’t know the grammar of their first language”. But one has to ask: “is this a linguistics class or a language class?” If it’s the later, theres no need for explicit grammar instruction of more than five seconds at a time if you’re doing it right…
It usually is like this, in my experience teaching another language to English native speakers, I could only use simple grammar terms like “direct object” when teaching a guy who was doing a Ph.D. in linguistics, with the rest of them, all English teachers with a CELTA or similar certificates, I just couldn’t use grammar terms. Anglo-Saxons don’t learn as much grammar as we learn about our own language in other countries, but local Chinese teachers don’t really know much about grammar either, they often believe that foreigners “don’t like grammar” so it seems they don’t bother to learn about it, I had a lot of teachers that couldn’t tell me if the word that just taught me was an adjective or an adverb, or both…
They possibly mean they know the meanings of verb, adjective etc? I found that they use this sort of thing a lot when teaching Chinese here.
Chinese speakers have a really hard time with English grammar. I find it extremely odd that a chinese speaker from Taiwan or China (they are known to do this too) would boast about having better grammar than a native English speaker.
Is their grammar better than a native speaker’s, no, usually not. But is their knowledge about grammar and terms like relative clause and subordinate conjunction better? Often, yes.
I’d say terms only. If their knowledge was better, they would be able to put it into practice… which isn’t the case.
They are very good at explaining the exact reason why something is supposed to be the way it’s supposed to be. Like at a PhD in Syntax Level of “understanding”. But they don’t know what English words are supposed to be plugged into their formula. So they can really explain English grammar, as long as they can use Chinese to explain the English grammar and use Chinese words in their examples. So they tell you about “present progressive tense”. They know that’s “現在進行式”. And they know that you add “-ing” to a verb. But they will use Chinese verbs, if they come up with any examples at all. They will also usually forget that you need a “B動詞”. They will also probably be able to tell you when they’re supposed to use that tense, but fail to use it correctly when they’re supposed to. But they can absolutely dissect the sentence better than I could have prior to majoring in linguistics. The only thing this tells us is that you don’t need to know grammar to know a language. And that knowing grammar proves nothing at all about whether or not you know a language.
No disagreement here. In my early days of teaching, I learned quite a lot from East Asian coworkers about how to explain grammar issues. And it’s still not unusual for them to ask me if something’s right or wrong, and I can immediately tell them, but then the two of us will have to work together for a bit to puzzle out why.
Once you understand that the goal of grammar instruction in Taiwan is not to learn English as a tool for effective communication but rather to achieve high scores on English tests written by Taiwanese academics, the whole thing begins to make sense.
Agreed.
However, most of these tests have grammar and spelling errors, awkward sentence structures based on Mandarin grammar and expressions that you would never, ever hear a native speaker of English utter.
A friend’s son recently brought me his most recent English midterm examination and it was rife with errors.
I made a copy of it and I’ll post it later with my own personal ridicule.
It really comes down to classism and borderline racism.
I can’t think of any other explanation for it.
I learnt Spanish, French, Mandarin, Czech, Indonesian to one degree or another.
I was always grateful for corrections from natives.
They think they are socially above foreigners who come here, and won’t listen to anyone who they deem to be lower class. I challenge anyone to come up with an alternate explanation.
My school used to publish a magazine, and posters. It was full of errors, and awkward, advanced-but-not-native English.
The office and lobby were all covered with posters in Skydragon English. Like they were rubbing our nose in it. ha.
Classism? Weren’t most straw-hat peasants 60 years ago? 99 percent racism, 1 percent classism.
I had this one corporate student.
He was building some GPS software, or something.
He couldn’t make enough sales. Went to trade fairs, everything… but not enough clients.
Once he showed me his website. The front page was again full of advanced but badly written English.
I thought having bad English on the front page would have been skewering his chances in the market…
So I said… “I can correct that page in a few minutes, if you like.”
He said…
drum roll
“Oh don’t worry… Alice has been to America”
HA!
Impregnable stupidity.
Yes. Which is exactly what makes them so insufferable.
They believe in their Monopoly hierarchy. The English know its just a game.
So I’ll say classism 60%, racism 40%, and raise you 10% ageism.
My last school was managed by late twenties Taipeiites who acted like they were demi-Gods.
Had exactly this experience a few days ago (although it was a catalog, not a website). All the text was - as you put it - “Skydragon English”. It read like a combination of Taiwanese schoolteacher, Google Translate, and high-quality mushrooms. Which was a pity, because the sales guys were good, knowledgeable people. The problem is, when you see a brochure like that, it gives you a lot of clues about their upper management and attitude to details.
“We need to hit the snake by its head to solve the problem.”
This might be off topic, but I swear when I was a kid people pronounced it as “gen-ray” with the French “gen” but American “ray”. I tried to find video evidence, but to no avail. Or maybe I just remembered it wrong since I was only a child?
