native speakers teaching

[BobbyCooper]

Originally Posted by evanny

yes. and then you went on talking about how 90% of them are speaking incorrectly because they have accents. accent doesn't mean incorrect the way you make it to be and it is nothing that person's ears can't get used to in a single month.

i met a girl on a street one night and started talking. after 15 minute conversation it turned out she was an exchange student who had been studying in england for a single year, and yet after 15minutes i could not tell the difference between her and a native. and even more - she came from the same country i did.

don't know why you are saying this..

but I never said they would speak incorrectly. What a stupid comment dude.

I said that it is extremely difficult to understand their English and that it would be much better to have a Teacher who doesn't have a strong accent.

You guys are slow lol..

work on your reading skills before you attack people.

[evanny]

or maybe you should work on your writing skills since that is what i took from your posts. you keep stressing how accents "are awful" and "They abuse thir own language!! It's not funny anymore" or you say something like "Ireland OMG in this area English doesn't exist anymore"
all of these phrases imply that they are speaking incorrectly. even if it is only phonetics - you are still saying it is incorrect to speak with an accent. specially in Ireland where it is so bad that "It's not funny anymore" and gotten to the point where "English doesn't exist".

[MMM]

This thread is going down for the 10 count. Last chance to turn it around.

[RealJames]

Originally Posted by RealJames

Yeah for sure.
As a bonus, non-native teachers tend to be a hell of a lot cheaper!

Trained native speakers, though, I believe will still be better than trained non-native speakers as teachers.
You have a good point that they can relate to how that person learned the language, and the native speaker doesn't have that.
Actually a big part of why I took learning Japanese seriously was to improve my ability to teach them, not so I would speak Japanese during the lesson, but to understand where they are coming from and how their language differs so as to better understand the challenges.


After Edit;


Another point is that it's a lot more difficult to unlearn and relearn something correctly than to simply learn it correctly the first time.
When learning from a non-native speaker, there's always a good chance that you might learn something flat out wrong, as opposed to learning something that's "wrong" but doesn't actually disturb the ears of native speakers.

There are many non-native teachers who are excellent teachers, who don't make these mistakes and in fact speak English just as well as I do. But there are FAR more who don't but profess to.
As a student, especially a beginning student, it's nearly impossible to differentiate these from each other.

How can you know, as a beginning student, that the non-native teacher you select is in fact reliable?
A native speaker, once he starts teaching you, if you learn, he's good, if you don't, he's not, but there's no doubt that what he's saying is correct English regardless of his ability to teach it.
A non-native speaker, once he starts teaching you, if you learn, he's good, if you don't, he's not, but there's no guarantee that what he's teaching is correct English.

See what I mean?

I think this is the last post on-topic, I'd like to hear the non-Bobby opinions about it, in particular Evanny's

[evanny]

you have a point that a student won't know if he is thought incorrectly by a non-native.
however i can't imagine any big mistakes that could be made and then hard to re-learn. mistakes usually made by non-natives are either pronunciation or simple translation - forgetting the meaning of words. other than that i don't know if any major mistakes that would "damage" students language in a long run can be made by a non-native, especially since all non-native speakers have finished universities in order to get a license to teach.

[RealJames]

Originally Posted by evanny

you have a point that a student won't know if he is thought incorrectly by a non-native.
however i can't imagine any big mistakes that could be made and then hard to re-learn. mistakes usually made by non-natives are either pronunciation or simple translation - forgetting the meaning of words. other than that i don't know if any major mistakes that would "damage" students language in a long run can be made by a non-native, especially since all non-native speakers have finished universities in order to get a license to teach.

a lot of the non-native English speakers I graduated from university with were good at their field but not necessarily English, hell my professors often weren't that good lol

but there really are many errors that can be transferred from non-native teacher to student, in fact I often encounter them myself as a teacher meeting a new student who learned from a non-native formerly

one example is using idioms correctly but in situations that no native speaker would use them, to a native speaker it just feels "off" but by definition correct

another example is when formal and casual terms get crossed, or formal diction is used in a casual situation

the most common though is incorrect accentuation, stressing the wrong syllable is a habit that takes so long to undo

[evanny]

well in my country for you to be a teacher you actually have to study teaching to be one. every teacher i know has spent 4 years in university, then usually majors and only then starts to teach while also attending all kinds of courses once in a while for improvement.

and what you just said are the mistakes i mentioned. but i would not call them major. i would be far more worried if i was thought incorrect grammar than idioms or pronunciation. and usually both of these things are left for the person to fix on his own when face with real life situations. doesn't matter how good the non-native teacher is - everyone still needs to practice with different people to "see" how language works in real life.

[RealJames]

Originally Posted by evanny

well in my country for you to be a teacher you actually have to study teaching to be one. every teacher i know has spent 4 years in university, then usually majors and only then starts to teach while also attending all kinds of courses once in a while for improvement.

and what you just said are the mistakes i mentioned. but i would not call them major. i would be far more worried if i was thought incorrect grammar than idioms or pronunciation. and usually both of these things are left for the person to fix on his own when face with real life situations. doesn't matter how good the non-native teacher is - everyone still needs to practice with different people to "see" how language works in real life.

taught, not thought

I suppose they might not be major, but depending on how long they've been misusing the language, it can be very difficult to break the habit.
A major error might actually not take so long to break because of how blatant it is haha.

[dosu]

I remember watching a news clip on youtube about highscool kids learning Chinese at school, but the teacher wasn't chinese nor did he speak it very well. It seemed like what he taught that day he learned the night before, plus his accent and tones were way off. Throughout the video it showed the highscool kids trying to speak Chinese. I felt sorry for them because they were thought wrong, and could only say basic sentences which were pretty much toneless.

Sorry for not writing in the same paragraph as before, but I'm on a psp XD and you can only write so much. After watching that video I seen a video about elementary school children who went to school on the weekends to learn Chinese(from a native) they were speaking it real well, and even writing stories in Chinese. This video made up for the one I watched before XD