I've already posted once about the Bambina's English class at school. She is in "CP" (first grade) at the French primary school here in Antananarivo and her class has "anglais" twice a week - English for French kids.
I stated in my previous post that I believed that this class would be, at best, a complete waste of time for the Bambina and at worst, harmful to the Bambina's French-English bilingualism.
So now I'm reporting back. The times that the Bambina has talked about her English class at school, she has said that it is very very boring. That was to be expected. But she has also said that the teacher makes mistakes. Last week, she said that the teacher, a Malagasy who almost certainly learnt to speak English at a French school, is teaching the students the parts of the body in English. In doing so, she points to her head and says "ED". "Repetez, les enfants : ED".
So the teacher is telling the children that the word for "tête" in English is "ed". Not "head" - "ed". And she is getting the children to repeat this word over and over, thereby engraining this hideously incorrect pronunciation into each child's brain.
Ever wonder why the French speak English so poorly? Now we know.
But not only does this teacher drop her "h's" when she shouldn't, she adds one when there isn't any. The Bambina has an Australian classmate, Ella. The English teacher calls her.... you guessed it... "Hella". What the hell?
All of which leads me to conclude that these English lessons aren't just harmful for my little Bambina's bilingual capacities. They're not doing the other kids any good either. The children are learning some English, yes, but bad English. English that later on will cause listeners to think, "this person doesn't speak English very well."
Thursday 14 April 2011
English class at the French school
Posted by The Globetrotter Parent at 09:07
Labels: bilingualism and multilingualism, education, learning a foreign language, les français, lycée français
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7 comments:
Hope you can get the Bambina out of it because it sounds detrimental for someone like her. I think it's better to have some poor English teaching than no English at all for the others. Can you and should you expect more in a country like Madagascar? I don't have a clue. We should be so lucky that people all around the world are learning our language so freely.
My first German teacher was a bit like that - I'd never learnt German before, but it didn't take a genius to hear that her accent was suspiciously similar to my dad's when he speaks French.
She did seem to be fluent though, and when those of us who chose to continue with German for A level we gained a second teacher who was in fact German. Bavarian though, so every so often Frau B lamented that between herself and Mrs G we didn't have the best start. Ooops.
Loquat, yes we live in Madagascar but let's not forget that the school is private and a part of the FRENCH "public" school system overseas. The question is whether we can expect more from the French. I think that ANYONE who teaches English, no matter what their accent, should know that, with a few exceptions, we pronounce our h's. Words like "honest" and "honour" are true exceptions to this rule and can be memorized. And we don't add h's to words that begin with a vowel.
It's not so much the accent that is my concern (after all, we all have accents, native and non-native) but rather the correct pronunciation of words. There is a difference. You can have an accent but still not add letters where there are none and drop letters where they exist.
i agree with you completely. this is not good for your daughter. my twins are bilingual in hungarian and (american)english - well, at a 2.5 year old level- but as different as those two languages are, they pronounce things perfectly and without accents. i would hate for them to take a hungarian class from a non-native speaker- kind of defeats the prpose of me doing nothing but talking to them in my mother tongue..could you pull her out/test her out of the class? good luck...
Esther and Brian, we have talked with the principal and he is looking into getting computers at the back of the class that native English speakers can work on while the rest of the class is being taught. They would learn to read and write English on the computer.
I have just found your blog and have giggled thorugh it. I so realet to this one. We are NZers who lived in Ecuador for 8 years. We used to say that our boys had 3 languages: English, Spanish & Spanglish (English with a spanish accent). The last one always made us laugh. The 'English' teacher was so threatened by having english speakers in her class that instead of using them and their skills she sent them out to the senior maths class. No wonder they are now extremely proficient in maths :)
Unfortunately I wouldn't be surprised to hear about the same poor pronunciation in FRENCH teachers in the English/American schools...
I think that the teacher's requirements to graduate from College/University is to blame here. Graduates "only" need to learn a bunch of useless history and cultural facts about a language (and lots of grammar) with no emphasis on the oral aspect of the language itself (the most important in my opinion).
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