On learning to teach English as a second language: first comment

         The contrast between the descriptive studies of various languages in use done by linguists and the prescriptive approach involved in what most people mean when they say “grammar” could not be greater. Over the last three decades or so, I've taught this kind of “grammar” as part of my official job description as an instructor of Rhetoric and Composition at various community colleges. When I first started teaching those classes, I had to learn prescriptive English grammar so that I could teach it. Many people learn to speak something that is close enough to Standard English to pass for it in most settings without learning the formal rules well enough to pass a really rigorous grammar test. Some even learn to write well enough to practice law or make a living in journalism without being able to state most of the rules they do obey many more times than not in writing their legal briefs or newspaper articles.

         On the other hand, I speak from many years of experience in asserting that teaching someone who writes badly enough grammar to pass a really rigorous grammar test will not always improve their writing all that much. Some people can understand grammar at the level of abstraction without automatically following those rules when they compose text; others consistently follow abstract grammar rules they could not state clearly if asked why the words of their text are strung together the way they are. Many people know what is “right” well enough to communicate very effectively in both speaking and writing but could not tell you what exactly most of the spontaneous choices they make in the process would appeal to in response to a question about why they are right.

         I'm writing a lot about the written form even though linguists more often than not mean the spoken form when they speak of language and see the written form as an attempt to transcribe the spoken language. The great “aha” insight that came to me only recently was the realization that my own engrained and habitual way of thinking about language amounts to seeing spoken discourse as text performed under conditions that severely limit the quality of that performance.  This is natural for a person whose pattern of thinking and feeling was shaped at least as much by the vicarious experience provided by reading as by his own immediate experience participating in the particular way of life that socialized most of his peers. I've only been tutoring ESL for a few months and, thus, still think like someone who read constantly as a kid, later decided he wanted to be a writer and ended up as a teacher of writing and literature.

         On the other hand,  I'm noticing for the first time how little help knowing how to spell English words gives someone who is trying to say the word rather than to read it or writ it.  My first few students were all Puerto Ricans who amazed me by being able to read anything in English they wanted, enjoy American movies without needing sub-titles and understand me pretty well most of the time when I spoke to them. What they could not do, at first, was to get their needs met here in Florida without great difficulty. In many different settings, they faced the maddening frustration of understanding what other people said in reply to their attempts to communicate well enough to be absolutely sure of the failure of these attempts.

         The pronunciation of a word is not a fact that one comes to know but something one learns to do with one's mouth. That is what I need to learn to take for granted to be really helpful to my students, but it goes totally against the grain of how I have thought about words up until now. Knowing how a given language works both as sounds made in a particular way and as a process whereby these sounds come to mean more than they are is the goal of linguistics. It is also a habitual way of thinking about language. I need to acquire that habit in order to be more helpful to persons who are trying to learn a second language.  I need to learn to describe what I do, with my mouth and otherwise, in speaking English in order to teach anyone else to speak English. I've decided that the main difference between a very patient native speaker of English and someone who really knows how to teach English as a second language flows from this capacity to describe what you are doing when you speak English in the way that a linguist would.

         When I started volunteering as an ESL tutor I thought that tutoring ESL would be very similar to teaching college-transfer or developmental English, as I have already been doing for years. I've enjoyed tutoring immensely more than I expected because tutoring ESL has turned out to be fundamentally different from anything else I've done before. I'm learning things about how language is used and acquired that I did not know in spite of years spent being obsessed with language and determined to acquire greater skill in the use of language. I've learned enough about how teaching a second language ought to be done to be amazed at how turnip-witted some of my previous assumptions were. I'm muddling through and getting better and realizing that there is so much that I haven't learned yet about how to do this that I can almost certainly expect to be much better at something very much worth doing even just a year from today than I am right now. I had said for years that, even though I had never officially taught an ESL class, I had in practice taught a lot of ESL just given who shows up for your classes if you agree to teach developmental English in Houston, Texas, especially at a satellite campus in the inner city. I always enjoyed those classes and my department chair always made it a point to be nice to me. He knew that he would someday need someone once again to teach a developmental course in a “bad” neighborhood that was fully enrolled to the cap but would cancel anyway for lack of an instructor if I did not take it. I like teaching ESL better than anything else I have ever done and genuinely regret that I did not discover ESL sooner.