Like the "ch" in the Scottish "loch"
Mar. 6th, 2005 03:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatarperegrineTwo students are sitting in front of me in the library, collaborating on a paper for their 18th century European history class. It's really amazing to hear the way they move back and forth between Arabic and English, often several times in a sentence. "Khalas the section on philanthropy; bil examples..." Most of the time I don't understand the Arabic, so to me it's just a stream of incomprehensible words punctuated with "hypocrisy" and "governing classes" and "proper burial." One of the students just asked, "Wain al trash can?" and I was happy to be able to answer, "It's over there." I wish I'd taken the extra second to remember how to reply bil 'arabi.
From the sounds of it, they're writing a pretty impressive paper, too. I am more and more amazed every day by how competent our students are in a second language. English and Arabic have practically nothing in common, which is why our State Department officially classifies Arabic as a "superhard" language to learn. (I swear I'm not making that up.) That makes English pretty superhard for Arabic speakers to learn, too.
Another nugget of wisdom from my ESL books: in a 1972 study published in under the grandiose name "The effects of experimentally induced changes in ego states on pronunciation ability in second language: An exploratory study," ESL students who drank a shot before class performed better than those who didn't. Apparently this proves some kind of point about language acquisition being inhibited by people's self-consciousness about making mistakes, but I imagine it wouldn't be a favored teaching technique here.
From the sounds of it, they're writing a pretty impressive paper, too. I am more and more amazed every day by how competent our students are in a second language. English and Arabic have practically nothing in common, which is why our State Department officially classifies Arabic as a "superhard" language to learn. (I swear I'm not making that up.) That makes English pretty superhard for Arabic speakers to learn, too.
Another nugget of wisdom from my ESL books: in a 1972 study published in under the grandiose name "The effects of experimentally induced changes in ego states on pronunciation ability in second language: An exploratory study," ESL students who drank a shot before class performed better than those who didn't. Apparently this proves some kind of point about language acquisition being inhibited by people's self-consciousness about making mistakes, but I imagine it wouldn't be a favored teaching technique here.
