Ebaby! Blog

Have you ever read Lolita? Controversy aside, the language is gorgeous. Many of the passages could be classified as prose-poetry and there’s a Shakespearean allusion and plan on words on almost every page. But the most amazing part? Vladimir Nabokov only began learning English five years before he began the book. And English was his fourth language.

Some people just have a gift for language, I guess. Or do they? Two stories came out in local papers yesterday about kids who came to the US not knowing English and quickly rose to academic heights through sheer determination.

Ngoc Trang Nguyen came to Wichita, Kansas, from Viet Nam just in time to start to high school. Five of her first six classes were ESL classes and didn’t count toward graduation. Now, four years later, she is valedictorian of her graduating class.

All of her teachers say they’ve never seen anyone work so hard. And there was a very specific point at which Nyoc’s work started to pay off. She says, “Being in classes with all American students and being exposed to more English, I was able to pick up the pace faster.” It took her forever to learn the basics, but the rest came easily after that. I think that’s the lesson to learn from Nyoc’s story: trust things will get easier as you suffer through the beginning stages of a project.

Benjamin Gutiérrez didn’t know any English when he came to Hanover, Pennsylvania, from Perú four years ago. The sixth grader recently won a spelling bee with contestants from 34 schools.

He studied for the competition for months with his mother, who is also learning English. But it sounds like a big part of his success was a cramming on English pronunciation in the week leading up to to the contest. The article says, “Though [Ben’s] family devoted a lot of time to helping him study in the three months before the bee, they knew that what Benjamin really needed was to hear the words dictated to him in native English pronunciation. James Jones, a volunteer tutor and friend of the family, began a marathon study session with Benjamin the week of the competition.”

I think this is particularly interesting because, unlike Spanish, in which every word is spelled exactly as it sounds (the very idea of a Spanish spelling bee is preposterous), English pronunciation isn’t necessarily the key to spelling, in fact, it can be misleading. I wonder what Ben’s trick is.

ESL students spend a lot of time online and it can be a great opportunity for them to meet native English speakers. I mean, 85% of American college students are on Facebook and the majority are active members. Our ESL/EFL students could be meeting a lot of Americans online.

But more than the obvious social benefits, social networking can improve students’ English. Just look around English, baby! and you can see how social networking lets learners experiment with language in a friendly, communicative setting. Still, not many people are convinced that social networking can or should be integrated into the classroom. It’s a nice extracurricular activity, but most teachers can’t see the teaching potential.

Well, the truth is social networking is great reading and writing practice! And I am going to take advantage of that in my ESL class. I am integrating social networking sites into a reading strategies lesson. One important reading strategy is inference. Inference means interpreting beyond what is actually written and making bigger conclusions. Look around any social networking site and you’ll find there is a lot to infer. People say one thing, but they mean another. My students are going to use this handout that I found online. The handout wasn’t developed to be used with social networking profiles, but it helps students separate what people say from what they mean. And it seems to fit perfectly with the activity. Students will write a few quotes from a profile and say what they think they mean on the handout. Then, they will write a paragraph about what they think about the person.

Here is an example of inference from lastbreath. His profile was the first one I read today. He says, “Things I Like: romantic dinner” He means, “I like romance. I want romance.” He says, “Favorite Movie: romantic and romantic comedy” He means, “I am a good boyfriend and I really want romance ,” and maybe, “I want a girlfriend.” You could even infer things from his screen name.

The point is that as teachers we need to monopolize on our students’ free time. They spend a lot of time online and an English social networking site will really help their English. It will improve their reading skills and maybe it will make it easier for them to make inferences.

This is just one idea. And we need to think of more ideas because online social networking is a great way for ESL students to practice reading and writing.

All the interesting people I met on my trip to Turkey inspired a new kind of lesson that debuted last week. It’s so new, we’re not even sure what we’re going to call it yet! We’ve been calling them “interviews” or “taking it to the streets” around the office.The idea is that I’ll interview real Americans and make lessons out of our conversations. All of our English lessons are improvised so that our members can be exposed to real, conversational English. But this new type of lesson will expose the members to a wider variety of voices and slices of American culture.The first interview lesson was with a lovely woman named Amanda who works at a local video arcade that is also a bar called Ground Kontrol. I decided to put up her interview first because she did such a good job of speaking clearly and using good vocab words. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone annunciate “buttons” so well! Check out the video.

The next lesson goes up on Monday but you can get watch the video below. It’s an interview with Devan and my former roommate Matt, who works at a guitar store called Old Town Music.

These interviews were inspired by Studs Terkel’s book Working, in which he interviews people about their jobs. But the next lesson, which is slated for a week or two down the road (but once again the video is below) probably represents the way we’re going to go with this concept. It’s an interview with a motorcycle rider, but the most compelling part is when he takes a moment to talk about himself and says that riding motorcycles is how he find his “freedom, peace and serenity.”

At John’s suggestion, I’m going to make future interviews more personal and more about the subjects. It should be fun because I love hearing people talk about their lives. It’s something I’ve done on my personal blog as well.Anyway, we’d love any input you have about this new type of lesson, so comment or send me an Ebaby! message via my profile. Photo: Yes, my jacket was picked to look like Ron Burgundy.

In order to stay connected in today’s world you not only need to speak English, you need to speak Web 2.0 as well. In fact, I’d recently told John about the joys of Esperanto, an easy to learn language developed to become international language, but that never caught on. A few days later, John passed on this article about the new universal language: Nerdic, the language of technology.

Knowing the language of technology can help you learn English and vice versa. Katie, our resident teacher often writes about wikis and videos can be used in the classroom.

But it’s clear to me that a lot of our users here at English, baby! aren’t familiar with some of the latest functions of the Web. Take tags, for instance. We had to remove the tag field on lessons because members were entering in the craziest things! (Actual examples: “I need to find a wife in Iran”, “how are you?”, “Angelina Jolie” on a lesson about bowling, not to mention the stuff in Chinese.)

Although tags aren’t covered in this video, a lot of the basics of Web 2.0 are. The video is made by an English teacher in Barcelona and aimed at helping teachers integrate new technologies into their teaching methods and get over their fears of them. I particularly like that the audio of the video is very slow and clear, so ESL students can understand it too.

And here’s a fun video of William Shatner speaking Esperanto in the 1965 movie, Incubus, one of the only movies made entirely in Esperanto.

Photo: The creator of Esperanto’s tombstone. Yes, it is in Esperanto.

Gordon Brown had some interesting things to say about the English language on his recent trip to the U.S. According to The Press Association he is trying to encourage more people around the world to learn English.

The Wall Street Journal reported Brown saying that he’d like to see the US and UK work together on the initiative and “strive to make the international language that happens to be our own far more freely available across the world.”

It seems that Brown sees multiple advantages to the US/UK initiative, including a reason for the two countries to work together, encouraging use of the language we already know, and “bringing people together.”

What the article didn’t mention was the benefit to the learners around the world who might actually get more access to English as it becomes more “freely available” through a cooperation of this nature.

Hopefully learners get the most value in this deal and are given the opportunity to drive the process. Has the British council asked them how they would like more access to the English language? If this partnership materializes, we’d like to see the groups begin with feedback from learners, then provide what’s most needed.

We’d also love to help.