This has been an interesting discussion on teacher training.?? I believe the original question was not whether a teacher needed to be bilingual or not, but whether a teacher needed to know some basic concepts about learners' languages.? Much of the discussion veered off to the bilingual question and then to TESOL preparation, which may or may not, in my observation, be sufficient to provide a teacher with not just the knowledge, but the insight to examine a learner's language to see where challenges for learning English may lie.?? 

I think of a teacher I coached a few years ago who could not understand why her student had so much trouble with a certain sound? and when I pointed out to her that the learner's language did not have that sound, the teacher literally whined at me, " Do you mean I have to KNOW about my learners' languages?"? Or the speech pathologist who characterized a student's inability to hear or pronounce? the p/f contrast (which does not exist in his language) a "speech impediment."???? These are just the kinds of attitudes that very good question seemed to address.? 

In my own work looking at what causes adult ESOL learners to struggle in learning, I have found that lack of awareness of certain features of learners' languages often causes teachers to either teach inappropriately to some students, or worse, as illustrated above, to seriously misunderstand challenges learners face in dealing with English and with instruction.?? For example, since we know that phonemic awareness and mastery of the alphabetic principle is key to fluent and competent reading in English,? if a teacher is not aware that a learner may be literate in a non-alphabetic language (which does not mean a language that uses different letters than our alphabet, but rather a language that uses a writing system in which individual figures represent larger chunks of sound than just a phoneme-- either a syllable or an entire word, as in some Chinese languages), then the teacher may not understand why that student struggles with spelling in English or with the concept of "sounding out words"--i.e. phonics.?? Problems such as not understanding the concept of a "middle sound" or of stringing sounds together to make words arise when the phonemic concept is not understood.?? Quite a few languages have diacritics (little marks) to indicate stress or even tone, where English has none of those and learners are sometimes baffled by that difference.? There is research evidence to show that readers whose languages are highly regular have a hard time learning to read English accurately because they do not deal with the huge variety of irregularities in English spelling well.? Again, if the teacher is aware of this basic difference, he or she can help learners who read in a highly regular language pay attention to and figure out a way to remember baffling differences of pronunciation of simliar spellings such as bomb, comb, tomb, etc.??? 

Other features, such as grammatical order of words in sentences or certain concepts of grammar, differ either a lttle or a lot from language to language and depending on the learner, may pose significant problems in moving to the the new language.? Recently a teacher I have coached asked a translator to translate the concepts of subject, verb, object into the language of some of her learners. ? When asked whether she thought she could do that, the translator commented that those concepts don't translate directly because the sentences in the language are not constructed on that principle. ? Thus direct translation could further confuse rather than clarify things for the learners. ? 

No one is suggesting that a teacher be fluent in all the languages of the globe, but the awareness that the differences exist and the willinginess to help learners explore the differences so both teacher and learner can learn about how the differences need to be understood in the language learning process can go a very long way towards more successful learning and teaching.?? 

I have found that a reading of the Wikipedia entry on alphabetic languages ( which includes a classification of several kinds of non-alphabetic languages, too) is? quick way to raise one's awareness of these concepts without having to become expert in a given language.?? 

Robin Lovrien Schwarz, Consultant in Adult ESOL and Learning Problems 

? 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.nifl.gov/pipermail/englishlanguage/attachments/20081201/ee8a6a7b/attachment.html