A Resson Rearned

Shortly after making fun of Engrish, I had an experience that made me think twice. A couple of weeks ago, my language learning students underwent formal standardized testing to assess their language abilities. At after school tutoring, a Korean student, not my own, showed up to practice eir speaking skills. Part of the test involves being recorded on tape, so I went over the types of questions that might be asked of eir and appropriate ways to respond. The student spoke pretty well for someone who had been in the country for only two months. The student's main problem was enunciating L's properly. I often couldn't understand eir because of this. "People" sounded like "paper"; "apple" was "apper" and so on. No matter how many times I repeated the difference, ey could not discern it, which was frustrating since the are clearly two distinct sounds. Because the student couldn't hear the difference between R's and L's, I made eir pronounce it funny. Since it's only on tape, I had eir practice sticking eir tongue out when saying L's. Though ey still couldn't really hear the distinction, it forced eir to feel it. "Peop-ullllllll" ey'd say with a tongue hanging out. I felt like some fascist imposing my cultural on eir, but this student came looking for help on the test and this suggestion was one of the best I had to offer.

One component of the test is to ask questions of someone. For example, if the student is told to borrow a pen from someone, the student would have to ask, "May I borrow a pen, please?" The "please" (pronounced "preeze" when eir tongue didn't stick out) part was often forgot, so I had to keep reminding eir. I figured that since the student is so sweet, ey must be polite, and would definitely say "please" if ey was more familiar with the language. (Why they test manners in addition to language acquisition is a rant for another day, I suppose.) With this in mind, I asked what the Korean word for "please" was. The student said it and I tried repeating it back. The student laughed and said it again. I probably attempted it after the student seven times with no success. I could swear I was saying exactly what ey said, but this student was hearing a laughable distinction that I failed to detect. That's when it occurred to me that such phonetic problems were not unique to any one group of people. It's pretty short sighted to assume these issues go one way, as clearly I couldn't hear something that seemed so obvious either. I'm a teacher, but I'm still learning.