on FL teaching and learning

[from an Instapundit comment I'd left... here, slightly edited]

Learning English remains a mania here, but Koreans insist on backwards and antiquated ways of teaching and learning FL, which is why they continue to score around 2 or 3 (out of 5) on the two types of TOEFL essays (integrated and writing for academic discussion), and why they can learn English for ten years, then go to America, the British Isles, Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa and realize they can neither understand English nor speak it. The Koreans who do well with English are the ones who live overseas long-term in anglophone countries. And even then, many go overseas and isolate themselves in "Little Korea"s and never bother to learn the language of their host country.

Korean nationalism does come into play though. But it usually takes the form of wanting to replace those horrible foreign teachers with AI-driven robots. Foreign teachers here generally have the reputation of not knowing much about grammar (or much else technical about English); those teachers often correct the students while using vague justifications like "that sounds better" or "it's less awkward" or "it flows better" because they can't quote the relevant rules, and the students can smell this ignorance.

Also: most FL-teaching emphasis in the West, these days, is on oral proficiency to get students speaking coherently much earlier in the process. I'm in partial agreement with this emphasis, but I've seen the disadvantages: I learned French the old-fashioned way with grammar charts, choral repetition, scripted conversation, etc. One of my brothers went to the same high school I did; by that point, the old-guard teachers had been replaced by the oral-proficiency crowd, and I was really impressed with my brother's ability to speak French by level/year 2 or 3. But I quickly noticed that the quality of his French writing was utter shite, and that's part of the problem with not stressing grammar or correcting students' errors. Grammar is important because it aids in clarity of thought and expression.

I don't know what the answer to the teaching/learning problem is even after years of FL teaching. (I started off as a French teacher, then moved to Korea and used my FL-teaching skills to become an English teacher. I spent the last decade as a content creator, not a teacher, but I'll soon be going back into teaching.) I suspect the answer is some sort of middle ground: Korean students in particular need more emphasis on productive macroskills like speaking and writing; they do way too much listening and reading, and none of it is helping because the style of Korean instruction is to take a super-analytical approach to foreign languages. Compounding this problem is that the Korean analytical approach to English is often just plain wrong. Did you ever hear, for example, that there are only five sentence types in English (see chart below)? I can guarantee you that there are a lot more than five.

So a lot needs to change in Korea if Koreans really want to learn English fast and well. My own humble suggestions, after years in country, would be:

1. Korean instructors need to be fluent in English before they can teach, and their fluency should be tested by native-level speakers of English.

2. The Korean curriculum needs to emphasize productive macroskills (speaking, writing) as much as it emphasizes receptive macroskills (listening, reading).

3. The Korean curriculum needs to be stripped of false notions about English (like "There are only 5 English sentence types").

4. The foreigners who are hired to teach English should pass rigorous tests of linguistic competency—not just grammar—before they ever step into a Korean classroom. Too many foreign teachers are just 20-something kids fresh out of college, just looking to earn money so they can backpack all over Asia. It's an old story. Yawn. And it adds to the already-bad reputation of foreign teachers in Korea. And since Korean "cram schools" (hagweon/학원) are fundamentally businesses and not centers of education, they don't care whom they hire—just put a white face in the classroom, preferably somebody thin and good-looking. And if the foreigner isn't white, well, good fookin' luck. I'd say hire only the linguistically competent.

5. While I would never suggest an obsessive focus on grammar in particular (it produces a "missing the forest for the trees" effect), I should note the irony that many Koreans say, "We know English grammar better than Westerners do," then when they speak or write, 95% of their many, many errors are grammatical in nature. They've been trained to recognize grammar patterns but not to produce them in any reliable way, and these are two totally separate skills.

But I despair of ever seeing major changes like the above. There's a pervasive cultural conservatism/inertia here, and not the good kind of conservatism. Koreans will continue to want to learn English, to learn it badly (because that's how it's always been done), to suffer at the hands of incompetent Korean and foreign teachers, and to pine for the ever-hoped-for AI robots so they can chase the fuzzy little furriners off the peninsula.

Oh, yeah—that sentence-type chart:

[new material starts here]

Want me to list off some sentence types for you the way Americans learn them (or at least used to learn them)?

1. simple sentence
2. compound sentence
3. complex sentence
4. compound-complex sentence
5. interrogative sentence (verb-first form is not even shown on the above chart)*
6. infinite combinations of the above joined by conjunctions, etc.

That's just off the top of my head. The AI god adds moods and clause types:

English sentences are categorized by structure (simple, compound, complex, compound-complex) and by purpose/function (declarative, interrogative, imperative, exclamatory). The four structures mix independent and dependent clauses, while the four functional types determine if a sentence makes a statement, asks a question, gives a command, or shows emotion.

Once you start mixing, matching, and adding complexity, the number of English "sentence types" is uncountable. To reduce them to only five types, and to use a weird typology in doing so, is at best vaguely insulting, and at worst harmful to EFL students. What would Koreans think if I presented an oversimplified chart of supposed Korean sentence types?

__________

*Interrogatives can be written as declaratives, but with a question mark on the end.

• You're going fishing?
• He said what?

—but where in the above chart do you see the grammar for

Do you have a name?

The V_aux + S + V_main + O_dir structure is not on the chart. Interrogatives are sentences, too. I would humbly submit that the chart is crap. And if there's one chart like this, there are others.