Fr. Bernie Rosinski is spending several weeks with SCJs in the Philippine District where he is helping with a few administrative tasks and teaching English. While there, he has been writing about some of his experiences on the province blog.
“With my degree in applied linguistics in hand, I have felt for a number of years that teaching English as a second language faces a huge obstacle,” writes Fr. Bernie in a recent post. “That obstacle comes in the form of the Latin alphabet writing system…
“English is notoriously poor at making writing correspond to the spoken sound. Let me illustrate with an example. One sound (which I will not attempt to “write” here) has 12 different ways of appearing in writtenEnglish (and I urge you to consider the contradictory patterns of writing): people vs amoeba; either vs niece; suite and sweet; key and sea; chamois and chassis; marry and she. Non-English people go nuts trying to learn to speak English from way it’s written. The problem is: from their prior experience with their native language their very bones scream out to them that this is the only way to go.
“The answer: repeating English sounds; learning English like babies do — by hearing, by using analogy for similar sounding words, by making mistakes in analogy application; by being corrected, either by oneself or by others. And after the sound system and sound patterns are learned, attempting to join the spoken word to the written word.
“That’s the way I am working in the Philippines. We use the breviary with its cycle of morning and evening prayer psalms. I ask the students not to look at the book but to listen to what I am saying. I repeat several times and then I ask the students collectively to repeat what I said by picking up their psalm books. Then I will ask individuals to repeat the verse. Where pronunciation mistakes are made, I correct them. Oftentimes, the mistakes that are made result from applying native language reading patterns to the English sound; e.g. seeing ‘will’ in writing, they will pronounce it ‘wee-l’ because that’s the way the ‘i’ is pronounced in their language: one letter, one sound.”
Click here to read the rest of this post, as well as Fr. Bernie’s other blog entries.
