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ESL teacher in Italy here, like the teacher in France most of my students have a good grasp of the language, or at least it's similar enough to Italian that you don't get the hilarious cock-ups you get from Japanese or Korean students. I did have a teenage student mis-spell "where" as "whore" a few times though. Another time my class was brainstorming words that go with "go" - go shopping, go bowling, go sightseeing - and one of them came up with "go down". So that was fun to explain. A large part of my job is essentially cleaning up the mess left by teachers in the public schools, who often have a tenuous grasp of grammar themselves, and, like the Korean teachers mentioned before, basically don't give a poo poo. They give the kids work that has absolutely no value in terms of learning the English language, like the comprehension passages about Flamenco dancing or deep sea diving or whatever in textbooks, which are just supposed to help students practice reading and answer the questions, have to be learned off. Once I was giving a girl help with translation homework assigned by her regular English teacher. The teacher had written the sentences herself. They translated to: "Avoid eating, because to eat is to die."  "I don't remember kissing him, but maybe I did, because I have kissed so many people."  "Her neighbour, whose cat's name is Obama because he is black, has died." 
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Jan 12, 2014 15:58
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Skillness622 posted:This isn't really a quote per se, but still very amusing. I was teaching on a pre-sessional ESL course at my university with a bunch of Chinese and Arab students. None of them dropped any major verbal clangers but one student in particular made up for that when he turned up for his final exam proudly wearing a pair of trousers with 'gently caress gently caress gently caress' emblazoned all the way down the leg, and around the cuff. I imagine it must have been the rolux equivalent of FCUK trousers, but it was highly surreal seeing a student walking around with expletives plastered all over his legs. One of the students in my adult class yesterday turned up in pants with "stoned" written all over them. She asked me what it meant so I explained and we had a nice long conversation about that and related vocabulary 
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Jan 17, 2014 23:36
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I got this from a student in an essay about how the language you speak affects how you think: "You have to think as an English man to learn English. Otherwise you learn something similar to English, but not really English."
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May 21, 2014 14:00
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