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AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster,
English teacher Lida Baker answers some of your questions. <p/> RS:
Starting with this from "Sunny," He Hong Feng, who asks: "May I say I
am an English teacher or should I say I am a teacher of English, as I
am a Chinese." <p/> BAKER: "If he says that he is an ENGLISH
teacher, with the stress on the word English, it means that he is a
teacher of the English language. So he is an ENGLISH teacher. Now, on
the other hand, if you say 'I am an ENGLISH TEACHER,' notice that both
of the words there are stressed equally, an ENGLISH TEACHER. That means
that you are a teacher whose nationality is English. Now I just want to
throw out a parallel case, quite a well-known one, which is: Where does
the president of the United States live?" <p/> AA: "The White House." <p/>
BAKER: "The White House. And you stressed the first word, WHITE House.
Now, one the other hand, if you stressed both words equally and you say
WHITE HOUSE, how would you use that?" <p/> AA: "I live in the white house." <p/> RS: "As opposed to the blue house or the green house." <p/> BAKER: "Correct." <p/>
AA: "Moving on, Rick Ming is a junior majoring in English in China, and
he would like to know how to get his classmates more interested in
current affairs. He says: 'Unfortunately, not all my classmates care
about current affairs. So the point is, how I am able to motivate them
to express the views on news freely in class?'" <p/> BAKER: "People
are interested in something or they're not. Most people are interested
in things that are of some kind of relevance to their lives. So I would
say if you want to discuss current events with your classmates, try to
select topics or issues that affect their lives in one way or another. <p/>
"But I suspect that a larger problem is, it's not that they're not
interested in current events, but rather it may be that his classmates
just feel that they don't have enough English to be able to do this
competently. So some ideas that come to my mind are, instead of talking
about, for example, Voice of America news headlines, to select the
feature stories, which have the scripts, posted on the Internet. <p/>
And before having the discussion with his classmates, each person could
read the scripts and that would give them the opportunity to spend some
time learning the vocabulary and thinking about the background of the
topic involved. So that's one thought that I had. <p/> "Another one
that I had was to give some thought to the linguistic skills that are
necessary in order to sustain a conversation or a discussion in
English. If you're talking about current events with somebody, you
would need to know how to express an opinion. You would need to know
how to agree with somebody or to disagree with somebody. You would need
to know how to ask questions. You would need to know how to ask
somebody to repeat what they have just said, or to explain what they
have just said. <p/> "Now all of those how-to's that I've just
mentioned are called language functions. And it might be useful for
this student to approach his English teacher and ask the teacher to
help him and his classmates learn some of these functions." <p/> RS: "It might also be a good idea for him to start a separate study group." <p/> BAKER: "I thought of that." <p/> RS: "A group that perhaps looks at an English language newspaper or looks at the VOA Web site, or -- " <p/> BAKER: "Or a club." <p/> RS: "Or a club, exactly, where interested people come together for this particular purpose." <p/>
BAKER: "Sure. One other idea that I had is to make use of the Internet.
There is a Web site, for example, called Dave's ESL Cafe. And there are
all kinds of discussion forums. But if you went to a search engine and
you typed in something like 'ESL discussion groups' I suspect you would
find others as well. So I think it's very worthwhile to make use of the
Internet, you know, via an online discussion group." <p/> RS: "And make new friends." <p/> BAKER: "That's right." <p/>
AA: Lida Baker teaches in the American Language Center at the
University of California at Los Angeles -- that is, when she's not
writing books for English learners. Lida can't answer questions
personally, but send them to Rosanne and me. <p/> RS: Write us at
VOA Wordmaster, Washington, DC 20237 USA or word@voanews.com. And our
Web site is voanews.com/wordmaster. With Avi Arditti, I'm Rosanne
Skirble.
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