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| EBD's portrayal of English as a Second (or Third) Language http://www.the-cbb.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=5504 |
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| Author: | francesn [ Tue Jan 06, 2009 8:08 pm ] |
| Post subject: | EBD's portrayal of English as a Second (or Third) Language |
Following on from the EBD's languages thread, and partly prompted by working with children who have English as a second or third language suddenly being expected to work in English at school... What do people think of EBD's portrayal of people using English where it's not their mother tongue? Does it sound artificially stilted or naturally stilted? Would they really have used such complicated sentence constructions? Do you notice any common themes that you don't really find with French non-native speakers or German non-native speakers occurring in the text? Did the fakeness of the accents annoy you, or did you not notice?! Were you ever amazed how quickly they managed to pick up English? Do we ever see girls who have no English when they arrive and really struggle to acquire it? Idle minds would like to know.... |
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| Author: | JayB [ Tue Jan 06, 2009 9:01 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: EBD's portrayal of English as a Second (or Third) Language |
The speakers of other languages always seem to master English better than the English speaking girls master French and German. I suppose thats for narrative purposes, as it would make plot development very difficult if none of the girls could communicate effectively in any language! The one girl I remember not being fluent in English is Odette, in Richenda. But I think that's more because she didn't try, being too overwhelmed with homesickness, rather than because she genuinely had difficulties with languages. |
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| Author: | tiffinata [ Tue Jan 06, 2009 9:36 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: EBD's portrayal of English as a Second (or Third) Language |
In The Netherlands they learn English as well as Dutch pretty much from the word go these days. A friend there said the better the level of education the more fluent the English spoken. I think that is mostly since WW2 though |
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| Author: | abbeybufo [ Tue Jan 06, 2009 10:27 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: EBD's portrayal of English as a Second (or Third) Language |
I worked for a number of years with someone who had been born in Hungary [in the 1950s, I think], and brought up in Germany, but come to England as a young woman. Her English was unaccented and idiomatic, and most of the time it would have been difficult to tell she wasn't a 'native' English speaker. But when she was tired, she tended to drop into a 'Germanic' sentence construction - verb at the end! - even though the words she was using were very much current English 
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| Author: | Lulie [ Tue Jan 06, 2009 10:37 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: EBD's portrayal of English as a Second (or Third) Language |
I work with a group of adults with special needs, all of whom are from India, Pakistan or, in one case, Afghanistan so English is their second language. They are all extremely fluent but do sometimes use odd sentence construction and will miss common words out such as "the", which I don't think exist in their mother tongue. The young Afghan gentleman came to this country in June without a word of English. By the time I met him in September he could speak basic words and a few sentences (e.g. "How are you", "I am very well" etc.) but now he is much more fluent and we manage to communicate with the help of a lot of sign language in addition to spoken English! He does understand a lot more than he can speak, which I believe is fairly common with a second language in the early stages? |
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| Author: | Kate [ Tue Jan 06, 2009 10:44 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: EBD's portrayal of English as a Second (or Third) Language |
Out of my class of 23, 7 speak English as a foreign language (well technically all but 2 of them do, as the rest speak a dialect of English, but we're mutually intelligible once we get used to each other). One child from Lithuania - you'd barely know that it wasn't her first language except occasionally for her syntax and sentence structure - e.g. she says "where this will go?" instead of "where will this go?" One of the others (Romanian) has been learning English for the exact same length of time and her speech is generally unintelligible. She knows lots of words but hasn't grasped how to put them together. Three have been learning since September: two are still quite poor and one is fantastic - full sentences already. At least one of the poor ones is because he doesn't try. He's away with the fairies half the time and just tunes me out. The other is Romanian as well; I wonder if that is just a difficult language to transfer to English because my three Romanians find it difficult. They certainly all understand more than they can speak. Four of the seven would be among my top students in literacy and maths. They're 5 and 6. I imagine that it's easier at 5 and 6 than it is at 15 and 16 though. |
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| Author: | Miriam [ Wed Jan 07, 2009 2:18 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: EBD's portrayal of English as a Second (or Third) Language |
English is my first language, but having lived in Israel for twelve years I sometimes find myself putting Hebrew sentence structure onto my English sentences. It's fine around my friends, who often do the same (as well as randomly mixing languages in one sentence) but I do have to be careful to speak one grammatic language at a time when I visit England or speak to my parents. |
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| Author: | Sunglass [ Wed Jan 07, 2009 4:16 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: EBD's portrayal of English as a Second (or Third) Language |
I'm always relieved that EBD doesn't ever do more than suggest the various foreign accents of most of the CS school body - when she does more, as when she writes Biddy O'Ryan's or the Highland twins' accents. I blanch to think of what the average early CS book would be like if she'd decided to indicate Simone's Frenchness and Marie and Frieda's etc Austrian accents and syntax throughout - though no editor would have let her, surely... Again, if she tried to be strictly realistic about English-language acquisition, as someone else said, we'd have huge chunks of books being about patently baffled new girls not understanding a word of sheepdogging, lessons, games, scoldings, Miss Annersley's lectures in the study, Saturday evening paper games etc - those poor little Norwegians, as other people have said in the past, who speak nothing but their own language and are pitchforked into the Tirolean school where no one spoke it! EBD's whole approach to people's ability to pick up languages is wildly implausible, but it has to be for the books to work. I just switch off the bit of my brain that suggests that poor wet Odette Mercier would be the norm, rather than the exception, in a real-life CS, unless there were specific starter-classes in languages for new girls, which weren't part of ordinary lessons. Ten vocab words a day and a bit of extra coaching from Miss Denny or Mdlle wouldn't get you far in being able to write an essay on Milton for prep! The other thing that occurs to me is that by the Swiss books, it must have been weird for the relatively few French/German native speakers to be surrounded by a largely Anglophone school which has learned your language from non-native speaker teachers and from copying one another's accents and vocab four days a week - and to be taught complex school work in your native language by Anglophone teachers who were only expected to have 'conversational' French and German! |
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| Author: | Tor [ Wed Jan 07, 2009 4:53 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: EBD's portrayal of English as a Second (or Third) Language |
Quote: to be taught complex school work in your native language by Anglophone teachers who were only expected to have 'conversational' French and German! Interestingly, my secondary school English teacher was German (whilst my German teacher was English  ).She was lovely, and an excellent teacher, but she did have some pronunciation quirks and turns of phrase that we forgave because we loved her so much. The one that sticks with me is when we studied Jane Eyre in year 9. My teacher had obviously learnt somewhere that St. John Rivers name had an odd pronunciation, but she got it wrong. And of course she passed it on to all of us as she corrected *us* when we first said "Saint John" when called on to read aloud. "No, no" she said, "It is Sinjun John". Despite discovering later this was wrong, to this day when I read Jane Eyre I can't help but hear Sinjun John Rivers, rather than the simple Sinjun, in my head!!! I am sure that CS girls taught by non-native speakers would have picked up far more mis-translations/mis-pronunciations from a staff that was almost entirely anglophone |
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| Author: | Cat C [ Wed Jan 07, 2009 6:13 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: EBD's portrayal of English as a Second (or Third) Language |
Believe it or not, I actually read an academic paper once upon a time which mentioned the way teachers of French adapted pronunciation of the vowels for Anglophone learners (this was during a seminar series on loan-word phonology). Anyway, discussing this, the nearly-retired, and expensively-educated seminar leader suggested that this was as a result of realistic / pessimistic expectations of learners. I wondered whether it might also have something to do with the teacher's lack of perfect French, and the seminar leader looked somewhat startled and explained that hadn't occurred to her since (apart from Latin) she'd only been taught languages by native speakers. I wonder if EBD had similar notions - and thought that the combination of native French-speaking French teachers and being based in German-speaking countries (or parts thereof) would solve all English-isms in the Chalet girls' language speaking? |
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| Author: | liberty [ Thu Jan 08, 2009 9:09 am ] |
| Post subject: | Re: EBD's portrayal of English as a Second (or Third) Language |
I have to say that I don't have a problem with it. We have lots of girls with English as there second language and if it comes out anywhere it's in their writing rather than their speech. Admittedly, I do work at a grammar school so they are very intelligent girls |
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| Author: | JB [ Thu Jan 08, 2009 3:10 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: EBD's portrayal of English as a Second (or Third) Language |
Quote: I wonder if EBD had similar notions - and thought that the combination of native French-speaking French teachers and being based in German-speaking countries (or parts thereof) would solve all English-isms in the Chalet girls' language speaking? When Kathy Ferrars joins the school, someone comments that she speaks good French but with a British accent. Given that, the two Mlles aside, the other teachers aren't from a French speaking country and now work in a community of made up mainly of English people speaking French, would anyone else's accent be much better? |
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| Author: | Cat C [ Thu Jan 08, 2009 4:02 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: EBD's portrayal of English as a Second (or Third) Language |
I didn't suggest it was a realistic thought 
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| Author: | andydaly [ Thu Jan 08, 2009 5:40 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: EBD's portrayal of English as a Second (or Third) Language |
Speaking of Biddy, is English being her second language? I think there is some reference to her speaking Irish, but I have also seen that phrase used to describe someone speaking Hiberno-English. |
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| Author: | Sunglass [ Thu Jan 08, 2009 7:27 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: EBD's portrayal of English as a Second (or Third) Language |
andydaly wrote:Speaking of Biddy, is English being her second language? I think there is some reference to her speaking Irish, but I have also seen that phrase used to describe someone speaking Hiberno-English. Depending on what part of Ireland she grew up in (there are still Irish-speaking parts of Kerry, and isn't there a suggestion B has a Kerry accent?), Biddy might well have spoken Irish, but as her father was in the British army and her mother would have needed to speak English to be a lady's maid, their daughter would know it too - especially as Biddy would have been likely to end up in domestic service herself, or to have emigrated to the UK or the US. (Though all kinds of questions come to mind about a lady's maid of this period being permitted to have a child with her - though presumably she stopped work again when she married Biddy's stepfather...) As there's no suggestion Biddy had any further contact with Ireland or any Irish family she might still have, she'd be likely to have forgotten the language over time, anyway, even if she did originally speak it. I can't remember how long they'd been abroad before her mother and stepfather died...? And I think that's entirely right about period books meaning Hiberno-English or 'English spoken with an identifiably Irish accent' when they say 'Irish' - in 'What Katy Did Next', Katy is said to be 'talking Irish' when she's just putting on a somewhat irritating stage-Irish accent to amuse Amy Ashe at Christmas. |
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| Author: | andydaly [ Tue Jan 27, 2009 9:44 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Re: EBD's portrayal of English as a Second (or Third) Language |
What Katy did Next was just the sort of thing I mean! Does anyone else find Biddy's Oirishisms a bit grating? |
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