The Art of Dumbing Down

An anonymous comment left on my "Teaching" post a few weeks back:

As a teacher of English, don't you think that you have a responsibility to teach PROPER English [instead of rewarding them for merely speaking]?

In a classroom you visit once a week with 30-40 five to twelve year olds with only basic skills, priorities change quickly. I've made the case to school administrators and people in my own company that schools are wasting a LOT of money by putting us into these situations. What a foreign teacher is best at - fine-tuning grammar and pronunciation - is pretty worthless when dealing with the demographic we do. In most cases, I don't feel like there's much I can do that a normal Chinese English teacher can't do. I can't change the whole system, so I do the best I can.

My first priority is effective communication. Use what you know. My Chinese is horrible, but I use it rather effectively and with the help of body language there's almost nothing I can't do. I find our jobs here to be well-suited for that: communicate with the foreigner using what you know. I teach/demonstrate that the average foreigner is not going to understand most of the Chinese you use, so use the English you do know to convey your message. Be comfortable with the language enough to actually speak it and guesstimate grammar in a creative, if stressful, environment. It's much better than locking up trying to remember finer grammar points or more difficult vocab.

For what it's worth, I almost always repeat student statements and questions loudly and in proper English so the whole class can hear and the student can make notes on where they went wrong. When playing games I help them say what they want correctly before giving them points. What it seems you are suggesting would force me, more or less, to make a fool of anyone who dared raise their hand to speak.

In one-to-one environments, I encourage students (typically adults in high-ranking positions) to not be afraid of dumbing down. You always see good speakers getting stuck on one word, trying to remember something the learned ten years ago. I always tell them there's likely four or five easy words that they do know that say almost the same thing as the big word and if used, the conversation won't grind to a halt.

Only my ideas... what do others think? Comment!