Saturday, January 23, 2010
Words Words Words
This week in class we started an RSS account and have been reading a few professional blogs. I am a TESOL or ESL minor so I am reading a few blogs regarding this topic. On http://www.esl-lesson-plan.com/archives/2010/01/words_of_the_decade.php, I am following this blog, they are talking about how words are constantly being made up by movies and other popular people figures. How can we expect our ESL students to learn how to understand the meanings of English words when we are making up words which do not carrying proper meaning by themselves. The meaning has to be explained most of the time to other people before it is known automatically by other people. It is difficult enough for ESL students to learn the meanings of words which do exist in our English vocabulary. So why do we feel the need to make up words? Most of the time we already have words in the English vocabulary which will express the same meaning as this new foreign English word. If you go to this blog you can look at a few words which have been created recently. English is complicated enough, do we need to complicate things for our ESL students even more by making up new words.
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Haha so I just wrote out a long comment, and then it disappeared. I guess I really do need this class.
ReplyDeleteAnyways, I have this friend, Andrew, who is from Peru and he went to college up in Michigan. He was born in Michigan and then his family moved, so he was fluent in both English and Spanish. His girlfriend came to visit him last fall, and she knows a lot of English but not as much as Andrew. I remember we would just sit there and talk to her as if she knew everything, but I think she struggled on occasion. One time, one of us said "that sucks!" and she looked at Andrew and was like "suck?" It was cute, but at the same time it got me thinking. There is so much slang in the English language. I bet as soon as she finishes learning all the slang, she is just going to have to start over because it changes all the time. I started to really admire her and others like her who are trying to learn English and take classes in an English speaking school at the same time. I don't know if I would be able to do that.