Difficulties of Teaching English in a Foreign Country in the Sixties
Jane Joy, UK
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Background information
The story
Jane Joy was born and grew up in Wales. She did TEFL training with the British Council in 1965. In 1965, aged 23, she started working in Finland for the British Council. For one year she was working at the Metsaliiton Selluloosa O.Y. at Äänekoski, Finland, a remote small town. She was teaching English to the managers and employees of a paper and pulp factory. She was teaching English at a time when there genuinely were "absolute beginners" in English.
The basic problem was that I spoke no Finnish and my class of beginners, consisting of six solemn Finnish males, spoke no English. It turned out that they literally were beginners. We stared across at each other and smiled, painfully aware of the gulf between us, whilst I racked my brains as to how I was going to give my first English lesson, and they just sat, patiently waiting.
“Good morning,” I ventured brightly: no response. Of course it was ‘double Dutch’ to them.
“Wait a minute, “ I said (where I though they were all going to run off to I don’t know!) and grabbed my little red Finnish-English dictionary, a possession which became more precious than even my passport.
“Found it!” I said gleefully and pointed to the Finnish for “Good morning” which is “Hyvä huomenta”, unpronounceable to me at the time. Dawn broke over their faces, and we realised that we had actually made contact. The rest of the hour was spent in enthusing over each other’s attempts at pronunciation and by the end of the lesson I could say quite a few useful phrases in Finnish such as, “How many sausages?” and “Very cold day” and “Too hot sauna” whilst they could at least greet me confidently with “Good morning!”
I had been told that it was quite easy to teach English in a foreign country without bothering to know the language of that particular country. I daresay it is possible, but I’m convinced that it’s much easier if one knows a certain amount of the pupil’s own language. Once I had learnt Finnish – let’s say enough to carry on a light-hearted conversation anyway – I then knew in what ways it differed from English and therefore what things my pupils found difficult, whether points of grammar or in pronunciation. I found I could anticipate their mistakes, and put them right early on, not waste a lot of time in trying to make out what they were attempting to say, I remember one conversation I had at the beginning, when I knew very little Finnish.
“You must be very careful of the rabbits when you visit the paper factory,” one of my more advanced pupils told me very seriously.
“Rabbits?” I asked, “I can’t remember seeing any rabbits. Where are they?”
“Near the bridge,” he said, “And they are dangerous – very dangerous.”
I had visions of wild rabbits chasing me round and round the factory, through the town and even out of Finland. I stared at him incredulously.
“You will get drowned if you fall in, “ he added, concerned for the safety of his English teacher.
Then of course I realised. “Rapids!” I shouted excitedly.
“Yes, that’s right,” my pupil repeated, “Rabbits.”
Because, you see, in Finnish, there is no difference between the letters ‘p’ and ‘b’. ‘B’ doesn’t occur in the Finnish language, except in loan words such as ‘banaani’. Both letters are pronounced exactly the same. Had I known that, we would have been on the same wavelength a lot sooner.
Another reason for a great deal of misunderstanding arises from the fact that the Finnish vocabulary has far fewer words than our own. This means that one Finnish word has to make do for perhaps as many as four or five of ours. The Finn, looking in his dictionary for the word he wants may see a number of English words for his one Finnish word, and of course if he happens to choose the wrong one then it makes no sense at all to us. One of the managers in the paper factory was describing the manufacturing process in his particular cellulose mill:
“The stuffs are cooked in the kettle,” he explained carefully.
“Impossible!” I said.
“Yes,” he insisted, and pointed to his dictionary, and sure enough for his word “kattila”, in English it can mean saucepan, pot, kettle or boiler.
It can also be a little disconcerting on leaving someone’s company to be told “Hallo”. For in Finnish, their delightful saying, “Hei! Hei!” can mean either “Hallo” or “Goodbye”.
Apart from actual language differences, it can be extremely difficult to coax one’s pupils to have a shot – particularly Finns. If indeed it’s possible, they are even more reserved than the British, though few of them would admit that; and they are a proud race, proud of their existence which has nearly been eliminated more than once in recent history. They find it hard to unbend and risk making fools of themselves. They would prefer to keep quiet than say it ‘wrong’. The only thing to do is to have a shot at their language, which bears no resemblance whatsoever to our own, make a fool of one’s self and let them have a good laugh, and then if you’re very lucky they might be persuaded to have a go themselves.
Please check the How to be a Teacher Trainer course at Pilgrims website.
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