In Malaysian universities, final exams are held once every semester, and we have two semesters per year. So that's an awful lot of exams, and an awful lot of fear and anxiety! And that's just the lecturers!!
But seriously, you have to feel a bit sorry for the students at this time of year. They have a lot of obstacles in the way of their studying hard for the exams. For one thing, they only have about two weeks to study after the end of the semester. And they only have fifteen weeks of classes before exams, because we follow the Semester system here in Malaysia. This may be fine for some content subjects but for English, it doesn't exactly give students a great deal of time to improve their proficiency much. Ah well...
I remember back in the UK, where we have Terms, our finals were at the end of the academic year, around June. Lots of time to study and learn (though bear in mind Parkinson's Law that work expands to fill the time available for its completion!) But here, the finals are at much shorter intervals. I wonder how my little charges manage to learn all that stuff and keep it in their fevered brains long enough to spew it out onto paper again for the required two or three hours.
Thank God I don't have to sit exams myself, that's what I say! Mind you, life isn't quite a bed of roses. I still have to mark loads of scripts crammed full of essays and comprehension passages and other English exercises of varying quality. Forests of poor handwriting (mind you I can't talk!) and of course the curse of all language teachers everywhere: bad grammar and spelling.
It's a professional vice of mine but I can't help collecting examples of what we linguists euphemistically call 'Learner English'. I actually do this for my research, but a few real howlers cropped up among my marking this week. Allow me to share them with you. The first two are from essays on road safety, while the last one is from a passage on workplace interaction:
Howler No. 1: "For me, safety is more important than beautiful"Howler No. 2: "Death in accident is wasteless"
Howler No. 3: "...to take certain actions which will help him to overcome his unsatisfied feelingness in a right way..."
I mean what were they on?!?!
I was commenting to a colleague this afternoon that looking at the English produced by learners is like reading the lyrics of a David Bowie song. Apparently, Bowie used to experiment with cutting up words and phrases randomly selected from newspaper articles. He would play around with the order of the words until he got the right LSD-induced effect. This means that my students are far from ignorant about language. They are just playing around with words, just to make my life interesting!!!
But seriously, I do care very much about my students, and admire them for tackling advanced studies in a language which is not their own. I really support them and hope that they have all the success in the world. Here is a picture of some of them sweating in an exam:
Can't you just SMELL the fear and sweat!?
But enough of this blatant sadism. My dear wife has just made a cup of tea. More blagging on the blog tomorrow, if you are good boys and girls!!
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