French teachers are putting English through the mangle, says expat mark brutton in France |
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Readers, I need your help. Consider the sentence: "He hail collie to Paris to visit his mother in hospital." Exactly that. It comes from an exercise given to my daughter's class in English at her school in France (she was asked to write the question to which this is the answer).
English lessons have always been a rather odd event for my children, both being flawlessly bilingual. They have the compensation of an automatic maximum score in the 'Bac' (and English counts for a lot) but relations with the teacher are inevitably strained.
On the first day of the year, he or she may be mildly thrilled to have a native speaker in their otherwise unenthusiastic class. But that quickly turns to resentment on both sides, the teacher not much enjoying repeated corrections from the floor and my children very much not enjoying losing marks for not |
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| My daughter has vowed never to speak to the teacher again in any language, having been marked 12.5 out of 20 last week |
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writing the teacher's wonky version of the language.
So they do not any longer bother to correct the many howling mistakes that splatter across the blackboard. And in my daughter's case, having been marked 12.5 out of 20 last week, she has vowed never to speak to the teacher again in any language.
But 'hail collie' is, I think, a puzzle that must be solved. If you Google it, you will get the source immediately: it comes from online teaching material authored by a certain Yvan Baptiste who prefers to call the language 'Globish' rather than English. Ho, ho, ho.
Since he invited corrections, we emailed him about this one, and a clutch of other mistakes that were profoundly careless but not in the same class of mystery. He replied rather sniffily that he would make the corrections, but some weeks later it is still 'hail collie'.
And so the burning question remains: what, in the name of all that is Globish, did you actually mean to say here? Any suggestions would be most welcome. 
FIRST POSTED FEBRUARY 19, 2007
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