The principle wanted me to sit in on some classes before I started. I got in two today and I’ll do two tomorrow as well. The first one was one of their advanced classes. They were doing pretty well discussing differences between emigration and immigration, dealing with adverbial phrases, etc. The teacher spoke very quickly, I was amazed that they followed him at all. I only heard one outright mistake from him, he referred to a man “being stolen” when he meant that the man was robbed. I decided not to interrupt and correct. No reason to get on the bad side of the teachers on my first day.
My second class was one of the beginning classes. They were actually further along than I imagined they’d be. They were reading out of the book and answering questions. They were also dealing with more complex ideas than I thought they would. They talked about being fired from a job, and they seemed to handle verbs like “to be” and “go” pretty well. I got a laugh out of some of the sentences they were reading out of the book. One woman read “If it is hot today, I will wear a tee shirt,” and another read, “If the weather is nice, I will go to the beach.” Honey, you ain’t going to do either of these things in this country… I also had to laugh when they were reading about superstitions. They learned that it is lucky to find a four leafed clover. I’m not convinced that they (including the teacher) had any idea what clover was, let alone knew what it looked like, 4 leafed or no. I mentioned the tradition of the bride throwing the bouquet. All the girls giggled since I knew about a girls tradition at a wedding. The wedding parties here are strictly segregagted. I managed to catch myself before I mentioned the garter…
I asked the students if they had any questions for me and several had questions about how to study. I told them the best thing to do was to read as much as possible and to practice speaking whenever they could. One guy asked if watching movies was a good way to learn English. I hesitated… Movies can be a good way to hear conversations, but God only knows what they’ll learn. I also wondered what they’d learn about the US watching those things. Then one of them asked about listening to music to learn English. I pretty much told them flat out not to do it. Most of the western music I have heard here has been the likes of 50 cent, P. Diddy, and others in that same vein. Not only are they using “nonstandard” English, there are plenty of words that only an experienced English speaker should be using…. I warned them about using any words they hear in songs, it would be a shame to accidently insult someone or to actually use haraam language…
That class also showed me the real reason I needed to be there, the teacher had the oddest accent. He kept referring to them as “My students,” but he managed to put an “R” into both words. I can’t begin to transliterate, it took me a while to understand what he was saying. He also put an “R” into the word “Good.” The first teacher also had some difficulty pronouncing some words so that I could understand him. I think that both had some sort of version of an Indian accent, but with a heavy Yemeni inflection. I’ll see a couple more teachers tomorrow. I think that there are some with decent accents, the guy that steered me towards this institute has a definite Yemeni accent, but it is not very heavy and no native speaker would have any difficulty understanding him. The principle also has a great accent, somewhere between an English and an American one. We’ll see what tomorrow brings…