"Rapid Translation" In Language Training

My name is B. Rose Anderson, and I teach English for world peace at my school, Word-Wide ESL Institute. I also hire tutors and train them in my methodology to teach their native languages for WordWide Language Tutoring Center. The schools are located in Ocean Beach in San Diego, California.

Word-Wide ESL Institute teaches English to all the world's peoples whether already in the United States to coming to us from other lands. This school is authorized under US Federal Law to enroll non-immigrant alien students. We work with SEVIS, a part of Homeland Security, and are State approved and nationally accredited.

WordWide Language Tutoring Center has absolutely no accreditation but does have some pretty great tutors. We teach international languages to Americans or residents of the United States. Casual, fast and fun language education for world peace at an affordable price.

Both schools have class sizes of no more than nine students. That number of students to a native-fluent instructor comes from research conducted by the US Department of Defense. I still use this formula and have found it to be the most successful.

The key to learning a language in the quickest time possible is to learn from a native-fluent instructor in private lessons. To save money, a small class size of no more than nine students is the best avenue. At ten students, the one-on-one time with the teacher degrades, and the student begins learning mistakes from the other students in her or his class.

I've seen students come to my school with very high test scores from paper tests. One was attending a TOEFL class at another ESL school. When we tested her ability to communicate one-on-one with a native-fluent speaker, her level was about 10 weeks past a total beginner. She appeared to study hard, did well on tests, but how could her communication skills be so low? Her first session with me showed me how: she had learned what I call "rapid translation".

Rapid translation consists of taking each English word into her mind, creating the synonym in the student's first language, say Japanese, finding a synonym in English and then repeating it. It is nearly impossible for a student who has formed this habit to become fluent. At one time or another, they have to throw away the translation gadgets and trust that what they are saying is English and will be understood.

This is very typical of older students, but I've seen younger ones form the habit of rapid translation also. It's very difficult to detect -- especially when the person is from a culture that always shows respect such as in Japan -- and very, very difficult to break. One of the indications of rapid translation is when a student is reading. For instance, I always have my students read outloud in my classes. We were reading a passage and, where the word in the textbook was "difficulties", the student said, "problems." She had translated the word "difficulties" in her mind into the Japanese synonym for "difficulties" which, when translated back into English is closer to "problems".

This sort of translation fails when someone is trying to learn the difference between "difficulties" and "problems" in English, which in its birth was a Creole, was injected with French each time the French conquered England, and is full of vocabulary, nuance and idioms.

I mention all of this because we're starting another ESL class for total beginners on August 8. New students means getting to know new people. We teach through conversation, so conversation is what we do, and I am always amazed at the variety of thought in our classes. My last beginner class, I had four students. Including myself, it meant five countries, five religions, five different family situations and five different minds all for one purpose - to learn English.

I especially love to teach beginners, because I can teach them to trust their ability to communicate in their second (or third) language from the first day in the classroom. Little sentences. Yes and no questions. Fragments. By the second week, I'm teaching them that a noun is a person, place or thing; nouns are people, places and things. I live for the "ding", the time when you see a student's face light up and actually comprehend something they have been instructed on for years.

Fortunately, there is magic that happens in my classes. I'd love to say I know why, but I really don't. It is just there. It happens with my good ESL Instructors, too. Some kind of magic between the teacher and student.

Once I purchased the ESL school, named it Word-Wide ESL Institute and brought it to Ocean Beach, one of my first students was a 20-year old from Chile. He told me that he learned more in four weeks in my beginner class than he had learned in eight years learning English in Chile. He's a good student. That is our dream for each other. He trusted me to teach him. I trusted him to do his homework. Most of the time, it worked out. He will be leaving my school in just a few weeks to go to college here in San Diego. I am proud of him. He has become my friend. He trusts his English. He knows he will do well in college. He's been here for less than a year and a half.

When you grow your language, you grow your mind for world peace. study@wordwide.us.