Ears and Note Part 3

Twenty little boys sh*tting on a plane

The other day one of my adult students told me her observation about her 10-ish child's English. She thinks her child mispronounces things. The example is a song her son keeps singing at home. The way he sings it is "Twenty little boys sh*tting on a plane ..." As you can guess it is a 'remix' of "Ten green bottles ..." Can you imagine the boy singing HIS version of the song twenty times nearly every day? Shame on me, his mum, my B1 level student didn't know the sh* word, now the whole family knows it, happy ending, cheerful faces.

This mother now thinks that her son's English teacher doesn't know the proper pronunciation of the words, this is why the boy sings all kinds of ...?embarrassing?... things. I wouldn't think so. Maybe the two English classes a week are just too few. Maybe the problem is that the song is WRITTEN in the book. (The pronunciation of the letter 'S' in Hungarian is something like 'SH'.) Funny though, we are capable of documenting our lives daily with the help of electronic gadgets. Documentary has become folk art. Why don't we then document our learning with the possible devices?

Phones and MP3 players, iPods

I bet all the kids in the group have a portable device to record the language taught in the classroom. Heretical idea! Students are not allowed to use these thing at school otherwise they would listen to music, take pictures or make videos and violate each other's rights to privacy. Should the students buy the coursebook CD? What? Hands off the family budget! (Worth of 3 litres of petrol.)

I want to find ways to utilize gadgets in students' pockets so that we can avoid utterances like this in the near future:

"Excuse me Sir. Can sh*t here?"