Esl Quotes

“HOSTESS. Oh, nonsense! She speaks English perfectly.
NEPOMMUCK. Too perfectly. Can you shew me any English woman who speaks English as it should be spoken? Only foreigners who have been taught to speak it speak it well.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

“Every day the same things came up; the work was never done, and the tedium of it began to weigh on me. Part of what made English a difficult subject for Korean students was the lack of a more active principle in their learning. They were accustomed to receiving, recording, and memorizing. That's the Confucian mode. As a student, you're not supposed to question a teacher; you should avoid asking for explanations because that might reveal a lack of knowledge, which can be seen as an insult to the teacher's efforts. You don't have an open, free exchange with teachers as we often have here in the West. And further, under this design, a student doesn't do much in the way of improvisation or interpretation.

This approach might work well for some pursuits, may even be preferred--indeed, I was often amazed by the way Koreans learned crafts and skills, everything from basketball to calligraphy, for example, by methodically studying and reproducing a defined set of steps (a BBC report explained how the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il had his minions rigorously study the pizza-making techniques used by Italian chefs so that he could get a good pie at home, even as thousands of his subjects starved)--but foreign-language learning, the actual speaking component most of all, has to be more spontaneous and less rigid.

We all saw this played out before our eyes and quickly discerned the problem. A student cannot hope to sit in a class and have a language handed over to him on sheets of paper.”
― Cullen Thomas, Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age in South Korea's Prisons

“The Thai people are pathologically shy. Combine that with a reluctance to lose face by giving a wrong answer, and it makes for a painfully long [ESL] class. Usually I ask the students to work on exercises in small groups, and then I move around and check their progress. But for days like today, when I'm grading on participation, speaking up in public is a necessary evil. "Jao," I say to a man in my class. "You own a pet store, and you want to convince Jaidee to buy a pet." I turn to a second man. "Jaidee, you do not want to buy that pet. Let's hear your conversation."

They stand up, clutching their papers. "This dog is reccommended," Jao begins.

"I have one already," Jaidee replies.

"Good job!" I encourage. "Jao, give him a reason why he should buy your dog."

"This dog is alive," Jao adds.

Jaidee shrugs. "Not everyone wants a pet that is alive."

Well, not all days are successes...”
― Jodi Picoult, Lone Wolf

“It seems obvious now: the child who spends school days in a fog of semi-comprehension has no way to know her problem is not that she is slow-witted.”
― Sonia Sotomayor, My Beloved World

“Nothing You Encounter in Life is Too Difficult - It's There to Teach you a Lesson
Fred Cheshire, "There's Nothing I Can't Do - Fred's Story”
― Mariam Cheshire, There's Nothing I Can't Do - Fred's Story: Continuation of the Fred Cheshire biography, "Worries Won't Happen - Fred's Story"

“I repeat, Há, and wish I knew enough English to tell her
to listen for the diacritical mark, this one directing the tone downward.”
― Thanhha Lai, Inside Out & Back Again

“I lack precisely the thing to explain what I lack. The words. For every word I get out, there's a whole iceberg of thoughts and hopes and feelings that stay unspoken. But how do I speak them?”
― Maria E. Andreu, Love in English

“While bilingual is understood as a valuable asset or goal for middle-class and upper-class students, for working-class and poor students it is framed as a disability that must be overcome”
― Jonathan Rosa, Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad

“My letter,” Bella said in Yiddish that was a bit garbled, but perfectly understandable. “I want my letter back and she won’t give it to me. Why doesn’t she understand my English?”

“That’s Yiddish you’re speaking,” Yetta said.

“No, it’s not,” Bella said irritably. “It’s the English I learned in the factory.”

“It’s Yiddish! You must have learned Yiddish because there were so many of us Jews in the factory. Listen”—Yetta switched languages—“English sounds like this.”

Bella stared up at Yetta, her eyes seeming to grow in her pale face. “I don’t even know what Yiddish is,” she said, in Yiddish…..

“Bella learned Yiddish by mistake,” Yetta said. “She thought she was speaking English.”

“Wish I could learn a new language just by mistake,” Jane said. “I’ve been studying Italian for weeks, and it’s totally useless.”
― Margaret Peterson Haddix, Uprising

“But something seemed funny,
even strange and surreal.
When she called her friends mouses,
was that right? What's the deal?”
― Joseph L. Licari, Mia's Mouses