COVER STORY
GETTING THE HANG OF CANADIAN EH B C
Image credit: KETUT SUBIYANTO on Unsplash.
By SHAGORIKA EASWAR
In our early days in Canada, the parent of a child in our sons’ school asked me how I spoke English “so well”.
Taken aback, because we take the language so much for granted, I said something about having gone to an English-medium school – and then, of course, had to explain what that was. We studied in English, I said.
“Not in Indian?” she asked.
I gave her the brief version of there being not one but multiple Indian languages and that while most of us were fluent in at least two, for many of us, the medium of instruction was English.
That exchange got me thinking. English is valued in India for the doors it opens. English gave us an advantage in our search for employment in large organizations in India and also when we moved to distant shores over those who weren’t that comfortable in the language. The Irrfan Khan-starrer Hindi Medium was an insightful look at the lengths parents will go to to enrol their children in an English-medium school.
But is knowing enough Shakespeare and Milton to spout quotes the same as being able to communicate effectively? Could those who learnt it as a second language, who didn’t hear it spoken at home, who read only English text books and not for pleasure, ever be nearly as good as native speakers of the language?
Would those that say “one of my friend” find it easy to land jobs? If they struggled to find meaningful employment in spite of peppering their sentences with eh?, would they recognize their lack of grammar or would they cry racism?
That feeling was strengthened when we launched Desi News 24 years ago and then CanadaBound Immigrant 13 years later. We received many letters from people wanting to write for us – people who couldn’t string a sentence together. We also received letters from those who read CanadaBound Immigrant and assumed we were an immigration agency that could arrange jobs in Canada.
The four letters below, selected at random, are real letters. I have just deleted the names. The typos, the spelling and grammar, the upper-lower case, are all as in the letters we received.
* * *
Respected Sir
I am ABC fron india. I am living in chandigarh.I am married. I want to apply for work permitt any type of job like food packing or computer operetor. i have done 10th and iti diploma for two years. I also known about the basic computer knowledge. Sir I couldn't beleive any immigration office . pls help me if ur office is available in punjab pls send me near by location. It will be really help full for me. pls Sir i will wait for ur response or answer.
THANKS
* * *
sir/mam
i saw ur websie about the canada rule and regulation
i am so glad tht u have the information related canada so widely
but here i am going to talk on my canada study visa refusal
i am very shock when i got refusal i think i have 99% chance to get visa but they refused
plz help me get visa in canada becoz its my dream country to do studies.
* * *
hi i am an graduate person from India and i have 5 years experiences in office assistance and back end process and know i want to get a offer letter from one of the Canadian Company for applying Visa, can you help me in this
Thank you
* * *
Respected Sir/Mam,
I am XYZ i m from India. i had completed my b.sc degree in hotel management and tourism and m.b.a. in h.r and saleas & mkt. form annamalai university (BOTH IS DISTANCE LEARNING) and in H.S.C i got 48% only now the agents in India they are saying it is not possible to get admission in Canada and some one is saying it is possible.
Kindly help me out i want to apply for student visa for Canada as soon as possible.
Thanks and Best Regards,
* * *
Some of these might make it to Canada and then, when they find it difficult to land good jobs, will cry foul and blame a “racist” society that doesn’t value smart, English-speaking immigrants. Canada offers free English lessons, but many do not sign up as they believe they know the language.
Before anyone thinks I am being too harsh or worse, suffer from a “colonial hang-up” (no worse insult for a desi!), I should add that once a newcomer myself, I have a clear understanding of the challenges faced in finding one’s footing in a new land. However – and I say this with all due respect for the knowledge and qualifications of newcomers – if the person you approach for a job can’t make sense of the application, what are the chances of your being hired?
In an article in Scroll.in, Akshat Khandelwal outlined why many Indian graduates enter business school without possessing the command over English they require to grasp complex concepts.
The situation doesn’t improve much when they enter the job market. He describes MBA graduates specializing in Human Resources or Finance “who can barely put together a decent letter to a client, or even orally communicate ideas clearly”.
Their learning, he writes, is all too often about rote-memorising the “three key features of HR” and not any real problem-solving and quotes an Assocham survey that notes that only 7 per cent of India’s business school graduates are employable. This is attributable to the fact that the “use of English as the language of business, law, government and bureaucracy, which is forced on a population that mostly does not grow up speaking it at home”.
If you don’t think in a language, you can’t perform optimally in that language. I have heard the principal of an upscale school in India intone “Time and tide waits for no one”. True, she may not be the English teacher at the school, but if the principal doesn’t know that it’s time and tide wait for no man then what hope can one hold out for the students?
Until recently, Ramesh Prabhu taught journalism at Commits Institute of Journalism and Mass Communication in Bengaluru. Image credit: B.K.PRABHAKAR, Professor of Audio-Visual Communication, Commits.
Veteran journalist Ramesh Prabhu taught journalism for many years at the well-known Commits Institute of Journalism and Mass Communication in Bengaluru.
Many of his students have achieved success in their chosen fields. These include Faye D’Souza (class of 2004), well-known television journalist and news anchor who was, until recently, the executive editor of Mirror Now; Victor Mukherjee (class of 2007), a Mumbai-based television director who runs a well-known production company, Mango People Media, with a partner; Priyali Sur (class of 2005), a former producer and anchor with CNN-IBN who won a Fulbright scholarship and now works as a communications specialist in Washington, D.C.; Ayesha Tabassum (class of 2007), who works with The New Indian Express in Bengaluru; Sherry Jacob-Phillips (class of 2007), who is with Reuters in Bengaluru; Sohini Guharoy (class of 2013), who heads NDTV’s social media division in New Delhi; Ayushman Baruah (class of 2008), a financial journalist with Mint, and winner of the Pole-Star award for business/IT journalism; Ankita Sengupta (class of 2013), reporter/sub-editor, DT Next, Chennai; and Neethu Reghukumar (class of 2008), reporter, CNN-News18, Thiruvananthapuram, to name a few.
Prabhu used to publish a blog in which he discussed aspects of the language and recommended books on a vast variety of subjects. As of date, The Reading Room has racked up 437,216 pageviews.
He urged his students to read, read, and then read some more, to hone their skills, and he corrected misconceptions and mistakes in real time.
When a student wrote about “witnessing a 105 years old recipe”, the exchange that followed read like something straight out of Eats, Shoots and Leaves. Prabhu pointed out, among other things, that one can’t “witness” a recipe and that it should be “105-year-old” as it was a compound adjective. The student wasn’t ready to cede territory. Why couldn’t she witness? After all, she was watching it being made.
“You are watching a dish being prepared,” responded Prabhu. “Recipes are used to make a dish.”
And so it went. Along the way, she changed the post to read “Eating a 105-years-old recipe”, agreeing to “come” with an alternative.
Prabhu: Come up...
She came up with, “A legendary eatery house serving a sublime dish based on a 105-year-old recipe”. And didn’t respond when he asked why she had added house to eatery.
In another exchange, a student spotted a “mistake” in the following sentence: In the concrete hodgepodge lie the pyramids of Giza...
“I think it will be ‘lies’ instead of ‘lie’,” she observed.
Prabhu: What is the subject of the main clause there?
Student: Pyramids of Giza.
Prabhu: So plural subject? If yes, we need a plural verb?
Student: Yes. But still it is sounding wrong to me.
Prabhu: When did you last get your ears checked? :)
Student: Sir, seriously it is sounding wrong.
Prabhu: There’s nothing wrong with the sentence. Please take my word for it.
Student: Okay.
Prabhu shares many common errors:
Atleast
Ofcourse
Inspite of
For e.g.
Jist (for gist)
Explaination
Loose (instead of lose, as in “to lose weight”).
Alot (for a lot).
Grammer
“One of my friend...”
Definately
Incase
“These are common spelling and grammatical errors made not by school kids, as you might imagine, but by young people in their twenties,” writes Prabhu. “What accounts for this? It’s easy to point a finger at the tendency to use ‘SMS lingo’, which is supposed to have obliterated the need to know correct spellings and grammar. But I think the culprit is our education system. Neither at the high school level nor at the undergraduate level do teachers bother, I am told, to check and correct spellings in their pupils’ written assignments and examination answer sheets. One reason for this may be the inability to deal with, and lack of time for, 40 or 50 or more students. However, I suspect that lack of interest is also a problem.
“Also, at school and in college, not enough is done, in my view, to encourage students to read – newspapers, magazines, books.
“How are these young people then going to know that ‘at least’ and ‘of course’ are two words? Or that you can’t write ‘for e.g.’ because e.g. stands for exempli gratia, which means for example? Or that the correct phrase is, ‘one of my friends...’? Most do not know that it is wrong to say someone was so angry he ‘literally’ hit the roof... unless his head actually touched the ceiling.”
Even those who are comfortable in English can get tripped up by so-called “Canadianisms”. Fresh off the Plane, a long-running feature in CanadaBound Immigrant details the experiences of newcomers to Canada who learnt that words in common usage back home either do not exist in Canadian English or have a totally different connotation.
To wit: A chemist is a pharmacist. Thermocol is styrofoam. Shingles, the painful eruptions on skin, are also roof tiles. What one knew of as bathrooms are called washrooms in Canada. And the little boys’ room is a euphemism for a washroom.
Lynda Goldman has been an ESL instructor at Concordia University and created sales and training material for several organizations in Canada. She wrote You’re Hired... Now What? to help people understand buzzwords while navigating a new work landscape.
Such as WIIFM, which stands for What’s in it for me? Pronounced wifim. It’s used to describe a presentation or sales pitch, when the speaker is reminded to consider the audience. Anyone listening to a salesperson or a presentation is thinking, “That’s great, but what’s in it for me? Why should I want this product or service?”
But she also included words and expressions such as ace a presentation, talk turkey, keep me posted, no brainer, next level and put to bed, etc., that are common enough but may be unfamiliar to some newcomers.
Ranjani Ramesh.
Ranjani Ramesh has been teaching English at the college and university levels in India and Canada for over 28 years. She started off as an English Lit teacher in Bangalore university colleges and taught for six years before transitioning to teaching English language and came to Canada with 20 years of teaching experience under her belt.
The string of alphabets after her name reveal her qualifications and experience.
EAP: English for Academic Purposes. This is a specialized branch of English language teaching and is mostly applicable in higher education.
YUELI: York University’s English Language Institute.
OCELT: Ontario Certified English Language Instructor, the new name for TESL Ontario teaching certification.
Dip. TESOL (Trinity): Diploma in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages from Trinity College, London.
Ramesh teaches both in classrooms and online, incorporating multimedia and online resources and has taught ESP or English for Specific Purposes (for engineering students) as well as Business Communication.
“Since 2001, I started using a learning management system and began to introduce the flipped class where some work was completed in an online format,” she says. “But all this teaching remained asynchronous until I started teaching on a program at YUELI in 2017 when I taught online for the first time. This was only for two hours a week as the class met face-to-face for the rest of the week.”
She teaches all the four skills – reading, writing, listening and speaking – says Ramesh. Although the skills are designated for individual focused learning, they are taught in an integrated way and also assessed in an integrated way. Example: Listening can be combined with reading and assessed via written answers.
In her experience, desis tend to be over-formal in their written communication, following a typical format.
“I find that desis tend to use stock phrases in their writing. This sounds archaic in the western world as these phrases are not usually used. ‘Happy and gay’ is one such expression which is rarely used these days.
“The tone of their writing can be formal as well. They rarely use the first person and always approach their subject matter in a roundabout way. For instance, instead of writing ‘India has many poor people’, they might write, ‘Poverty is an endemic problem in India’. It is a challenge to make students unlearn indirect sentences and write in a simple direct way as William Strunk would advise in his Elements of Style.
“Most students coming from an Indian system of education begin their essays with a quotation/saying. They also tend to write much more than the word limit by stretching and repeating some ideas by re- phrasing so that they can fill the pages. It seems that Indian schools like students who write more. So, everyone writes a lot as a mark of having written well. In the North American system, this tends to work in the opposite way and they get very low marks.”
Examples of “Indian English” that she has to correct include over use of “the” and verb form errors like “must have to” and expressions like “at the backside”, says Ramesh.
Ramesh’s students have been from various backgrounds and of all ages. Generally speaking, day classes have younger students and evening classes have adult learners in the age group of 25 to 40. Many of these adult learners are or were working professionals.
At York University, she teaches students whose ages range from 19 to 24. Mostly Chinese, with a few Indians and Iranians, a few come directly from high school while others have already completed a few years of university in their home countries before coming to her class.
Colloquial expressions in Canadian English puzzle, interest and amuse her students, she finds. Expressions like yada yada, keener, or a cup of joe. And students struggle with colloquialisms like I’m good instead of I’m fine and no worries instead of no problem. Take away instead of take out, standing in line not queue, living in an apartment not flat, filling gas not petrol, walking on a sidewalk not pavement, are other common expressions that might stymie a newcomer.
Ramesh has had her share of know-it-all students who believe they don’t actually need any help when they really do.
“One of the biggest problems I have faced all my life as an overseas English language teacher is being a visible non-native speaker of English. Many overseas students want to learn English from Caucasians who they think are the true inheritors of the English language. So having an ethnic Indian with an Indian name as their teacher usually makes for a difficult start in class because some students feel that they have paid to learn English from a White Canadian! But as time moves on, I’ve found myself being accepted more as a legitimate speaker of English and that is largely due to the multicultural nature of society in Toronto where my students see people of all ethnicities around them. This acceptance was harder to achieve in some Middle Eastern countries where I taught for many years.”
Newcomers used to be advised to listen to the CBC and read newspapers to familiarize themselves with Canadian English. That still holds good, believes Ramesh, up to a point.
“I ask students to watch CBC documentaries for discussion and watch American television shows and movies without subtitles. Students are mostly on their phones or devices and therefore print media has lost its relevance for them.”
Asked if teaching during social distancing was different or challenging and how she and the students coped, Ramesh responds that while online classes can keep students engaged, connected and motivated, the flip side – distraction, exhaustion and boredom – is also ever present. To combat this, she created a variety of activities on different online platforms and broke down a task into smaller chunks so that learners felt rewarded for each step completed and the whole task could be done without losing motivation. Not only were tasks broken down to easily manageable chunks, they would be completed on different online platforms so that there was variety in method as well.
“To learn how to write an argumentative essay, for instance, we would explore the concept of pros and cons through brainstorming on topics via short videos, group projects, presentation and collaborative writing.
“The long hours of screen time, the physical exhaustion of sitting in a four-hour class every day as well as coping with anxiety related to social isolation were challenging issues both for me and my students. Doing a set of simple physical exercises together was a great way to feel connected at the beginning of class. Then taking short breaks between activities also helped lessen fatigue and improve concentration.”
Newcomers can use the Language Portal of Canada, a free website from Public Services and Procurement Canada, to improve their business communication, vocabulary and more. It has tips, quizzes and guides to help with clear communication, syntax and more. One can learn when to use a comma, whether to write out a number or not, and even how to incorporate more inclusive language in their writing.
So there you have it. The resources are there. The teachers are willing and able to help in creative ways. What is missing is the recognition that some of us need a little extra help.
• You’re Hired... Now What? by Lynda Goldman is published by Oxford University Press, $29.95. Ramesh Prabhu’s blog, The Reading Room, can be accessed at engageentertainenlighten.blogspot.com.