TEFL and Terrorism by Yoda

I believe I have uncovered a cunning plot by a cadre of unemployed South-East Asian VCR manual writers to infiltrate Ireland and subvert our knowledge economy. These people have invested enormous amounts in plastic surgery to pass as Irish, and have flawless accents, mostly from Cork. They have created fake histories to make it appear that they have been in the Irish education system for the past 20 years. However, their secret identities are revealed by the pile of seminar paper drafts which I am reading this week, in which they can easily be picked out because they are incapable of writing a grammatically correct sentence in English.  I know I am not a paragon of grammatical accuracy myself, which means that if it is so bad that I can find fault with it, well, then you know it really is bad. Some of these students write like people who just learned English from Yoda. It is not my job to use the force to work out what they meant to say, and give them nice marks.  It is my job to tell them why they can’t pass for native English speakers, which explains the sea of red ink today. If they don’t fix the red ink between these drafts and the finals, (which would be part of the learning process) then I’m going to mark them down for it.


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One response to “TEFL and Terrorism by Yoda”

  1. Barry Avatar
    Barry

    I look at some papers for friends of mine who are in university.

    Sometimes I’m shocked by the lack of respect for basic grammar and spelling, but not as shocked as I am by what their professors are prepared to put up with.

    One professor of English in UC Riverside failed to spot three affect/effect confusions!

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