Canterbury Tales -- Here's a Whopper

One of my first teaching assignments - aside from introducing myself - has been (as the house native speaker, of course) to listen to the 4th Form's presentations on Canterbury this week.  They went for a Sprachwoche two weeks ago and stayed with English families from Sunday to Sunday to improve their English (of course) but also to do these projects, which were basically PowerPoint presentations on 1) surveys they handed out to Canterburians on basically whatever they wanted.

Lucky Ducks! I say. I want to go to Canterbury for a week to work on my English! That's one better than the other 4th form class, who went to London (sorry, Londoners, I don't dig...)

Like, seriously. My high school foreign language classes never got to go anywhere. Not even to Montreal, even though I begged the French club. And set up a bake sale three years in a row. To what avail? We made enough to cover the cost of buying T-shirts. Whoopee.

So, yeah, these Austrian teenagers have it pretty good. And their English is good (way better, I'd say, than any average American teen's German -- *suppressed chortle*) Nevertheless, they could stand some improvement. I mean, they are not always intelligible...

For example, they love putting double negatives in (I think they're confusing French and English for some reason) and "None of the questioners wanted to comment on the Queen" becomes "None of the questioners don't can comment on the Queen" which...well, go figure.

And when I brought this to their attention, they got all defensive, like, "This is our first real English presentation!" To which the teacher said, "Yes, and if you had been presenting a business idea to English clients, they would have laughed you out of the seminar room." SO...meanwhile, I feel that my correcting their English was somewhat nicer put. Maybe? I mean, if that's typical Austrian teacher-student intercourse, then hell, I can say whatever I want to them, right?

Maybe not. Because, at the end of the day, even if the students are used to abuse, I'm not Austrian, so I can't contribute.