Week 5 Reading: How I learned to be polite when speaking English

In this week's reading about second language acquisition, I find the text under the subtitle of "Learning to use English in socially and culturally Approriate use" in the P&B book very practical. This is because it reminds me of a past experience in which i learned how to make myself sound polite in English.

Two years ago when i was in my second year at college, i worked as a private tutor of a half American-half Vietnamese boy who was 6 years old then. His father is an American journalist who travels back and forth between Vietnam and the US to write articles and reports. Every year the family would live half of the year in Vietnam and the other half in the States. Since at the time there was no international school in Hue - my hometown and the little boy's first language is English (he speaks very little Vietnamese), he couldn't go to the local elementary school where the language of instruction is Vietnamese. That was the reason why his parents decided to have private tutors to go to their house and teach him. At that time i was teaching him Mathematics in English. And during that time i must say i was able to learn as much from him as he did from me. In fact, i taught him how to solve Math problems and he (unconciously) "taught" me how to use English in a socially approriate way. One of the most interesting lessons i learned from him was to say "please" at the end of a command or imperative sentence to show politeness. How i acquired this language behaviour was interesting. During the first days when i gave my little student some math problems to solve after having explained to him the rule, i often said: "Do this problem, Cullen (his name)!" or if i needed some thing that i wanted him to give me, i would say: "Give me a pencil!". I did not realize anything wrong in those utterances until one week later when after one of my commands, he suddenly said to me: "Teacher is not polite!". I was very surprised and immediately asked him why. The answer was that his father told him to always say "please" when he wanted somebody to do something for him. Of course he gave that comment in a normal non-sarcastic way that a child usually says when he experiences something which is different from what he is taught, and from that time onward i always try to remember to put "please" into my imperative utterance to show my politeness. Though this is just a small element in learning English, none of my teachers had ever directed my attention to it before my little student actually pointed it out to me.

Now that i read the text about "learning to use English in socially and culturally appropriate ways", i come to understand better how important it is for English teachers to raise students' awareness of social and cultural norms that are reflected and used in English, for it is true that the ability to use a foreign language fluently does not easily entail the capability to use it appropriately.