Globe and Mail Update — Rana Lee, a recent arrival from South Korea, listens to Brad Paisley's fishin' song and quickly gets the drift – the guy loses the girl. It is a country and western song, after all.
One line perplexes her, though: “I spend all day out on this lake and hell is all I catch.”
University of Toronto professor Jennifer Harris, who teaches an advanced course in English as a second language, swings by Ms. Lee's desk and explains that to catch hell means to get in trouble. The fellow is in trouble because he spends more time on the lake than at home. But, ultimately, he chooses fishing over romance.
This is the new ESL.
Prof. Harris uses country and western music to teach her foreign-born students sophisticated grammatical concepts, in addition to common slang and idioms.
Toronto ESL teacher Maureen Stewart writes lyrics and sets them to classical music to teach university graduates from non-English-speaking countries about language, pronunciation and everyday life in Canada.
And, at the request of his clients, Vincent Dong now includes a hockey primer in the “language of business” course he has developed for immigrant professionals who have found work in their fields of expertise, but still need coaching on language and cultural issues.
Of the many things that confuse foreign-born employees about Canadian workplace culture, few are as unfathomable as that time-honoured office ritual: the postmortem of last night's hockey game, says Mr. Dong, a chartered accountant and founder of Toronto-based Language Education for Accounting Professionals.
The majority of newcomers to Canada speak neither French nor English as their first language. At the same time, more than 70 per cent of skilled immigrants come with at least one university degree and high aspirations. This is fuelling demand for higher-level language programs, according to a recent study by Institute for Research on Public Policy.
Once a week, Prof. Harris incorporates a country and western song into her U of T class. Her students are Korean, Taiwanese, Japanese, Mexican and one German-Iranian. Most aspire to become teachers, or were already instructors in their home countries.
Ms. Lee, who taught for three years in South Korea, came to Canada two months ago after reading about Prof. Harris's course on the Internet. Like many well-educated newcomers to Canada, she was attracted to the U of T language course because it goes way beyond the ESL basics.
“Once you know about the language, you have to know about the culture and the grammar and the vocabulary,” Ms. Lee says.
Prof. Harris incorporated Mr. Paisley's I'm Gonna Miss Her into last week's lesson. The previous week, another Paisley song, Alcohol, left a student wondering what it means to “put that lampshade on your head.”
The worksheet helped. “Drunk: bombed, hammered, loaded, intoxicated, inebriated, tipsy, under the influence, wrecked.”
Drawing examples from Mr. Paisley's lyrics, Prof. Harris also discussed possessives, infinitives, causatives and participle adjectives during that particular class.
“We take a very analytical approach to language,” Prof. Harris says.
Her class dissects the songs, line by line, to look at how language is used, how sentences are formed, “why we use certain language in certain situations.”
In the process of listening to country and western, the students also learn about the improper use of English – the dropped Gs, the double negatives.
“Some students have never been exposed to the word ain't. Until we do this music, they say, ‘I hear this word all the time. I don't know what it means,' ” Prof. Harris says. “Of course, it's not in any book of proper English.”
In Ms. Stewart's ESL classes, a song about how to perform in a job interview is set to a minuet by Johann Sebastian Bach. Verses about shopping, the weather, ordering fast food, a visit to the doctor, love and relationships are sung to selections by Mozart, Beethoven, Vivaldi and Johann Strauss.
Ms. Stewart, who has written a book and created a website, eslclassics.com, about the concept of using classical music to teach language, says “people from all over the world are familiar with classical music,” so it resonates.
“Certain [sentence] structures are just so complicated, but if you hear it set to a tune, and you repeat it and repeat it, it helps,” says Ms. Stewart, who adds that, according to a theory known as “the Mozart effect,” classical music helps memory retention.
Mr. Dong says he sees a growing demand for programs that go well beyond the nuts and bolts of language training, with several employers now incorporating his “language of business” course into their professional development programs and picking up the tab for employees.
“We have a class on hockey because it's talked about so much, and the students feel uncomfortable. They have no idea what anyone is talking about,” says Mr. Dong, the Canadian-born son of immigrants.
“You can't separate language and culture; they're inextricably intertwined,” adds Mr. Dong's program co-ordinator, Devon Scoble, who uses Roch Carrier's classic book The Hockey Sweater to convey to newcomers the depth of Canada's passion for hockey – and the adoration, in Quebec, of the Montreal Canadiens and hockey legend Maurice Richard.
Mr. Dong says business relationships are often strengthened through small talk and socializing, whether it's bantering about hockey or going to lunch with a client. (His course also includes a class on how to decode an Italian menu. A word to the wise: best not to order spaghetti, which can be messy, if the purpose of the lunch is to impress a contact or close a deal.) As to the hockey chalk talk, Mr. Dong says: “The difficulty in trying to tell somebody about offside and cross-checking and somebody like a Wayne Gretzky [is that] you can't teach it in 10 minutes.”
Mr. Carrier's book is a good starting point, however. And when a hockey debate does break out at work, “newcomers can at least say, ‘Oh, this is what it's all about.'”
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