ABSTRACT
The difference between the old and the new objectives for foreign language teaching have always been neatly summed up for me in a parable published over twenty years ago (Corbett, 1965).
The author recounts how, falling asleep after finishing marking his last GCE ‘O’ level translation paper one night, he dreams he is back in India where he served in the army. He is teaching English to two Indian soldiers. Suddenly there is commotion in the camp as it is learned that a dangerous tiger is about and also that the colonel’s and the adjutant’s ladies have gone into the jungle to pick flowers. They must be brought back quickly. The author seizes the opportunity and gives his two soldiers an Urdu sentence to translate and sends them off to look for the ladies. The sentence reads (in Urdu): ‘Depart very quickly for an enormous tiger is approaching.’ A little later, one soldier reappears with an alarmed and breathless lady who is nevertheless unharmed. The second eventually arrives escorting the stretcher carrying the expiring remains of the other lady. How had the soldiers translated their sentences? The first lady reported that her soldier had said: ‘You run quick big tiger he come.’ Using the GCE ‘O’ level marking scheme he had been applying before he fell asleep the author assessed it. ‘This was clearly deplorable: -3 straight away for ‘you run’; -2 for mood (indicative instead of imperative) and -1 for vocabulary (I might have accepted ‘run away’ or even ‘run back’, but ‘run’ alone was clearly inadmissible)…Next ‘quick’:…the scheme imposed a maximum deduction of 1 for any adverb. ‘For’ omitted -1; luckily for him I had not used ‘since’: the maximum deduction for a subordinating conjunction is 2 but for a coordinating conjunction only 1. ‘Big’ I thought inadequate for the Urdu word I had used: I wanted ‘enormous’, ‘huge’ or ‘immense’; -1 therefore for vocabulary. -1 for ‘he’ as being superfluous, whether or not it was admissible as to gender. ‘Come’ was at least -2 for gross breach of concord…Total penalisation was therefore -9 and the mark for the sentence 1 out of 10.’
