Can they have been being seized?

Hello everyone!

I want to start this month’s post apologizing for my… silence last month. I’ve got only myself to blame – anyone writing about organization skills out there? – and can just promise it won’t happen again. Scout’s honor.

So let me pick up from where we left off last time:  I ended by asking you whether you’d feel insulted if someone (a teacher trainer, a colleague, your coordinator) told you you had to work on your English. There weren’t many replies, I’m afraid, but the very few people who wrote back (both here and via email) had the same to say: ‘No, I wouldn’t’.

Well, I would. Maybe. Not insulted, but somewhat hurt. Let me expand on that…

I didn’t mean to say last month that it was in any way easy hearing from someone we need to work on our most important professional tool, our knowledge of the language – and yes, I do think it is at the very least one of the most vital tools in a language teacher’s “toolbox”, as it were. What I meant to say was that this is no reason why we shouldn’t talk about it!

I love teachers. The vast majority of my closest friends are language teachers. More than half of my students are teachers of English. I’ve been a language teacher for 15 years, almost half of my life. I think teachers’ feelings are important, and when I decided I was going to start dedicating more time to the neglected issue of an English teacher’s knowledge of English, it was by no means my intention to hurt teachers’ feelings, or to say my English was beyond reproach, or to aggravate people in any way. I just think it’s fascinating – and I don’t mean this in a good way at all – ELT just seems to pay no attention at all to such an important aspect of a teacher’s development. We owe it to ourselves and to our learners to keep on working on our language skills throughout our careers, and from next month I will be suggesting ways in which we can do that.

I want to end this month’s post, however, by sharing something that happened to me last Tuesday. Listening to a BBC podcast (BBC Global News), I heard one of the reporters, as he talked about the situation in Ukraine (Ukraine or the Ukraine, by the way?), say ‘Police stations have been being seized…’. I was shocked! Not only had I never heard that before in my life, I’m absolutely sure I’d gone as far as saying to my students that that was impossible, wrong, and that it sounded awful.  Some of the most interesting comments I got:

– ‘Awful!’

– ‘Wasn’t s/he stuttering?’

– ‘It is so embarrassing when supposedly educated people can’t even speak or fathom the language’

– ‘(…) if we can say “stations are being seized”, why not “stations have been being seized”… How else would you say exactly the same thing, if it started in the past and is still going on as we speak? (…)’

– ‘Why do people suppose that us native speakers get it right all the time? (…)’

– ‘Nice slip of the tongue. Unfortunately, present perfect continuous in the passive doesn’t exist.’

And on it goes.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about this particular sentence (you can hear it here). Right? Wrong? Something in between?

To read about the Ukraine/The Ukraine debacle, click here.

See you all in May and hope to see some of you guys in Paraíba next month!