Larry's story - a cautionary tale

Larry’s story – a cautionary tale ^LB1 about free conversation lessons.

 Larry was someone I met from time to time in my home town in England. He was Polish, in his sixties and good company in the pub. His English was as fluent as any native speaker’s when he was talking about last night’s football match or the bloody government. Yes his English was fluent, but absolutely terrible^LB2 – terrible pronunciation, terrible grammar. Larry seemed to be a typical working class guy with a typical working class job in a factory and a typical working class house. He had come to England after the war, married a local girl and had a family. As it turned out he wasn’t typical at all.

One evening I was sitting in a pub with a friend. We were talking about philosophy – about David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Suddenly Larry appeared ‘I join with you, yes?’. Larry knew a lot about philosophy, and spent the rest of the night talking to us.

At that time I had decided to come to Poland to teach. I did not see Larry for a while. The next time I saw him I found out Larry’s name was Wawrzyniec – unpronounceable for the English! The English name is Lawrence, from laurel (laurel – wawrzyn). He told me that when the war started he was a student in Lwow. He was very interested when I told him about teaching English, about methodology and so on. He said he had made a big mistake when he didn’t take English classes. He just relied on conversation and learning words. He had 40 years of free conversation.

At the beginning I said that Larry’s story is a cautionary tale. The lesson ‘Free conversation’ seems very attractive when a language school offers it. But what if such so-called^LB3 classes make your English worse not better? Then a good school should not offer this option.

I think it was a tragedy that someone like Larry spent his life doing work that did not let him use his intelligence simply because he had not learnt English properly. Good, well-structured English classes would have allowed him to have a better life in England.

LB¹ – a cautionary tale – a story (tale) which teaches a lesson. Little Red Riding Hood is an example – do what your mother says.

LB² – terrible – very bad. One of those words which are used a lot by natives, buy not so much by other language speakers.

LB³ – so-called. Remember that this is always negative in English and means that something is not what it claims to be e.g. ‘ so-called conversation lessons’ are not lessons.