PHRASEOLOGY FOR PILOTS AND CABIN ATTENDANTS

I have touched upon this subject in Russian several times trying to explain that any acquisition of good professional phrases in an international format is very useful but not quite conducive to real mastering of the language – mastering of any language requires not only memorizing by rote, it also requires some dynamic and active practice in questions and responses according to multifarious Speech Patterns.

There are many useful manuals and textbooks both for pilots and cabin attendants which really provide them with all professional terms and short phrases but these phrases or even dialogues are not recurrently interactive, they cannot teach them to communicate in a situation that requires not only one phrase but some short exchange of several phrases in order to clarify everything and settle a matter or solve a problem.

This is just the reason why they cannot do without an experienced language coach or trainer who acts as an animator or an anchor man responsible for keeping the ball rolling and maintaining any communication within some methodical frame – this frame implies both ready made speech patterns and dialogues and newly independently generated dialogues which really can be interesting for students.

I have been teaching Aviation and Plain English to Russian pilots and cabin attendants for more than ten years which amounts to some ten thousand training hours and I know perfectly well from my own experience that this category of students requires quite a specific approach and some special methods of teaching.

I’d like to explain what I mean – one cannot expect all these students to have any philological background and knowledge of such terms as Gerund, Participle, Perfect Tenses and all that stuff. All these terms are not only redundant in our teaching practice but even terribly confusing and preventing them from using this or that grammar fact in its proper functional place.

I have had a lot of instances like this – whenever I begin classes of English, there always pops up some connoisseur of grammar terms who suddenly exclaims – Ah, I know, this is Gerund! – but when I ask this student about functional and practical usage of this Gerund – alas, no reply!

When I give them an example such as Excuse my being late or Excuse mu coming late and ask them if it is Gerund, they seem to be puzzled because they probably memorized only one example of Gerund and this function of converting verbs into some kind of nouns which is very convenient in your speech is not quite clear for them.

So, instead of showing of and trying to be very clever, clever – you’d better use all this in its proper functional place without any grammar explanations – use it, and that’s all! That’s just what I always try to get across!

Only functional approach seems to be expedient – I never waste my time for explanation of grammar rules but I always give some close typological examples in our native Russian language which helps my students much better than some sophisticated formulas as Passive Voice in Present Perfect – such a phrase as Have you been cleared to taxi by the ramp people? – cannot be digested by anyone, it should be trained and trained many times until it becomes clear.

Teacher/trainer of Aviation and Plain English                              Alexander Khodovets