How to “make a difference”…

Teaching is a line of work which brings you in contact with many different kinds of people…especially when you work for a French language institute. You come into contact with students of all different ages and from different walks of life. The other night I animated a dinner meeting with a group of military police officers. In France they are called Gendarmes and they are ranked like army officers from corporal to general. At this particular meeting there was a general, 2 majors, and 2 lieutenant majors. All of them were participating in an intensive language course to prepare them for a special mission to Afghanistan. They were to leave the following week and had been kept in the dark about what exactly their year-long mission would entail. All they knew was that they would be sleeping under a tent and working with other American soldiers and officers which was why they needed to practice their English. Their level of English was very good and all of them were quite fluent. I joked with them that I too would be sleeping under a tent this summer in the mountains of California but of course, contrary to them, the only hostile creatures around me would be the black bears who sometimes wander down into campgrounds searching for food and other goodies that campers bring with them. As with many people who are faced with an uncertain future, they needed to take their minds off their worries so the subjects of conversation went from the swine flu outbreak in Mexico to how French people are considered by Americans since the beginning  of the conflict in Iraq and the UN Security council confrontation which pitted the French against the Bush administration (and a large segment of the American population who were being fed propaganda by the rabid US  news media…). Their curiosity kept the pace fast and joyful giving us many opportunities to develop new expressions and vocabulary. Not to interfere with their fluency I kept my corrections to a minimum. I’ve found that if you correct students too often favoring form over content you have a tendency to make them make more mistakes than they normally would as they focus too much on their grammatical structures and less on the ideas that they wish to convey. It is better to speak about “meaning related” language problems then “surface” level blurbs unless they interfere with communication  (I’ve adopted some of the same laws for verbal communication as set down by some applied linguists for nonverbal communication: see Semke, Harriet D. “Effects of the Red Pen.”  Foreign Language Annals 17 (1984)). However there were one or two typical usage mistakes French students make  which I took time to explain. One of them was the use of the expression: “to tell the difference between” or “to distinguish between”. The general kept repeating: “I would like to make the difference between…”. This is what I explained:

To distinguish between 2 things we say: “to tell the difference” (Ex. How can you tell the difference between a man and a woman?)

To express frustration we might say: “It won’t make any difference (if you come or not)!” (Nobody will notice your absence.)

When you don’t care about something you say: “It doesn’t make any difference to me or It makes no difference to me.”

When we want to understand the difference between 2 things we say: “Can you show me the difference between oil paints and water colors?”

And when an action is a deciding factor for succeeding we say: “Your speech made all the difference. Now they are really convinced”. “Being married has made a big difference in my life. I’m no longer lonely.”

After explaining the intricacies of these different expressions, I asked for a “doggie bag” (too much food!), bid everyone farewell (after ordering them to “Stay Safe!” and to watch out for the bears in Afghanistan…) and drove home pondering the art of animating a conversation and of course how to escape the swine flu….

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