Ask, don’t tell.
My students, who are largely Hispanic, have an odd habit of not using the word “ask”. They don’t want to say it, and will perform bizarre circumlocutions to avoid it. At first I thought they were simply being rude. After all, it can sound quite accusatory when I tell a student that he needs to be taking notes, only to have him point at his friend and reply, “I told him can I have a pencil!”.
But this amusing oddity could get a child in trouble when I choose a volunteer to pass out the workbooks and an unchosen one wails, “I said can I do it!!”
Oh, you said, did you? You told me, did you (hands on hips)? Finally it occurred to me, since they are mostly ESL students, that they didn’t realize that the word is “ask”. Trying to get them to say it, however, produced a bit of a struggle.
“You mean, you asked me if you could pass out the books?”
“Yeah, I said could I do it when I came in, remember?”
“Yes… you ASKED if you could do it.”
“Yeah, I said!”
“SAY ASKED!”
Reluctantly, they mutter, “I ASKED can I do it.” For a while I wondered if it was just the difficulty of the SKT sound in “asked”, so finally I went to one of the Hispanic teachers. He mulled it over and finally opined that in Spanish, they would use the equivalent of “said” or “told” more often than they would “preguntar” or “pedir” (to ask.) So apparently it’s just a direct translation phenomenon.
Well, I can’t fault them for that. Direct translation has gotten many people in trouble. It once caused JFK, in Berlin, to accidentally say he was a jelly donut. Let that be a warning to us all.
