why do we need to study english?

This isn't so much to show that my students' English is bad, so much as how this language they're trying to learn is bad. All it takes is a few letters misspelled or one particle misremembered to utterly change the meaning of the sentence into something absurd yet still with meaning.

These questions were asked as part of a set list the students practiced in class, where the "correct" strategy for the test is remembering and regurgitating the response you wrote and got vetted by the teacher in class (even if said answer is factually incorrect) rather than doing your best at expressing the actual answer.

As such, these lists only contain responses whose meaning became something amusing because of how finicky and easy-to-fuck-up English is, and do not comprise: correct answers, a dozen different misspellings of "kilometers", or best-intentioned word salad that ends up nonsense.

As an educator-aspirant I consider it truly shitty to laugh at any learner's mistakes, so three-and-a-bit years at this job has been a slow porcess of trying to figure out a balance. I think looking at the aggregate of errors like this is a pretty neat way to understand where in the specific my students struggle with the language, and what kind of mistakes they repeatedly make. It's like a taxonomy of goofs