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[ruggedtoast]

I work for a Grad Schooly here in London (My Asian TEFL days being over) and I get a lot of email enquiries from Chinese students, most of them go something like this:

" i wanna come to ur university because im gonna work in london after. I hope u r gonna give me an offer cos i wanna come and study Masters"

"Gonna" ?

"Wanna" ?

"u" ?

What are you guys teaching these people!?

[abusalam4]

I gonna tell you that I don`t wonna be sarcastic....

Well, I can see two possible reasons:
- In China, there are some backpacker type of people who may teach that sort of sub-standard English to their students ... High School graduates from the USA, for example, who seem to have a great impact on their students of similar age to make them imitate all that;
- on the other hand, it may be the Chinese students themselves who just imitate the manners of us Westerners without really knowing what they are doing - "ur!, etc, seems to be a mannerism developed in Internet chats or the like.

However, most of us, I would say, are well-educated enough not to teach this sort of thing.

If you receive such mails with sub-standard English, just tell the senders their "variant" of English is not acceptable and they should send their requests again. They cannot expect everybody to understand US-based street or whatever slang, especially when your are from the UK and would be more accustomed to.....QUEEN`S English...hahaha!

[georginachina]

Don't blame us!! Blame the TV shows that teach slang! I've even had to contradict Chinese English teachers that teach "sth" for something, and "smb" for somebody.

[tw]

Many pronunciation textbooks do actually teach "wanna" and "gonna". In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if many middle school students have learned that as the way to say "going to" and "want to". After all, isn't that how many North Americans speak? How are students going to know what "wanna" and "gonna" mean if they are not taught what they mean? The problem is that they were not told never use "wanna" and "gonna" in writing, only when spoken.

[danielb]

Exactly.

[Burl Ives]

They teach it to themselves QQ-ing, Skype-ing, and Messenger-ing. SMS-ing too.

U, ur, 2, 4, sth, sb, thx, bb et al.

I asked a class one day. "Convenient," they said. "Efficient." In other words, without these things having been taught in school, they are all recognised and widespread. And for the users it appears not to be an issue that these usages are at best colloquial, at worst outright insults to their recipients.

It probably tells us that despite all the nice young people we know, there aren't all that many Chinese using English in anything like an exacting communicative environment. They look like idiots when they find themselves in such an environment, but they don't know that either. And I'm pretty sure they don't care.

Whatever kind of tool English is for our charges, it's showing symptoms of Chinese characteristics.

[Steppenwolf]

I don't think any of us can be blamed for our students picking this sort of "English" up. I note that it's very popular with Indians and they in turn will point out that this is the way English is used on the Internet...

I guess it's the Internet generation's rebellious anti-establishment mindset...

[ruggedtoast]

I guess so but its not going to help them at graduate level. Most of these guys have IELTS of at least 6.5 or TOEFL of 100 or so as well.

Personally I find it quite rude. If they cant be bothered to write me a proper email how are they going to get by studying. I was thinking about making some note on their file like 'written English poor' and making them all do IELTS again but maybe Im just feeling vindictive today.

[11:59]

This is an area I teach at university (my 'Asian TEFL days' being far from over), so perhaps I can help. That is, perhaps I can tell you exactly what I teach 'these people', as you so eloquently put it.

I think those contractions just appear odd in the written language. In normal run-of-the-mill spoken language (native speakers of any language tend to produce between 10 and 15 phonemes a second) naturally occurring phonology will produce such contractions whether you like it or not. (It is rather like speeding up a record. Of course the acoustic elements will change.) You also seem to forget that much of the contemporary language is itself a contraction of former separate items (wasn't 'tomorrow' originally 'to the morrow' or something of the sort?). In short you are being prescriptive and ignorant of language change, a normal yet poorly understood phenomenon. I think this is quite odd for a teacher at a 'graduate school'.

As it happens, though, the contractions you cite ('gonna', 'wanna') are highly rule based, and so do not in any way reflect 'sloppy' or 'lazy' speech. 'Going to' cannot always be contracted to 'gonna' and 'want to' cannot always become 'wanna', at least not according to native speakers. Native speakers are of course often totally clueless about this, at least consciously, which of course is interesting in and of itself. You have to tease this information (declarative knowledge, not procedural knowledge) out of them through grammaticality judgement tasks.

Contraction of 'want to' to 'wanna' seems to be prohibited where the words 'want' and 'to' are separated by a Wh-trace (let's symbolise it as t) that has been 'left behind' in the phrase marker grammar by the movement of an earlier constituent through the syntactic process of 'raising'. Not many teachers of English are trained in syntax (and especially not computational syntax) so let me explain. Please bear with me.

Before I do though, I have to briefly explain the (Chomskyan) notion of D- and S-structure, that is D(eep) and S(urface) structure respectively. Long ago it was proposed that the sentences that we speak, hear, read, and write are but surface structures, and that they are the result of transformations from deep structures of which we are never aware. Some sentences can have two S structures but one D structure (or phrase marker structure), or vice versa. For example, 'I saw the girl with the telescope' is ambiguous as it has two wholly separate D structures, which in S-structures would be expressed with something like 'I saw the girl who had a telescope' and 'I used a telescope to see the girl'. Another example would be 'Washing machines can be dangerous' (i.e., you can hurt yourself when washing machines (of any sort), or, the machines we call washing machines can be dangerous - they often explode).

So what on Earth does the theoretical and highbrow notion of D- and S-structure have to do with 'wanna' and 'gonna'. Well, first, let's establish that these contractions are not always licensed by the grammar of English as (unconsciously) stored in your head. Take the following example:

1) Who do you want to kiss?
2) Who do you wanna kiss?

In this example there is no problem contracting 'want to' to 'wanna'. The same is true for the next example:

3) Who do you want to invite to the party?
4) Who do you wanna invite to the party?

So, again, no problem. But, now look at the following (an asterisk in linguistics means that when asked native speakers reject the sentence):

5) Who do you want to kiss you?
6)* Who do you wanna kiss you?

And:

7) Who do you want to invite Fred to the party?
8)* Who do you wanna invite Fred to the party?

Native speakers reject examples such as (6) and (8), though of course they won't be able to tell you why there are ungrammatical. Well linguists can, at least those trained in generative syntax.

The D-structure of (1), 'Who do you want to kiss', is said to be:

a) You want to kiss wh

Which becomes:

b) Who i you want to kiss