Job Discussion Forums

[Ahchoo]

Come on. Anyone calling themselves an English teacher should habitually use correct grammer and spelling.
The odd typo I can understand but all this quibling and making excuses (tired? when I'm tired I still know 2+2=4) is ridiculous.

[zorro (3)]

I hope to god that the last post was in jest!!!!

[ls650]

[Ahchoo]

[cangringo]

I admit, I missed a lot of this thread because I came in late and I'm tired, and really it's a lot to read. I understand the gist though and I'm sure someone will catch me on a mispell or a grammatical error but I thought I would try and throw my two cents in.

I think it's perfectly understandable to make spelling mistakes or grammatical errors on threads such as these. Most of us here have lives that do not revolve around Dave's or other forums. If you are making those mistakes in class constantly, that's another matter. I do find though that I have always had trouble with definitely...I know how to spell it, I just have trouble with it and I always have to double check. It's the same with tomorrow.

What really irks me is when I am listening to the news or some Discovery show and I hear "there's a lot of people" or some other such obvious grammatical error. These people are on TV...some are scientists for god's sake. I constantly hear simple mistakes like these and it drives me batty. So, if you are really that anal about some forums, try listening to how people are speaking to the world first.

Oh and the comment about editors not accepting mistakes...ha, I read a lot and I can't count the number of mistakes I've found - not just in novels either.

I'm trying to say, some people should lighten up I guess and it's a forum...it's not the real world. I refuse to spend a lot of time editing and re-editing my posts on a forum.

[zorro (3)]

The spoken mistakes that you refer to cangringo, are only mistakes when compared to 'proper' English. There are English speakers the world over who have particular quirks in the way they speak. You could argue that saying 'there's a lot of people' is easier to say than 'there're a lot of people'. It's a bit of a mouthful in fact. What's wrong with saying it the first way?

This all begs the question of what to teach our students? I know common sense tells us to teach them the proper way for numerous reasons; practical: to pass their TOEFL, IELTS etc
social: to be accepted into the middle classes of English speaking countries (if this is their aim)
economic: to get a well paid job and to advance up the career ladder

I guess this is the divide between a sociolinguistic and practical reality. Ideally, our language wouldn't be seen to be a static form, but one that is developing and changing - with creative spelling (merlin, 2007) (chaos would soon ensue, but then again look at text talk and interentese lol, btw, imo...) and each variety/dialect/accent being as equal as the other - a linguistic utopia. But practical reality suggests that this is a tall order!

It's all a very difficult area and so I gracefully give up...

[Stephen Jones]

Actually, Ahchoo, 'quible' is an example of Hartman's Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation, which states that:
any article or statement about correct grammar, punctuation, or spelling is bound to contain at least one eror.

There's a lot of people is probably an example of language change. The origin of the phrase 'there are a lot of people', is presumably an inversion of 'A lot of people are there', but that would mean we already have the anomalous situation of the subject coming after the verb it is supposed to agree with. It is common to parse 'there is/are' as 'dummy subject + be', and it's a short step from that to taking there's as an unchangeable phrase (which is the case with the French il ya, the Spanish hay, and the Catalan hi ha. Unlike the use of 'was' for 'were' - we was at home -(very common in many areas of the UK) or negative concord -We don't want no thought control - the use of unchangeable there's appears to 'be common with educated native speakers, and is probably best viewed as a free variant rather than a sub-standard construction.

Certainly, it is wrong to say that a phrase commonly used by native speakers is ungrammatical. It may be ungrammatical in Standard English, whilst being grammatical in another variety of English, but if native speakers commonly produce the construction spontaneously it is grammatical by definition.

I agree totally with Achoo over the matter of spelling mistakes. People aren't making their spelling mistakes because posting to Dave's needs to be slotted into their incredibly packed schedules; they're making the mistakes because they didn't bother to learn to spell in their sixteen or more years of formal education, plus their years of professional experience as an English teacher.

Then again, there are plenty of 'English teachers' who seem to feel that having a white skin is sufficient qualification for the job (unless they're Asian or black). And of course in Korea or China or Japan they are often not called upon to actually teach the structure of English, but rather to give 'conversation classes', where the students practise what they have been taught by the 'proper' teacher. This also explains the complete ignorance of explicit English grammar shown by job applicants from many places in the Far East (one teacher informed me in a telephone interview that he was not interested in a job where he had to know grammar but we could contact him when we used a more modern method - osmosis anyone? - and others can be heard audibly sighing while they frantically flick the pages of the grammar book, though my favourite was the teacher who hung up for five minutes before repeating the book answer fluently (the same one to three entirely separate questions) because 'his mother had set the microwave on fire').

Ignorance of basic spelling and punctuation is particularly nefarious because it is so visible. The host-country speakers, Korean, Chinese or Japanese, often persist in their illusory ideas of what is correct English because they do not trust the judgment of native speakers who can't even get simple spelling or punctuation right.

The spelling that set the post off, 'commutting' does appear to be a one-off. It is quite interesting actually, since what has clearly happened is that the writer knew that the word was one of those pesky words with double consonants, but couldn't remember the consonant to be doubled; the misspelling shows he forgot, or didn't know, the basic rule of English spelling which says that a double consonant is nearly always preceded by a short vowel, but we all have the odd blind spot. The problem is when the 'teacher' persistently misspells and mispunctuates. It is fatuous to say that he won't do it in class; standing in front of a class of students is much more stressful than posting to Dave's, (even when Cleo, HC or VS are in the thread), and however tired or drunk you are you don't think 2+2=7 (if you do, please come and drink in my bar!).

[globalnomad2]

Stephen said

"...if native speakers commonly produce the construction spontaneously it is grammatical by definition."

Grammatical by function, perhaps, but by definition? Linguists remind us that although language is descriptive, we still follow rules. And although I'm American, I still chafe at the general non-English-teacher American misuse of past-tense hypothetical constructions such as "I wish I would have seen that" or "If you would have been there you would have seen me." which I certainly consider ungrammatical; as far as I'm concerned, we still have rules in English. Humphh! Professor Snarf, we must have standards! The grammatically correct form is "I wish I had seen that" and "If you had been there you would have seen me," respectively.

But I digress. We were threading about misspellings.

"Definitely"...goooood. "Definately"....baaaad.

[Stephen Jones]

[globalnomad2]

All true, but I'm only saying that the standard educated dialect in the US ("Network Standard") still uses 12 tenses and essentially eight passive constructions and all those hypothetical conditionals the way they have been received in RP. So educated Americans really should still be shying away from "I wish I would have been there" not because of the grammar book--although I don't think grammar books should be ignored; they exist as a reference to what is more or less currently correct, assuming you've got a recent edition--but because at least all the writers, editors, national news broadcasters and well-educated English teachers still use all the tenses and conditionals and you will still lower your chances of getting a good job in business or law if you submit passages that say "I wish I would have worked for your company ten years ago." That makes the construction still ungrammatical. Well, OK--perhaps not ungrammatical, but certainly nonstandard.

In a separate example, Black English has its own grammatical rules and they are absolutely fine, but BE is not accepted in the worlds I just mentioned--forget about finding a job. I found in my own experimental research that African-Americans gravitate more and more toward Network Standard as they progress through the college years, and switch to it almost completely when they go to graduate school, but they also often "code-switch" back to BE when they go home for the holidays.

[Glenski]

Stephen Jones wrote:

[zorro (3)]

As you say Globalnomad, BE is not readily accepted in the world of the educated. Is this a reality that you are comfortable with? I certainly am not, particularly when it has to do with the colour of your skin. We know that black people are often disadvantaged when at school because most primary teachers are white and from the dominant middle classes and accept only the standard variant (as can be seen from some of the posts on here). Therefore code switching does and has to happen. This means that the black child's communicative competence has to develop to encompass when to use what variety and with whom, which will obviously put them on the back foot. They may also make mistakes in class, in front of their teacher who then classifies the child as 'unable to speak in grammatical structures'. This label may then stick with the child throughout schooling, no matter how accurate it is, and negatively affect results. In turn this will mean that this child is then unable to compete for the better jobs against his white peers, and the perpetuation of using the standard language as a gatekeeper to protect the interests of the dominant middle classes continues.

Can this logic then be applied to our assumptions about misspelling? Could spelling correctly equally be seen to be a value of the dominant middle class? It certainly acts as a gatekeeper - imagine the incredulity of the prospective employer receiving a CV with even one spelling mistake in. I'm not saying that we should give up entirely and let people spell however they want to (although this would be one hell of a social experiment), but perhaps we should be a little more lenient and less dismissive of those who make errors - give them the benefit of the doubt and question our own attitudes towards these imbeciles.

Of course with English teaching, correct spelling comes with the territory. It is the nature of the beast.

[Stephen Jones]

English has two tenses, though for perverse reasons the editors of the CGEL change it to four as they don't consider the perfective an aspect.

The way the different types of conditionals is taught in grammar books is a disaster, since the grammar books concentrate on inventing certain standardized types of 'conditionals' (first, second and third and zero as they suddenly found another to fit in, and had to count backwards), and don't look at the most important distinction, which is whether the 'if' clause (or apodosis as it is technically known) is a real or hypothetical possibility.

[zorro (3)]

Although I agree that prescriptivism should be based on descriptivism this is a rather academic school of thought. The mavens that you refer to are often in a position to have it their own way. When the prescriptivists (the government officials - not sure who it was) and descriptivists (linguists)got together in the 80's to assess the future of English language education within in England, there was much head clashing. I think it was the Cox report that was very sensitive to the issues put forward by linguists and sociolinguists (every variant is equal) which was simply ignored by the government at the time. They wanted a prescriptive grammar at the heart of the national curriculum.

I'm not sure what the current state of affairs with regards to the initiatives put forward by descriptivists in the 80's is, but I think the government's stance may be softening. Anyone any knowledge of this? I should probably ask in a mainstream teacher forum.

Anyway, linguistics needs to be politicized in order for the descriptive school of thought to become mainstream.

[Ahchoo]