Job Discussion Forums

[BethMac]

I teach my students the difference between formal and informal language and yes, I teach reduction (gonna, wanna, etc.). Believe it or not, it helps them tremendously because there is a huge gap between what they are learning in class and what they are hearing on the street or in movies. As native speakers, we often think we are speaking correctly when in fact we are using reduced forms. It doesn't do the students any favours to omit this in our teaching. They want to learn how to understand what's being said by other English speakers and how to be understood themselves. Their goal isn't to be foreign versions of Little Lord Fauntleroy (sp?). Give them the tools they need...all the tools they need. This means formal language and essay writing format but also informal language - slang, idioms, reduction, etc.

[isabel]

I believe that the op was talking about writing. Gonna, wanna and ain't have no place in written English. Most of our students have some aspirations which include the possibility of working in an English speaking country, or working for an company where English is required. Can you imagine a cover letter that starts "I wanna work for your company because I ain't got nothin better to do"? Ignorant English sounds especially ignorant when written.

Yes, because a lot of westerners speak English poorly, we need to at least teach our students to understand what this stuff means. It does them no favor to teach them to use it. "Formal" English is also professional English, and educated academic English. These are the aspirations of many of our students. I don't think we should sell them short.

[Stephen Jones]

"ain't" used to be perfectly correct standard English, particularly in the States. For some reason it has become sub-standard.

I am particularly irritated by the teaching, let alone the spelling, of "wanna" and "gonna". Apart from anything else it suggests that some people actually pronunce the schwa in to as an o, or pronounce going as two syllables instead of a dipthong."Interactions", in one of the most misguided attempts at leaching English pronunciation ever devised, actually teaches the difference between the reduced and the full forms, even though there are few or no circumstances in which you would distinguish between the two.

[moonraven]

This should not be such a big problem. Students are not dummies. If you tell them that writing is a formal process which precludes beginning an essay with "Well," or incorporating sloppy speaking habits, they will usually get the point. They don't want to expend a lot of time and energy and MONEY learning a second language with the goal of looking like fools.

[denise]

I'm sorry that you're surprised, Roger. I stand by what I said.

Real, live, flesh-and-blood native speakers are not robots. They do not follow neatly-arranged transcripts that focus on only one grammar point or sound at a time. They speak quickly, use slang, reduce things left and right, overlap, pause, etc. I want my students to understand.

Right now I am teaching a research paper class, and there is no way I will except gonna/wanna/ain't in a paper--or "and so on," which is the biggie here.

d

[BethMac]

I don't think anyone is teaching students to write reduced forms. Nonetheless, many of my students already know internet acronyms and reduced forms like "ur" for your, so they are learning it anyway.

Formal writing is only a fraction of what students learn in an ESL classroom. (Or perhaps not...I can only speak for myself and teachers I have worked with.) In my opinion, the listening/comprehension and speaking skills are just as important as those of reading and writing. If students don't learn about idioms and reductions in class, they are pretty well lost once they go to a store or to the local pub.

Just last week, I taught my students "Ida" - as in, I'd have. "Ida gone to the party, but I was too tired." You should have seen their faces light up! "So that's what I've been hearing!" "I was wondering what that meant! People say it all the time!" Do you suppose I did them a disservice by teaching them that reduced form? I certainly don't.

[Celeste]

I teach reduced forms in pronunciation and listening classes but always with the corollary that it only needs to be understood, not produced (unless they want to) and certainly not written. Many languages have reduced forms (vowels that shorten to schwa or consonant sounds that drop out in rapid speech) and they are not incorrect; they are merely a feature of rapid speech.

[Stephen Jones]

[Roger]

I am still at odds with the notion that it is a teacher's ialienable duty to cover every non-standard variation of dictionary entries like contractions that basically are two words; in my view this is teating students as minors who can't decide for themselves that "wanna" could be "want to". If students are not intellectually up to making such decisions by themselves I guess, teaching them advanced English is a meaningless luxury.
I am NOT AVERSE to covering such informal phrases per se, but I would cover them from the passive user's point of view: he or she stumbles upon them, I would help them to rephrase that particular segment in a sentence in formal English.
If they find "gotcha" or "b4 u" in any text, chances are they can figure out their meaning. If not, I wonder why they come to English lessons.
Students at pre-ubniversity levels probably ought to know the rules rather than how to circumvent them. The latter anybody learns on their own!

[Stephen Jones]

If you are referring to the written form you are quite right Roger.

However if you are referring to the spoken form then 'to' will only ever be pronounced with an 'o' as opposed to a schwa when it comes at the end of the sentence as in "Do whatever you want to". If you let them pronounce the 'o' in the auxiliary 'do', 'you' (unless contrastive stress is involved) and 'to' as an 'o' in "What do you want to do?" then you are not teaching normal English. Incidentally one 't' in 'want to' may be pronounced though sometimes only as a glottal stop - if you pronounce both 't's with the inevitalbe pause between them then your are either a slot machine or a bad Elizabeth II impersonator.

The only tning advanced about this is the amount of linguistic self-awareness the native speaker has.

[Ben Round de Bloc]

[thelmadatter]

Writing.... *sigh*

One reason I was sooooo happy to get out of teaching university in the States was the appalling state of so-called composition instruction. They threw in TA's who knew nothing about writing in the writing classes, often solely to have "cultural diversity" (but mostly because TA's are cheap). One student wrote into the school paper complaining that all his writing teacher (Comp. 101) did in class was talk about Chinese characters and that he was not learning what he needed. He was dismissed as "racist" and "ethnocentrist."

I had my supervisor tell me that while in her mixed writing classes (1/2 native speaker / 1/2 international student) maybe they didn't learn much writing but at least the native speakers had "cultural exposure" I bit my tongue - but it hurt.

I agree with Ben. We cannot teach all the variants of English. It's not possible and quite likely not useful to our students. Teaching a standard gives them the best chance to communicate with the widest variety of people - native and non-native speakers of English. It has really nothing to do with the PC notion that "all language is valid." It may be but not all language is appropriate in all situations. I can still speak my NY/NJ (Nanny/Bugs Bunny/Sopranos) dialect and have pride in it, but I would never consider seriously teaching it to my students. (Maybe a phrase or two if they asked me or for a break in the serious stuff) It would never help them in the business/international situations in which they will most likely use English.

[Stephen Jones]

[Ben Round de Bloc]

[moonraven]

If people want to waste their time and their students' time preparing them to decode what passes for speech in the movies from Hollywood, no one can stop them. They are simply pathetic examples of a decadent culture.