Teacher Discussion Forums

Is prescription ever the right move?

It is fashionable to belittle the prescription of certain grammatical structures in EFL/ESL classrooms. I, for one, often champion efforts to show/describe/teach students the English that is as opposed to English that specific teachers wish speakers would use (for whatever reasons they might have).

However, on reflection, it seems to me that it might be irresponsible for teachers to give their students the idea that anything goes; that there are no reasonable standards for English grammar. So where should the line be drawn? To what degree should teachers require students to adopt "standards", and to what degree should they be encouraged to emulate contemporary usage by native speakers or embrace language that may not equate to received standards?

And finally, just who should determine the standards?

(Let the battles begin! )

Larry Latham

(Thanks, woodcutter, for stimulating the idea for this topic)

Hey all!

Well, I would not ask my students to read David Copperfield, any of them at any of their levels. I have found at least seven instances where Mr *beep* (read D¡ckens) places "don't" in the mouths of his characters even when they ought to be using "doesn't". And that "don't" is not only in the mouths of the common people he often champions, but also in the language of the more sophisticated members of his menagerie. Perhaps the use of "don't" in third person singular was acceptable way back then. Perhaps Mr *beep* (read D¡ckens) hadn't drilled his "don't / doesn't" exercises sufficiently. Perhaps being a pulp serial writer had some influence on his use of "don't" over "doesn't". Perhaps English is a living, breathing monster that evolves with time and usage.

I've said elsewhere that non-natives don't seem to have the right to coin words, even when they have become totally proficient speakers. Reminds me of more recent discussions on native/non-native mistake making. I think that prescribing certain basics is helpful. I think that not pointing out the flexibility of such basics in native speech is fooling the student. I think that "every little bit helps" is a nice expression to teach students. I think that "Every little bit helps, said the old woman while peeing in the ocean while trying to drown her husband" is cute but not very useful. Want to impress your friends and acquaintances? Call a cow bell a cencero instead of a campana and they will be amazed at your vocabulary, your command of a word that even they would not have used (unless they have cows or make the bells). Want to be understood, avoid silly prejudices like the "broken English" thing on another thread? Then don't take your examples from *beep* (read D¡ckens), despite his wonderful story telling style, we are not usually talking about social injustice in the late 19th century in first-person!

I prescribe, but I also let the student know that it is up to him/her to take the medicine regularly, depending on how much the lack of prescription interfers with his/her communication.

peace,
revel.

To quickly reprise what I have sprawled elsewhere.....

No prescriptivism = No standard language

Remember how much of it you received at school?

No standed langwidge and kommunication mor diffcult.

Who should prescribe? An exalted body of enlightened linguists, altering their prescription each year as reality dictates.

I find the conflict is between students who want me to give them 100% certainty over what is right when, and making them aware of "real English". The question is one of balance - up to what point is it OK to say "X is right, Y is wrong" when a substantial number of native speakers say "Y".

I would agree that it does student no favours to give them the impression that "anything goes", but it is equally unhelpful to teach them grammar rules as though they were as absolute and immutable as the laws of physics. All too often I hear students arguing for or against a sentence with all the passion and ferocity of Alan Derschowitz defending a client.

As I teach in the UK, it's common for my students to pick up language from their native speaking work colleagues and to come back to me with questions. Revel's example is a classic case in point - on more than one occasion I've been asked "I heard an English person say he don't - is this correct or incorrect?" My response is something along the lines of "It's nonstandard and uneducated, you should recognise it but don't repeat it in your exam and certainly don't say it yourself as people will think you speak bad English".

Are there times when it's OK to prescribe? Clearly some things are just plain wrong - you can't say "I am go in London yesterday Monday". But be careful about teaching students absolute rules - they only get more bamboozled when they visit an English-speaking country and hear real English. I think the best approach is the one advocated by Michael Lewis - when we teach rules, make it clear when we are giving a guideline or useful hint rather than stating absolute fact.

Early Picassos show he was perfectly capable of painting the same sized eyes and one on each side but later chose not to, which is very different from being incapable of drawing the two eyes the same.

So perhaps the rules can be broken by those who know they are breaking the rules. It's like Hardy's Tess or my grandmother, who could switch in and out of standard English. Though it's true that many speakers of non-standard English have great difficulty expressing themselves in standard forms.

Maybe a language is a club and only native-speakers can put their feet on the furniture. My neighbour often corrects my Spanish moments after she has said the same thing: "WE say that but you shouldn't".

Students occasionally reach a code-switching state, especially if they have encountered non-standard English in host families for example.

But is standard British English, prescribed or described , the English of the predominantly white, middle-class, university educated and living in the Home Counties? When Swan says "many people consider this to be wrong" he hasn't exactly gone out and counted heads; he means people like him. I suspect that on a completely democratic basis a descriptivist would find a majority of English speakers using double negatives, though a good many of them might not write like that or talk to their childrens' teacher in the same way. Or they might say "I know this is wrong".

Well, are any other languages so very different? Whose English do our students want to learn? Who, small children apart, is not going to understand "People say this but it wouldn't be appropriate in all situations" .

Would the decisions of a Royal Academy, drawn from exactly the same people who decide now, be any different? My experience is that academies push for too much change or are far too slow. English seems to have got on fine without one, proactive or reactive.

The only thing I can do about this is try to be, and choose material that is, neither too stodgy nor too groovy. Look up what a book says about "which one (of two) is the higher/highest" or "as/like we did last summer" or your own particular shibboleth and choose the stuff that fits in with your feelings on these weighty matters.


Whatever, Dear ESL Teacher. Your students are going to end up with a mid-Atlantic accent tinged with the Irish of that nice teacher they had when they were 15, making L1 influenced errors as well as errors based on the well-intentioned "explanations", and their misunderstandings of these, as a result of their various unfinished course books and differing teachers, including you.

Good morning all!

Just yesterday, in class with a group of bright fifth graders.

I wrote the exercise number on the board: LAE 7.

I wrote fifteen affirmative sentences with the verb "be".

We have been doing singular to plural work for about a week, so one boy suddenly says "Teacher, teacher, number 9 can't be turned into plural, it's already plural."

"Yes, yes," I replied "you are right, but this exercise is on a different subject. We will be making these sentences into questions." And beside the exercise title, I wrote the word "Questions".

For between one and three years, these kids have heard how to make questions out of sentences with the verb "be". They have been given a convoluted explanation along the lines of switching the subject and the verb of the sentence around. So, a sentence like "The American girl is very happy" becomes the question "The American is girl very happy?" I repeat at least six times "take the verb be out of its place in the sentence, put it in front of everything, close up the gap, and you have a question." The students ask again, "But, don't you have to switch the subject for the verb?" I repeat my simple explanation again. About half the students suddenly say "Oh, that's very very easy, are you sure that's how it's done?"

Of course I'm sure that that's how it's done. The difficulty these fifth graders have with the exercise is that it is so clear and simple that they doubt that it can be correct, isn't English difficult? Well, no, sentence number eleven in the same exercise says clearly: "English is easy." while sentence number twelve goes on to say "English is an easy language." The horrible confusion of confusing and horrible explanations is an interference to these kids when having to simply manipulate a basic structure in English.

Years later, these kids will be my adult students who have been studying for years. Some will have learned those simple, exception free rules of sentence manipulation. Those will be the students that I can push towards a more creative use of the language, as they will have gotten a handle on the basics. Others will still be swimming in the quagmire of "turn the subject and the verb around" or "adverbs of frequency always precede the verb except the verb to be" or "third person singular in the simple present always carries an s". Those others will be the ones who always forget to use an auxiliary word even though the majority of verb forms in English require such an auxiliary. How can these people be expected to create in English if they do not dominate the tools of such creation?

The Picasso example is excellent. My music study examples are on the same line. Even my professors in university complaining about my insistance on directing classic theatre over modern, contemporary theatre are in the same line. Learn to mix colours first, then you can experiment. Learn to play a scale first, then you can reinvent the scale. Try some heavy duty Shakespeare before you get into some epic Brecht. Learn the five foot positions before you try to dance Swan Lake. Language is an art, art is first a discipline and then a creative endeavor.

Have I been clear? Hope so!

peace,
revel.

You have, revel, but you leave me with a question in my mind: Which five foot positions do you learn, and who picks them? Precisely what scales do you learn, and who chooses those rather than other possible scales? Are some of the scales more "standard" than others?

Larry Latham

The analogies are starting to break down a little here. Dance steps and forms, and musical scales, are much less abitrary than language. Sure, there are limits of human anatomy that constrain what is possible, but if you don't want to prance around on tippytoes in a tutu you run around naked instead. When it comes to speaking, however, what you say has got to follow what everyone in at least your generation "understands".

The analogies are starting to break down a little here.

Agreed, Duncan. Nevertheless, I wanted to poke revel in the ribs just a little. I'm sure he knows the analogies are a stretch, but I assume his larger point is to promote learning the system before you attempt to bend it. I also imagine you know that too.

My question is merely: "Who determines what the system is?"

Larry Latham

Who determines what the system is? Well, hopefully actual as opposed to armchair linguists, dedicated researchers rather than dilettante writers with axes to grind (and foibles of their own), if "determine" involves more "discovering" than "deciding".

The keyword, I think, is "arbitrary": the more certain people insist we have a conscious choice to make, a choice that begins to assume titanic moral proportions, the more we should be wary of the "advice" they are "offering", and the constraints it will impose if we are stupid enough to accept it.

Of course, there is a lot of choice in how we express ourselves, but generally these are all equally valid choices; the only time I get interested is when 99% of speakers (including higher-level non-natives who are "in the know") find something amusing or discordant in terms of their internalized "system" - they all reach for and arrive at a similar alternative. In cases where there is huge disagreement over the form the alternative "should" take, again, I would be wary of accepting any one viewpoint.

Sorry to be so dense, fluffy, but...which side is it you're coming down to support? I, being old and feeble of brain, as well as easily confused (that's always been with me, I'm afraid) have not been able to absorb your message above. I'm sure it must be in there somewhere, but even after several tries, I can't find it.

Can I ask again: "Who gets to decide what the standard is?"

Larry Latham

Actuallly, I knew I wasn't quite answering your question in my last post there, Larry.

I guess that the standard is set by who(m)ever we "trust" to decide the "correct" standard (trust in two meanings there: positive, "informed" trust/consent - these guys sure know their stuff and are the best ones for the job! - and of the disinterested, impressionable "Oh I suppose this guy is right, he seems passionate enough after all, wow!" kind).

Unfortunately, the people that we can trust in such matters are morally constrained to fight a rearguard action against linguistic prigishness; even though they are entitled to take the high ground, it is not really the place to be, is it!

Woodcutter wrote: Who should prescribe? An exalted body of enlightened linguists, altering their prescription each year as reality dictates.

This is already happening, in the form of quality and widely available dictionaries, grammars and usage manuals (especially those that study variation across speech as well as writing) for those who "care" enough to actually consult them. These kind of books show us that we can be secure in our liguistic insecurity.

I don't think establishing an official institution and emblazoning its endorsements all over these kind of books is really necessary; whilst it might silence the windbags and alter usage for the "better", do you think it would boost sales that much? I say, let people carry on making sense as best they can, like they always have done.

Okay, old timers, here's it as clear as can be : "the people who (get to) decide what the standard is" are generally those who expound their viewpoint the loudest and the longest (e.g. newspaper writers without solid skills or a real job). It also helps if they get their viewpoints in first, before anyone else (which is easy to do via the media).

But as we more enlightened souls on Dave's know, these windbags are merely saying what the language should be like (prescribing), not what it is like (description), seemingly oblivious to the fact that it would be a lot easier for everyone to proceed on the basis of facts than theories. (Were you aware of that "is" vs. "should be" in your questions there, Larry? That is, was it a conscious word choice on your part?).

Returning to your first post, Larry, and quickly skimming through all that follows, it seems the main point to me is that what learners should be given should be systematic and, above all, help them understand the language (and perhaps, indirectly at least, also the culture(s)). Spontaneous native-speaker data, especially speech, is probably the best starting point to achieve this. Observations can be made, and intuitions honed, all valid. We can abstract away from the data and simplify it somewhat, but we shouldn't lose its general shape and flavour (i.e. the function to which it was put, in context) or try to make it too easy or more "standard" or pat or whatever. There is ultimately no logic to me in frustrating what is surely a learner's goal: to "get it" as much as possible.

(Were you aware of that "is" vs. "should be" in your questions there, Larry? That is, was it a conscious word choice on your part?).

Indeed it was, my flossy little rodent.

Larry Latham