An old can of worms

[JuanTwoThree]

Odd that the fiercest of both the expat and domestic variety of correct English mavens are Americans, though British and others do exist. Look around the EFL boards and forums and you'll see what I mean. Metal56 and SJ and others have had more than one run-in with the type. And how many British papers have columns and Q&A's about correct English? You'd expect the defenders of the linguistic faith to be us, the Brits, who are in fact more relaxed, in general. Or is that slacker? Why is this? Discuss, calmly.

I refer to nobody in particular, plus this board is mercifully free of the type I describe anyway.

[Metamorfose]

I can say what I see in coursebooks when it comes to exposure to listening, American cousebooks tend to use one type of accent whereas all the British ones I've come across use many different accents, even non-native ones.

But the English language police trophy must be given to many non-natives who reach a high command in English, I think I've read here that NNspeakers tend to be more inflexible to language variations than natives. Many things I have been told that were plain wrong have been turned out to be 'wrong in some situations but...'. Many language around the world (including my dear Portuguese) have an institution which regulates how language should be used, could this be a kind of influence?

This is the only forum I know that people deal with language in a more scientifical fashion.

José

[JuanTwoThree]

http://eltj.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/cont ... t/40/4/306

This refers to an article in an old ELT about error-perception between NS &NNS teachers. As the synopsis says, there were some differences of opinion about "How incorrect is incorrect" between the two groups. If I remember correctly, the Indian teachers were much stuffier than the NS. It was twenty years ago so things may have changed, even the perception that Indian teachers are necessarily NNS.

Certainly my Spanish colleagues are generally less tolerant of minor errors than are my British ones.

[Stephen Jones]

Somebody who applied for a job with us had just completed post-graduate research on the attitude towards errors of native and Saudi teachers of English. He found that the Saudi teachers were much more inclined to judge phrases as wrong that native speakers viewed as correct.

There is an explanation for this. The non-native speaker is limited to what he has been told is incorrect, whilst the native speaker has a much wider database to draw from. And most phrases that come into consideration are those that have been produced somewhere or other by a native speaker, and are thus likely to be correct anyway.

Change the type of errors to those that are acceptable in the second language, particularly collocations not acceptable in English, and the result would be different.

[JuanTwoThree]

So what makes (some of ) these Americans such sticklers?

Here's a little test.

This is another study of error rating between NS and NNS:

http://www.multilingual-matters.net/la/ ... 110084.pdf


and here is part of their conclusion:

"The NNSs were significantly more annoyed by high frequency NS and NNS errors than were the NSs and considered all errors to be more serious than did the NSs"

Here are what they call the "high frequency NS errors" which they mixed up with correct sentences, "egregious NS errors" and non-native errors. Well I don't think some of them are even wrong:

1 Everyone was asked to bring their own steaks to the barbecue.
2 They are looking forward to us visiting them in late September.
3I feel badly because we completely forgot to phone your aunt.
4 I suggest that he tries to get an acting job in Vancouver
5 I heard a real shocking story on the radio the other day
6 If I was health minister, I’d legalise marijuana for medical use.
7There’s a lot of travellers who apply for passports during the summer.
8 When a person takes exams, they should read all the questions very carefully.
9 We’ve reached an age when you should know better than to do that.
10 The responsibility for organising the conference was given to the president and myself.
11 I can’t hardly wait to find out the winners of the contest.
12 I’m trying to find out where is the new public swimming pool.
13 If I would have seen the ad, I would have applied for that job.
14 When the professor arrived, there were less students than he expected in his class.
15 One of my favourite summer pastimes is laying in the hammock in the backyard.

If you have nothing better to do, would you all mind ranking these errors (reproduced without any permission at all) from N (not an error in my book) through B ( this is bad but worse things happen) to OT (Ouch, this is terrible). And what you are? (AmE NS, BrE NS, NNS, AusE NS etc) . Thus:

[JuanTwoThree]

1 N, 2 N , 3 B , 4 N , 5 B, 6 N, 7 B, 8 N, 9 N, 10N, 11OT, 12B, 13 OT, 14B, 15 B,


I'm a BrE NS.

[lolwhites]

1N, 2N, 3B/OT, 4N, 5B, 6N, 7B, 8N, 9N, 10B, 11OT, 12OT, 13B, 14N (but I would still say something else), 15B
Me: BrE

1N, 2B, 3B, 4N, 5B, 6N, 7N, 8N, 9N, 10N, 11OT, 12B, 13OT, 14N, 15OT
My partner: NNS, French, teaches English at university, has a CPE, lived for 3 years in UK until one year ago.

Of course, "correctness" will depend on context too; some seem OK to me when spoken, but I'd correct them in an essay, while 9 only makes sense to me if the speaker and listener are the same age.

It's also been pointed out to me that a 40 year old, non-native teacher could well be teaching the English they learned 25 years ago, which may well have been 20 or 30 years oou of date when they were learning it themselves. Quite a few of these "wrong sentences" would have been condemned in UK Grammar Schools in the 1950s but would be considered perfectly acceptable today. This highlights the need for NNS teachers to regularly visit English-speaking countries and keep their knowledge up to date.

[Stephen Jones]

All are correct English except for the following:
3.B, 11.OT, 12.B, 13.B, 15.OT

I also find 9. ungainly, though I would hesitate to say incorrect.

As lolwhites has pointed out we are not commenting on what register the constructions are appropriate for.

NS BrE

[LarryLatham]

I suspect all 15 sentences are natural (actually used outside an English class) were spoken, rather than written, and uttered by educated native speakers. The so-called "errors" are not hard for any of us to spot, but I personally am bothered only by number 11, and then only fleetingly. If someone engaged in conversation with me said these things, I wouldn't bat an eye.

Oh, I'm one of those pesky American NS's.

We are in pretty rarified company here, my friends. Unkind as it may seem, I would guess that something like 20% of my teaching colleagues abroad (in Taiwan) would either have insisted most of these sentences are wrong, or would not have been able to find the error in the first place. And I'm afraid that percentage would rise to somewhere around 90% of my teaching colleagues here in California, sad to say. (I guess JTT's first comment about American mavens is on the mark, according to my personal experience.)

So I'm happy to see that many of us here, who argue so passionately every day over nuances of English structure, are also quite open to natural form, zits and all. It is a language after all, not computer code.

Larry Latham

[JuanTwoThree]

It's worth pointing out that for the three researchers all 15 were, presumably, at least "B" or they wouldn't have been in this category.

[LarryLatham]

Oh, of course. All of the sentences contain some infraction of the textbook rules of English grammar. But what's interesting is how different people see that.

Larry Latham

[Tara B]

To sidetrack a little. . .

My dad's family came to the US from England in the 1860's and settled in a small community in Idaho full of similar people. Although they're not British anymore, they have held on tenaciously to language and traditions that I consider British. . . Like, they still call their parents "Mother" and "Father." Those are the most rigid people I've run into when it comes to prescribing language. Very important to them to be "correct."

[Stephen Jones]

The researchers refer to all of them as "egregious" or "high frequency" native speaker mistakes.

None of them would pass the SATs, but then the relationship of SATs to real English, is akin to that of Disneyland to real culture.

[JuanTwoThree]

It's far from clear how the research chose the categories in the first experiment. In this, numbers 5 10 13 15 were in the "egregious" (Ouch) category alongside some real hillbilly stuff like "I seen them" but also with "unthaw the steaks" (which doesn't upset me much) and the well known "irregardless of". In this experiment, "I suggest that he tries" was high frequency (N/B on my scale?).

In the second experiment , as a result of the feedback from the first , "I suggest that he tries" had miraculously been pro/demoted to "egregious" (showing that Canadians and Swiss-Germans are picky!) and 5 10 13 (I wonder if the "If I would have" was clearly heard as "would" ) and 15 were now "high frequency" , unless I'm mistaken.

As it happens, I'm using a PET level book that teaches "If I was you" and doesn't even mention "were". Published by CUP itself, what's more.

[Stephen Jones]

'If I were you' is pretty much a set phrase. It should certainly be taught, and so should 'I/he were' in general as they are pretty common, especially in written English.

The mistakes are those that would be considered mistakes by pernickity Americans. 'I suggest he tries' is standard British English, as the present subjunctive (as opposed to the past subjunctive) has all but disappeared in British English apar from set phrases such as "Long Live the Queen!"