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Stephen Jones wrote:I agree with Doris Day

The "colloquial" language of the NW of England it being taught to Spanish nurses working in that area. Their hard won level of Standard English helped them get, but not do, the job.

lolwhites wrote:The Spanish nurses in question had very specific needs - had they been sent to Wolverhampton they'd have needed another dialect, but when they were first learning English, they had no way of knowing which dialects they'd need to understand in the future.

Indeed not, but many students are given the "promise", or led to believe, that SE will provide them with all the language they need to communicate internationally, climb socially and professionally.

If we shouldn't teach them SE, what should we teach instead? A fair question if you only teach one-to-one classes, less so with a class of 30.

Do you teach your students spoken SE? If so, what is it? What is spoken SE?

In the years before Manchester hospitals employed Spanish "NNES" nurses, no need was identified in the area of misunderstanding locals. The nurses were taught to communicate orally with their Manchester patients. Coronation St, a British TV soap, was used a support material in class.
The nurses were somewhat annoyed at having to give more time to rel-earning spoken English. The promise of the English teaching academies in Spain had led them to believe they would be able to use the English they had learned on home soil.

More later.

The nurse were somewhat annoyed at having to give more time to rel-earning spoken English. The promise of the English teaching academies in Spain had led them to believe they would be able to use the English they had learned on home soil.

many students are given the "promise", or led to believe, that SE will provide them with all the language they need to communicate internationally, climb socially and professionally.

The nurse were somewhat annoyed at having to give more time to rel-earning spoken English. The promise of the English teaching academies in Spain had led them to believe they would be able to use the English they had learned on home soil.

That's not an argument against teaching SE,

Nor is this:

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Asking students to learn standard English because it is important for career development indexes a vague future. 

it simply shows that the schools were not honest with their students.

It's quite common.

<In answer to your question, yes, I do teach RP. In fact, Phonetics is one of the courses I have to teach. That's not because RP is better, but it's (a) the one I'm qualified to teach and (b) more widely understood than Geordie. >

So you teach students to use a minimal pronunciation? Do you really believe that it is more widely understood? I've been teaching for 25yrs and found that most students have just as much trouble understanding RP users as they do many other English accents.

If the patient is hard of hearing, distressed, or hasn't ventured far from their home town they might have great difficulty understanding a strong (say) Spanish or Filipino accent.

So for you there's only RP or a strong L1 accent, right. No grades in between.

Tens of thousands of people in Manchester have lived for years speaking only standard English there.

The principle of teaching the Standard Language to Foreigners and letting them pick up the local dialect in situ is entrenched in the teaching of most languages.

In answer to your question, yes, I do teach RP. In fact, Phonetics is one of the courses I have to teach. That's not because RP is better, but it's (a) the one I'm qualified to teach and (b) more widely understood than Geordie.

In an investigation with over 1,200 Chinese students at her university, the writer discovered that the vast majority had never heard of either World English or China English, believing instead that proficiency in standard American or British English should be their goal.