Re: Grammar

Said  "Bill Bonde ( the oblique allusion in lieu of the frontal attack
)"  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> :

 
>We have people who have native dialects. All I'm saying is that it helps
>the learning process for the instructor to know where the student is
>coming from. Just calling the student a moron over and over while
>walloping him on the knuckles with a ruler isn't going to change
>anything except where he keeps his hands.

Language is about communication and communication goes both ways. If
I'm not communicating because my accent is too thick or my dialect is
incomprehensible, the load's on me to make myself understood. Want to
speak your dialect ? Go speak it to people who understand it, or else
make a jolly good effort to be understood by the rest of us ! 
 
>Who said *anything* about 'pandering' to anything? You invented that.

Letting a student get away with speaking dialect is pandering, unless
everyone speaks that dialect - in which case it's a dialect no more. 
 
>You are diverging into other topics here. My original point stands, that
>the teacher should have a clue *why* the student is making an error so
>that the teacher can more easily apply the right corrective measures.

The whys are pretty irrelevant to the teacher. It's a simple question
of common sense: want to be understood ? Be understood. It's up to the
student, not to the teacher. 

>Imagine walking into class with an idiolect which had tense as optional
>and aspect as mandatory, the opposite of the situation in Standard
>American English. Imagine not having understood that some of your
>dialect's constructions are camouflaged in  meaning compared to near or
>even identical constructions that the teacher knows in Standard American
>English. Would you be surprised that you might have trouble? That the
>teacher might become frustrated?

I have this kind of situation every semester with my Chinese students.
Yet they must change, and I can't do much about it - so, my class is
in English, and if they can't handle it, their problem. You know,
there's nothing like placing some demand on the student's survival
instinct, it does wonders. 


Alberto.