Re: Grammar

Alberto Moreira wrote:
> 
> 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 !
> 
Well, I admit I'm not understanding you.



> >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.
> 
Who is letting the student get away with speaking dialect? All I said
was that the teacher should understand where the student is coming from
so that the teacher can make the best progress possible.



> >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.
> 
So if the student doesn't understand something, that's not the teacher's
problem?!



> >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.
>
I hope you aren't an ESL teacher.



> 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.
> 
Fine, but that doesn't address my original point at all.


-- 
"Throw me that lipstick, darling, I wanna redo my stigmata."
+-Jennifer Saunders, "Absolutely Fabulous"