DD:
I didn't realize that my posting might offend anyone --I'm
really shocked. I've just posted the message I'm pasting
here (including some random examples). I hope my
clarification (these are middle-class standard-dialect,
native-speakers of English) will be sufficient.
yvonne
On 7/30/06 I posted a kind of inquiry regarding the problems
with English that I observe in native-speakers of English
who are training to become ESL teachers.
I pointed out that some types of errors are similar to what
is often seen in various types of language deficit. That is
not to say that the students are language-impaired. Rather,
it means that the language skills of these native-speaker,
middle-class standard-dialect students are so weak that the
errors they produce often resemble what is seen in various
types of language impairment. There are clearly levels of
formal language/discourse that most people have to learn
through instruction, and these students have grown up in an
era when that instruction was minimized in the K-12
curriculum in the US (and England). T
I need to make VERY clear that the data I’ve collected
represent students who are ALL middle and upper-middle class
SES, and they are ALL native-speaker (standard-dialect)
speakers of English (I have excluded non-native speakers
from the data I’ve collected). Most, if not all of these
students have graduated from "good" public schools. They
range in age from about 21-40. Most of the students plan to
teach ESL, but about a third will be speech pathologists. (I
have worked closely with both groups.)
I'm certainly sorry if my posting was misinterpreted in any
way. My purpose was to underscore the importance of direct
instruction in grammar. I was trying to make people aware
that quality ESL instruction, now a major concern in K-12,
is jeopardized if native-speaker ESL teachers themselves
have limited skills in their own language –not to mention
problems with very basic language categories like nouns and
verbs. I hope that the examples below will be helpful. The
problems tend to be more obvious in (informational) formal
writing/speaking. The difficulties with lexicon and clause
structure are particularly interesting.
EXAMPLES:
All three systems, phonological system, lexical
system, and semantic system, have rules that help to
understanding completely the language itself.
Also, modularity includes that parts can be taken
from it and put back in.
I think what happens is that once L1 is acquired and
L2 is being learned during adulthood, the individual has a
phonological, semantic, syntactic, and lexical knowledge
that works against the variation of the knew structures and
ways of conformity to the new language.
The larynx changed from being higher like an animal
has to going lower.
In chimps and Neanderthals the larynx was up high as
opposed to adult humans today.
An extra emphasis and change of tone would help into
specifically which is a part of.
• People become so used to their language and what
parts of the system they use such as their tongue, larynx,
etc and what they use the most in order to get the sounds
that they use most often.
• After the age of eight, is gets especially hard to
learn an L2 language biologically because the person will
not have been developing and growing in the process of
internalizing speech sounds and meanings of words in the
brain like it does when one is little and just grows up
around the language and.
• Different sounds are made by different position of
the mouth and airflow, some of which occurs more naturally
and regularly than others
• Although the words up and down are antonym…
• These are idioms because the meanings aren’t taken
from the actual words, its not to be taken literally and
need a cultural knowledge of the phrases to be able to
understand what they mean. These phrases are also not
opposites which would be what would make them antonyms which
they also aren’t.
The semantic property that they would share, up as
the antonym of down, is broken because of the placement in
the idiom and in the context of the sentence.
Limiting the use of pronouns to later in the
sentences (after the subject has been called by name) can
help one avoid interpretation problems.
---- Original message ----
>Date: Mon, 31 Jul 2006 14:16:16 -0500
>From: DD Farms <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: native-speaker (ESL teacher) problems with the
language
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>At 10:58 AM 7/31/2006, Yvonne Stapp wrote: . . .
>> I'll be happy to post some
>>examples.
>
>DD: I would be delighted to see what problems face you and
those
>trying to become ESL teachers. Off list or on.
>
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Yvonne Stapp PhD
Assistant Professor of ESL
James Madison University
Dept of Exceptional Education MSC 6908
Memorial Hall 3130B
Harrisonburg, VA 22807
phone 540-568-4525
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