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. > >To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: > http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html >and select "Join or leave the list" > >Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/ 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