> > Misuse, schmisuse.  If someone uses "he ain't got none," do you let it
> > go--assuming that this is in a college course on grammar??? christine gray
>
> I thought we were talking about children in elementary schools: how
> to teach them standard English (oral & written) without making them
> feel that their home language is inferior, wrong, or incorrect.  Not
> an easy task by all means.
>
> Students in college are a different matter.
>
> Mieke Koppen Tucker
> Bishop's University
> Lennoxville, Quebec, Canada
 
Yes, they're a different matter -- you can have a more sophisticated
discussion about the _social_ reasons behind someone's denigration of a
construction like 'he ain't got none', and also a more sophisticated
discussion on how dialects differ in their grammatical rules, and, as
Terry Irons points out, go into subtle points like the varied histories
of different dialects of English. This is NOT a waste of classroom time.
 
I might point out that confidence in one's intelligence is just as
important a factor in college students (especially 'basic writers', who
have a history of failure, or they wouldn't be in the basic writing
courses) as it is in young children. If anything, it is even more
important to bring these young people to a true understanding of their
language abilities, since they have a lifetime of condemnation for using
nonstandard English to overcome.
 
I am not a wholesale bandwagoneer of the 'self-esteem movement' -- I _do_
think that lowering standards in order to promote self-esteem ultimately
does children (and adults) a huge disservice. But teaching the truth
about language does no one a disservice. And it does not constitute a
lowering of standards -- if anything, it raises them, by asking students
to commit themselves to a _scientific_ understanding of language, and
take responsibility for their own usage decisions.
 
Christine Gray's answer implies that she is not interested in the
consequences of how we react to nonstandard English, and yet other
subscribers to the list seem to think something is at stake here in terms
of effectively teaching children _whatever_ we want them to learn. Is
there, or isn't there?
 
I am going to forward to this list a posting made recently to Linguist
which addresses some of these same issues.
 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Johanna Rubba   Assistant Professor, Linguistics              ~
English Department, California Polytechnic State University   ~
San Luis Obispo, CA 93407                                     ~
Tel. (805)-756-2184  E-mail: [log in to unmask]      ~
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