The article titled “The importance of proper and improper English”, Johnson (November 2nd 2017) explains some criticisms of Tom Sherrington’s blog post titled “Let’s talk properly”, which is addressed to teachers, asking them to encourage students to communicate in standard English. The critics come from Rob Dummond, a linguist at Manchester Metropolitan University and Oliver Kamm, a journalist at the Times. They criticise the use of the word “properly” along with related words like “correct”, suggesting that such fierce argument sums up the way academic linguists (especially sociolinguists) see standard English. While teachers see a sentence such as “I aint done nothing” as simply wrong, linguists find dialects as rule-governed, coherent and fully expressive; which only sound wrong to those who don’t understand the rule. There might be political aspect surrounding the debate. Dialects are usually linked to poor, non-white and less educated society, which leads to false discourse that their language must be one of the things that holds these people back. Both sides agree that standard English is indeed necessary, and while it’s fine to speak it in different accents, grammatical correctness is absolutely needed. But children who speak other than standard English at home, should not be discouraged about their home speech. After all, dialects are as valuable as the standard English, they give the speakers some sense of belonging and identities. Children should rather be taught the occasion, where and when they need to switch between language varieties. Teaching the ability to understand the difference, or even translate one variety of language to another is proven to be more effective than to prevent the students to speak in dialects at all. (277 words)
The original article can be found here:
the-importance-of-proper-and-improper-english it contains 754 words
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