On prescriptivism in English language teaching

When you think of a “grammar teacher” what image comes to mind?

Do you think there are “better” and “worse” ways to speak and write a language?

Do you use language in different ways depending on your audience?

                One of the trickiest terrains to manage as language teachers is our position with respect to language use – and more specifically, between a somewhat imaginary “standard” English with strict and confusing “rules”, and the realities of how native- and nonnative English speakers use the language every day. The traditional image of a stern and unsmiling teacher giving out low marks or derogatory comments every time a student ends a sentence with a preposition (Where did you go to, etc.), begins a sentence with a coordinating conjunction (And then she bought a puppy, etc.) or one of a thousand other imaginary infractions, is an enduring one. And it is probably in your mind these days, as you are likely enrolled in a course in English grammar for teachers. It’s important to spend some time at the outset unpacking some of the implicit assumptions and ideas that we bring to the job of teaching English to speakers of other languages.

                So – what is standard English, and is there really such a thing? Well, yes and no! We can generally say that, while there is no official body governing what is and is not “correct” English (some languages, such as French, actually do have a governing organization), the type of English that we usually read in newspapers and textbooks, and that we hear from newscasters, and most professors and politicians, is what most people mean when they refer to “standard” English . There are “style guides” such as Strunk and White (YEAR), American Psychological Association (APA, YEAR) and the Modern Language Academy (MLA, YEAR), and Purdue Online Writing Laboratory (Purdue OWL, YEAR) which do indeed explain the language as having a coherent set of rules for writing, but much less so for speaking. And since English is a language with a lot of flexibility in what counts as a “word” it is pretty common to consult the Oxford or Cambridge dictionaries to see if a given word is “officially” an English word. But all of this presumes that one is basically proficient in the core vocabulary and grammar of English, which in fact does not vary tremendously…

(MORE TO COME SOON)

Additional Reading: https://lingeducator.wordpress.com/descriptive-vs-prescriptive-rules/