Su,
I'm quite surprised to hear you say that. Generally speaking, my opinion is that those of us that are "against the host", as you put it, have much more experience with other languages than he does. I have no way of knowing this, of course; it's just my impression. Strange that it should be the opposite of yours!
You see, through my experience learning other languages, I have found, quite like Julie, that knowing some basic "rules", regardless of how prescriptive, is one of best ways to get started in learning a language. Gradually, the rules are relaxed, of course, but had I been subjected to discussions of all the different registers of writing and speaking at once, I would have thrown down my books in confusion and never have learned another word!
It seems to me that, in the beginning, the job of the language teacher, and the textbooks, is to "put words in the students' mouths". The teacher's job is to get the students speaking. But which words will we have them speak? At first that decision is more the teacher's than the students'. I think that that decision can and should be based on the reasonable assumption that the student wishes to learn the most standard variety of English as spoken by educated speakers of that language. If the student eventually wishes to enter a university where he or she will need English, for example, the goal is the quite practical one of mastering the vocabulary and grammar which will be needed in that setting. To be practical and efficient in reaching this goal, it would be foolish to waste time on lengthy discussions of American expressions used only in the Ozarks, for example, or the idiosyncracies of California "valley girl" vocabulary, or the variations in vowel quality between the English of Scotland and that of India. These are all descriptive of English and worthy academic topics, but that doesn't make them valuable additions to the curriculum for a non-specialist who needs English not for its own sake but to survive in the world of engineering, physics, or business, for example.
I feel the same about topics in linguistics. Being the "science of language", it is a dispassionate examination of the way people use language. It has nothing to offer, by its very nature, in terms of recommendations to the student. Being a science, it cannot recommend. It can only observe and describe. As a science, it is completely tongue-tied when the student asks, "What should I say in this situation?", "What word do I use here?", because all it can answer is "Well, 45% of native speakers say this, and 32% say that, and 11% say this", and so on. "But what should I say?" the student pleads. "So sorry, we don't make recommendations. It wouldn't be politically correct. We might slight some socially disadvantaged group of speakers who have just as much right to be represented in this class as any other speaker of English." And it's exactly in this last bit where we see the true 'science' of linguistics.
CJ
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