Re: How would you define "native speaker of english"

aeon — Sun, 27 Feb 2005 03:35:47 GMT

Many Singaporeans do speak very good English, but the reason many western native English speakers don't consider that Singaporeans in general speak 'native English' is because of the predominance of the Singlish dialect.

Singlish in it's most extreme forms lacks inflection for tense and plural forms, the verb 'to be' is optional, particles and sentence structures borrowed from Chinese (usually Hokkien) are used, and local idioms which are not comprehensible to western English speakers are used frequently. Many Singlish speakers are incapable of speaking standard English, and are thus incomprehensible to someone who hasn't spent time there getting used to the dialect.

That said, many native speakers in the UK, Oz and the US speak dialects which are very non-standard too. Perhaps rather than quibbling over what constitutes a native speaker, the real test should be whether someone can speak and write English which is widely comprehensible? In which case many Cockneys, Scousers, Outback Aussies, Gangsta Rappers and Singlish speakers would fail the test, but a large number of English speakers who would consider even themselves to be non-native would pass with flying colours...

Re: Prescriptive Grammar - Centuries of Error

julielai — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 05:11:32 GMT

I won't comment on your post, Su, but I'd like to add a few other remarks.

When I was a kid, I did benefit from grammar lessons. After all, English has relatively few inflections and rely mainly on word order, so sentence structure has to be a sustantial part of the basic curriculum. But by the time I did O-level, I couldn't help but notice how the majority of my classmates were still struggling with basic grammar and semantics. A couple of reasons for that:

1. When students don't back up their grammar lessons with extensive exposure to English, grammar is all they can hang on to, and they'll end up learning the same rules over and over. Partly the curriculum's fault -- emphasis on reading and writing is often inadequate.

2. A passive learning environment -- back in my days, students were encouraged to trust their source of authority - be it an English textbook, an English teacher, a native speaker...students didn't learn to challenge the authority and think for themselves. To these students, the grammar was a source of authority. So these poor kids were spoonfed the rules and they often didn't know how to apply grammar sensibly.

(I was a bit of a rebel back then (okay, still am) and I ended up quarrelling with my Eng teachers quite a bit. Needless to say, my Eng. teachers didn't like me.)

I think overemphasis of grammar is certainly a problem in many outdated ESL curriculum. To me, an ideal ESL programme should:

1. help students learn the rules but not at the expense of effective communication.
e.g. the following is certainly not a good opening for a complaint letter, though it is grammatical enough:

I was horrified to see the mountains of rubbish covering xyz recently. Instead of a fresh, beautiful start to the New Year, it seems like we have gone back in time. It was painfully obvious that all the money spent over the years by the government educating the public to respect the environment and keep it clean has been wasted. Itâs ostensibly quite puzzling......

(Sadly, this is the sort of writing that is taught in some ESL programmes in China.)

2. teach kids to think for themselves, or they won't have anything interesting to communicate in the first place

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Re: How would you define "native speaker of english"

Re: Prescriptive Grammar - Centuries of Error