Future Englishes - Is Standard English the Only Educational Standard? | Stewart McNicol | TEDxStoke
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- Опубліковано 2 лют 2017
- English is a world language which exists in a range of different forms. Education expects students to use Standard English. But are other forms of English - the dialects which make up most of our language - really inferior? Is it time for education to adapt and allow for a range of Englishes?
Filmed Dec 2016 at The City of Stoke-on-Trent Sixth Form College.
[Cameras (Staffs Uni): Oluseyi A Oluyinka; Giorgia Perini; Bob Straw; Tom Andrews; Ed Walker]
[Editor (Staffs Uni): Carl Maddox]
Stewart McNicol is a teacher of English with years of experience teaching in Stoke schools and colleges, often even teaching teachers. It is often said that something is not good English or is ‘wrong’ when it comes to language. Stewart's talk considers how the English language is not best seen as a monolithic entity with rules that should not be broken. Rather, English covers a range of communication styles, a related family of languages, each appropriate in its own time and place. Educational success, then, should not be limited to those who can engage with ‘correct’ English, but should be open to the rich variety of all our various Englishes.
This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at ted.com/tedx
Absolute legend.
This man taught me English Language at Sixth Form college. He's genuinely one of the best teachers I've ever had. He seems to understand that students are diverse and not comparable by backgrounds or grades, everyone's intelligence is measured in different ways.
He always taught his subject with diversity, compassion and empathy in mind and in a way that would really make you think.
It goes to show that when you really care about your students and your subject you can have a profound impact on their lives.
The way teaching is done is important- it should never exclude, degrade or belittle anyone.
Fair to say that more teachers need to be like him.
Well done and thank you Stewart.
Brilliant talk, i can relate to this so much. I'm originally from Longton, Stoke-on-Trent and i moved to London in my mid 20's as a designer. When i first moved I was expecting to hear accents like the characters from Eastenders but was shocked that all my work colleagues and friends had 'well spoken' southern accents, i found it very intimidating. This feeling that my Stoke Accent was common and i sounded unintelligent. So unfortunately 12 years on i've ironed out my stoke accent. A large part of my job is presenting design work to clients and this internal pressure that my accent was bad has made me change it to a more neutral 'standard' accent.
Who is that absolute stud of a man? Seems like a lovely fella to have a pint with
Great talk. Where I'm from, there are lots of different "speech levels" and a regional accent (Texan) and minority and majority accents. In school and in business, everything but standard Midwestern English (flavored by local big-city Texan) is there, but it's socially substandard to a greater or lesser degree. Kids with very "country twang" or minority community accents get socially less status and more discrimination, and so do their adult family members out in the work world. (And my dad had a very strong regional minority American accent: Appalachian American, like in the Foxfire heritage books or a few country singers.) I was nearly adult before I could appreciate my own dad's way of speaking. We need to find ways of destigmatizing those minority accents. If we want people to really learn a standard way of speaking and writing, then we need to include them and find ways to "translate" from their dialects to the standard one, so they learn it and aren't socially or academically handicapped, stigmatized, for the way they speak at home and with friends. Why should we look down on that? It's a rich cultural heritage, and yes, there are nuances that the standard dialect doesn't always have. It's also important as oral history, the way all our people lived and adapted to life here, and how we have come together. So why do we insist on making it hard and lower class, to keep people from learning the standard easily? Ir's social prejudging. It's stigmatizing. It's perpetuating negative views and an underclass and handicapping people who are just as good as anyone else. We've got to find a way to handle this better in schools and in business. Sure, having a standard speech and writing level is good for communication. But let's find ways to make it easy for folks with non-standard speech to learn the standard dialect, so they aren't perpetually disadvantaged by how weirdly subtly different the standard is, without teaching ways to learn it well. And...maybe our standards are outdated too. I see less and less of some things even from educated speakers, and I work with words and editing a lot. If no one really uses the textbook dialect in some ways, then just possibly, our standards are out of touch with reality, out of date, and need to be updated to meet what's really used by most educated people in everyday speech and writing.
I'm an American. I belong to a worldwide writing forum. The Brits and Aussies speak a different language. And we all have to ask each other for clarification many times. Colloquialisms aside, we all expect proper grammar usage to help us at least try to parse out what we each are saying. I don't know if any of my friends are "posh" although I do have an idea of its meaning. But there is no accent included in the written word.
Thanks for this! Three vague thoughts:
1. Rumour has it that Norway's very good at just embracing letting people talk the way they talk. (Partly to do with promoting dialects as part of the nineteenth-century National-Romantic resistance to Danish/Swedish domination.) I must ask around and find out whether Norwegian education is actually a model for Anglophonia or whether it's really another hotbed of chauvinisms!
2. I'm endlessly fascinated by the detail that in Finland, which has Finnish and Swedish as official languages, Finnish-speakers do marginally better at school than Swedish-speakers, despite Swedish-speakers doing better on pretty much every other indicator (wealth, happiness, health, etc.). The suspicion lurks (though as far as I know it's only a suspicion, and to be fair I only know this fact at all 'cos a friend told me and I've never checked it) that maybe Finnish is an easier language to study in. It only started to be written extensively 200 years ago, so the written form is relatively close to the spoken (despite some marked differences). And vocab is very transparent: 'kirja' ('book', Sw. 'bok'), 'kirjallisuus' ('literature', Sw. 'literatur'), 'kirjasto' ('library', Sw. 'bibliotek'), 'kirjoita' ('write', Sw. 'skriva'). So it's arguably easier for kids to master technical language in Finnish. Although I revel in the huge vocabulary and intricate syntax of academic English, I worry that it's an inherently undemocratic language.
3. I wonder what it'd be like if we had more of a culture of accent-switching in English. If I go to Glasgow I sort of feel like I should be switching to Scottish English but don't because (a) I'd be rubbish at it and (b) people would think I was taking the piss. But a couple of decades ago in Ghana I found people understood me better if I attempted a local accent and spent most of my time approximating it (I wonder if I'd be too self-conscious to now...). You might think that'd be hard work, but it wasn't. And I've seen people switch gymnastically between British and Indian Englishes, or standard English and Aberdeen Doric, and of course little kids seem to do it instinctively. Just as a thought-experiment, what would it be like for teachers to learn to sound like pupils as part of their PGCEs, rather than kids learning to sound like teachers in their GCSEs? (And conceivably to teach everyone some kind of lingua franca accent for international use--I remember reading some research saying that non-native speakers usually find it easier to understand rhotic varieties, so this might for example include most English people learning to say 'r' in words like 'word'.)
Oh dear. That had paragraph breaks in before I posted it, then UA-cam took them all away...
hi guys I'm Banglideshi,
Do you agree or disagree with what you learn in English must follow a standard English?
I don't agree because English is the world's lingua franca owned and used by all people in the world as part of their communicative repertoire alongside their other languages 😊. I love English and I feel that I own English with a different social function compared to that of English native speakers. I love equality of English use amid the presence of multiculturality of English users
This is suggesting that we further disadvantage the poorer communities already subject to broken families, drugs, violance and sub par education because of government and community leaders who subjugate and exploit, by teaching them not to speak properly so they can be readily understood by others a necessity for employment. The only people this is good for is those making money talking about it in clear English. My opinion
Who taught you that the in fact arbitrarily chosen regional accent (or group of similar accents from a broad region, in the case of the USA) that was chosen to be standard across whatever country you're in, is "speaking properly" and that all the other regional accents that developed in parallel with it - as opposed to having diverged from it - are not? That is what makes children grow up to be employers who despite understanding all of them, will assume everyone not born into or artificially adopting that particular regional accent is badly educated or unintelligent. There's nothing wrong with arbitrarily choosing a regional accent as the standard for ONE purpose: teaching a language as spoken in a given country to non-native speakers, so that they aren't confused by conflicting pronunciations in learning materials before they know the language well enough to adapt to its variability, and so that they will have a single natively used accent that native speakers across that country are familiar with instead of randomly using features of multiple accents for different words, as the latter would make them harder to understand. But the way the chosen accent is used in many countries - spending time teaching native speakers of all the unchosen regional accents, with no speech impediments, to pronounce words differently despite being perfectly understandable to most people both locally and in most other regions - causes them to grow into employers who discriminate in hiring and promotions, because they see one regional accent or continuum of accents as "proper" and every other accent as a failed attempt at it.