Joey Barton and grading your language

[MartinEnglish]

We all try to grade our language when teaching, but not quite to the extent of "speaking wrong".
London English Classes: Joey Barton English/French?

 

[emsr2d2]

Ha ha, I was just reading that story myself on the BBC website! It's one thing to take on the accent of a foreign country where you lived for some time (I know I suffered from that a little in Madrid), but to just do it in a press conference in that country is ludicrous.

 

[MartinEnglish]

yes, I had a laugh but actually, if I'm honest, I picked up some terrible habits living in Spain - I stopped using questions tags and started merely saying "no?" at the end of sentences. The worst thing is that it genuinely sounded fine to me and I had to ask people if it was correct. I'm only just starting to shake it off! Not as bad though as some teacher friends who'd spent too long in Germany and started saying "or?" (in English!) instead of question tags, like the German "oder?"
An occupational hazard I suppose.

 

[5jj]

Important is that you don't pass these things on to your students in a training. Fortunately, I am immune of such things. Even when I spend a whole weekend on the cottage in the nature with my Czech friends, I retain the purity of my tongue.

;-)

 

[MartinEnglish]

What were you doing on the cottage? Was there a flood?

 

[etep]

I quite miss Czech cottages. I wish people all over the world adopted a similar idea.

 

[Esredux]

Someone wise once said 'To err is human' and it is.
You can tear me to pieces, but no native speaker, regardless the language, is exempt from any sorts of language errors. 'Inaccuracies' come in all shapes and sizes and are particularly noticeable in informal conversations where immediate reaction, spontaneous decisions and constantly changing content override the norm. Higher levels of education could seemingly protect from such misfortunes, but ironically it applies more to speaking in L2 with a well-developed self-control and is almost always at the expense of speed (and, sadly, quite often the meaning).
My tutor, the best tutor of all time, once said 'Whatever a native speaker utters is never a mistake because this is how language evolves'. It could have been said to reassure my peers but it also inspired a certain interest into the nature of language errors.
What confuses me is if fault-finding really is a professional hallmark of a teacher.

 

[Tdol]

What confuses me is if fault-finding really is a professional hallmark of a teacher.

If it's smug and negative, then no.