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Originally Posted by Casiopea Most importantly, the majority of language providers welcomed into Asia to "teach" English aren't qualified to teach grammar nor do they speak the Standard either. Same holds true for ESL students who learn English as a survival language. Native speakers aren't necessarily qualified teachers of grammar either. If a student is serious about learning "English" then the student needs to know that language encompasses three skills: reading, writing, and speaking. |
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Deviations from the Standard that I have noticed:
Phonology: e.g., supposu*bly
Morphology: e.g., poor spelling (pick an example), PPs (I *drunk beer).
Syntax: e.g., adverb order (I *sometimes have been known to watch TV.)
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Hi Casio,
I know you've noticed these deviations from the standard, but I'm not sure that I completely understand. If I understand correctly, you're saying you've heard native speaker
ESL/EFL teahers deviate from the standard in these ways?
By the way, once again, placing "sometimes" after the subject and before the auxiliary "have" is not a deviation from the standard. There's less of a tendency to do that, but it's not a deviation from standard language. It can sound emphatic. It can also simply be seen as additional information, in which case it should be set off by commas. Also, that just simply might be where "sometimes" occurred in the mind of the speaker as he/she was speaking. It's not right to call it a deviation from the standard. The rules of adverb placement can, at times, be difficult to define in a precise way for the learner. Adverb placement is more flexible in spoken language, though there are still limitations, of course. In written language, one could expect to find that adverb placement conforms to more usual tendencies. I wouldn't call these tendencies rules, however. All one needs to do is listen to enough samples of spoken English to know and understand this.