British or American English

[miss_bammbamm]

Hi there,

this might sound somewhat odd as this is my first question here but recently I had a situation in class where a student's obviously googled various random vocab and wanted to know whether it was Brit.or Amer.English. Now most of them were alright but I struggled with the rest.

What are your thoughts regarding the importance of knowing that.

Thanks in advance!

Bamm

[Offroad]

I don't think it's that important. Britons and Yankees can understand each other perfectly, but none of them know all the differences between their languages, nor should they. I bet they have something more important to do. They get confused all the time when they travel overseas.

[MrPedantic]

If the googles were indeed random, I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect a non-native teacher to be aware of the provenance of each word or phrase.

An ordinary dictionary would usually tell the student if a word was particularly used in the US or UK; and if the words weren't in an ordinary dictionary, there is no reason why a teacher should know them.

All the best,

MrP

[miss_bammbamm]

Thanks for your posts!
It might not be too easy convincing them but I shall try

ta,
Bamm