Just before Christmas my husband was watching football and I
heard one of the managers speaking in a post-match interview.
During that short discourse, I heard him say
‘I was’, ‘he was’, ‘it was’, ‘we was’ and ‘they was’.
No doubt, if he came from another part of the
country, I would have heard‘ I were’, ‘he were’, ‘it were’, ‘we were’ and ‘they
were’.
Now I have nothing against local
dialects: the diversity in grammar and vocabulary found in different dialects
gives our language richness and character.
If we are curious enough to investigate a
dialect and its accent, we find out much about an area’s history, environment
and way of life.
However, working with teachers,
I am aware of the criticism they frequently receive about the way children
speak and write, so I am alert to the different dialects I hear around me
(including the Standard English dialect) and then my appropriateness radar
switches on.
As teachers, we are charged with the task of teaching
children to speak and write in Standard English, but that task is challenging
when another dialect is spoken outside school by family, friends and community. In addition, children are constantly hearing
different dialects on television and radio.
Of course, the worst thing we can do is to tell children they are wrong
to speak in dialect. They are not wrong
and we should value the rich variation in language that dialect provides. It is a community’s natural, default speech
pattern and we are only going to upset children and parents by trying to
substitute it with Standard English.
What we need to do is provide children with an understanding that Standard
English is useful for communicating with people outside of their dialect area
and for specific formal purposes. Then
they have choice: knowledge of two different ways of communicating and the
skill of understanding appropriate time and place for using each.
What is really annoying is poor usage of grammar within the
Standard English dialect, particularly when it is broadcast through television
and radio and perpetuated within the business community – the very people
complaining about school leavers’ standards of literacy.
Subject-verb ‘disagreement’ and sloppy use of
adverbs are a daily occurrence in the media and I’ve forgotten the times I’ve
heard incorrect use of
subject and object pronouns on programmes such as ‘The
One Show’ and in phone conversations with business representatives.
Poor
usage is rife in the corporate world and can be experienced almost daily in
spoken and written advertising, business forms, promotional literature, phone
communication and listening to company spokespeople in the media.
Correct usage of Standard English is also not
helped by the incredible amount of business jargon that is bandied about.
I recently heard about developments in the
‘business stream’ and the fact that people were ‘onboarded’.
It’s no good business leaders complaining
about standards of English, if they are not prepared to promote clear meaning
and correct Standard English in their own companies.
In spite of this, in the grammar islands that are our
classrooms, we will continue to rise to the challenge and develop children’s understanding
of Standard English. One of the priority
areas in this struggle is subject-verb agreement. However, in the new National Curriculum, the
government is now proposing that we should also teach primary children the
subjunctive mood, where subject-verb agreement alters in the third person
singular. Surely this is a step too
far? Use of the subjunctive mood is
fairly rare in English and, although it expresses the hypothetical, our
language has a range of modal verbs that do the same job, with less confusion
to children who may still not be secure in their use of third person singular
forms of our verbs.
It would be better if the government also switched on their
appropriateness radar and considered what eleven year old children need to focus on when learning the
Standard English dialect. The skill of speaking
and writing for formal occasions has a progression, like any other area of
learning. In my opinion, the optional
use of the subjunctive mood in formal speeches and documents does not belong in
primary education and I would suggest that valuable classroom time may well be
better spent developing understanding of those features of Standard English which
will enable children to communicate effectively, confidently and clearly in
situations where this dialect is appropriate.
If you would like further information on the subjunctive,
click here.
