Learner Language: Tools for Teachers | The New School

[FKNPIGS]

wow you spent 20 minutes speaking about the absolutely irrelevant fact that she adds an s onto the end of a word. Is that all you could see? did you know what she meant?

very poor examples in your work. very irrelevant work.

"i know what i would do" - what a statement. I pity everyone that pays you money to learn something about english.

all i can say is wow

[FKNPIGS]

there's no such thing as the perfect model of english. It can vary so much from region to region that we must think in terms of international intelligibility.

[FKNPIGS]

You can be as grammatically correct as you'd like but if what you're saying is unintelligible then you're wasting your time.

Of course learners should know when they are making mistakes but they should be getting taught about proper sentence level intonation/stress/vowel length: these are things which are important to intelligibility, not minor mistakes like missing a /t/ on the end of a past tense.

Let them speak with these minor errors to improve their fluency and increase confidence.

[FKNPIGS]

this is a waste of time.

you're missinɡ the point of learninɡ a language. Intelligibility should be the focus, not wasting time on what you believe is 'correct english'.

What does a learner think when told they are making a mistake by not properly pronouncing /θ/ then go to Ireland to find that a whole native population is 'making that mistake'.

Grammatical mistakes were made by the speaker. Did it have any impact on intelligibility? No