When they grow up, they'll know better.
Jan. 26th, 2008 11:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
franceslievensI have read ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
frenchani's rant on youngster's language use a couple of days ago. The ideas and comments that raced through my head afterwards were so diverse, that I decided to bring them together in a new entry on my LJ rather than writing everything down in an extra-long comment.
frenchani makes us aware of what she considers a lack of language skills in French high school students. Commenters pipe in that they too notice a decline in both grammatical skills and knowledge of vocabulary. I didn't bother to give my comments at this stage, because I do not consider said decline as new. I do not even consider it a decline. It is more of a status quo that gets a bit more attention.
In Flanders I have noticed a similar outcry against poor language use that gets so much screen time on the telly. They acknowledge though that the lack of language skills with the majority of Flemings is a direct effect of poor policy some decades ago. Stressing the use of correct Dutch has succesfully eradicated most dialects, but hasn't been able to learn anyone how to write or speak correct Dutch. Teachers even hardly talk standard Dutch, because they have never learned how or even why. Only a couple of weeks ago I heard my Headmistress make such a big mistake against the Dutch language, that I was indeed wondering whether no-one ever told her about it.
Of course this doesn't explain the French situation, but it might be interesting to put two situations next to each other. Does one explanation fit for the other? Or do you need more? Which indeed I have. Just look under the fold.
My strong belief is that we can consider two reasons for student's bad behaviour towards their mother tongue*: (1) People are innately lazy and (2) Not adhering to language rules is an easy way to display subversive behaviour.
Why should I spell correctly? You did understand what I was trying to say.
Teachers will probably have heard that flimsy excuse for mistakes made in essays. I usualy retort that spelling correctly in fact makes things easier to read. If the mood hits me, I write a couple of words on the blackboard. The kids blink, wonder what's written, until one of them reads it aloud, and suddenly they all know. Dutch isn't spelled like you hear it. Most of the words we borrowed from other languages have kept their foreign spelling. But we are used to that spelling, so we hold on to it. A trained reader reads words, not letters. You only go back to the letters when the words don't fit the image you have of them, but this takes time. If I would have misspelled every word in this little text, you would have stopped reading. Not because it's your pet peeve or something, but because it takes time and effort to read such a text. So, you should spell correctly if you want someone to read without effort what you've written.
I don't often convince pupils of being right though. They don't want to spell correctly, because it takes effort. Dutch uses some strange rules that you need to apply, and when you've only just begun to learn them you'll have to think about applying them with every word you write. When you grow older and more used to the rules, you apply them no matter what and you start using them even when they don't apply, because you weren't paying attention. That's also being lazy. You write "Ik wordt" (I become) whereas it should be Ik word, because well the version with -dt is a bit more prevalent in reading material**. Not noticing the misspelled word is pure lazyness. People don't take the time to reread what they've written or typed for that matter.
What I do find striking – but I don't know whether this is a contemporary problem or a problem with non-native speakers – is unwillingness to learn the rules. My friend teaches Dutch and English in secondary school and has told me his students stil misspell their verbs (the only words that have the weird -dt at the end). The rule is simple: regular verbs have stem+t in present time for second and third person singular. This is also the case for words whose stem ends with a d, hence the dt pronounced as t. Still at 16 they are unable to apply this rule to actual words in actual sentences and texts they write. I believe this is a lack of general language skills in any language, a problem that's based in growing up in more than one language and ending up not even achieving fluency in one of them.
You were young once, miss!
No, that one I never heard, but sometimes I thought it when a teenager myself. We give our children and teenagers more free reign nowadays. They can choose for themselves, don't have that many rules to abide to, and are allowed to criticise the ones we do set them. Teenagers don't ask of each other to spell correctly. They ask to put as much info as possible into one little text. So they think up abreviations, new words... Even my teacher-friend is an avid misspeller in texts. His messages are a constant play with words – probably more conscious than the word-play of your average 16 year old.
Where that average 16 year old and her teacher differ though, is that the teenager doesn't regard the rule that says you can't use text-messaging out of context and that different language rules apply for different situations. A teenager simply doesn't care, or changes the rules at will. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was and is famous for using that element of teenage culture and thus making the characters believable. They did as teenagers do: take language and use it in all the wrong contexts.
Language is a means to give yourself and your group an identity, to put yourselves against "the others", the ones that speak another language. There has been a study into language use by adolescents of Maroccon descent in Antwerp – I liked it so much I keep quoting it, although I don't know who conducted or if it got refuted. The general belief is that those young people can't speak standard Dutch, because they don't mingle with Flemings and talk only Arab amongst themselves. The study completely wrecked this belief. The Antwerp Maroccons mastered 4 different "languages": Arab at home, standard Dutch in school, Antwerp dialect on the streets, and a bastardised version of Dutch they used when talking to Flemings, because it was that what was expected of them – that they couldn't speak correct Dutch. Their crippled Dutch was indeed their slang to make fun of the outsiders.
*I am not considering my own pupils, who have an even worse behaviour towards Dutch, but it isn't their mother tongue. Of all my pupils only 15% has at least one parent who talks Dutch at home. For Brussels this is a high percentage, partially distorted because of the nature of my class. Morality does fish in the pool of native Belgians and not the pupils of foreign descent.
**Dutch must be the only language that has a t-sound written as t, d, and dt. If you got some time I'll explain the rule, which isn't that hard, come to think about it.
frenchani's rant on youngster's language use a couple of days ago. The ideas and comments that raced through my head afterwards were so diverse, that I decided to bring them together in a new entry on my LJ rather than writing everything down in an extra-long comment.frenchani makes us aware of what she considers a lack of language skills in French high school students. Commenters pipe in that they too notice a decline in both grammatical skills and knowledge of vocabulary. I didn't bother to give my comments at this stage, because I do not consider said decline as new. I do not even consider it a decline. It is more of a status quo that gets a bit more attention.In Flanders I have noticed a similar outcry against poor language use that gets so much screen time on the telly. They acknowledge though that the lack of language skills with the majority of Flemings is a direct effect of poor policy some decades ago. Stressing the use of correct Dutch has succesfully eradicated most dialects, but hasn't been able to learn anyone how to write or speak correct Dutch. Teachers even hardly talk standard Dutch, because they have never learned how or even why. Only a couple of weeks ago I heard my Headmistress make such a big mistake against the Dutch language, that I was indeed wondering whether no-one ever told her about it.
Of course this doesn't explain the French situation, but it might be interesting to put two situations next to each other. Does one explanation fit for the other? Or do you need more? Which indeed I have. Just look under the fold.
My strong belief is that we can consider two reasons for student's bad behaviour towards their mother tongue*: (1) People are innately lazy and (2) Not adhering to language rules is an easy way to display subversive behaviour.
Why should I spell correctly? You did understand what I was trying to say.
Teachers will probably have heard that flimsy excuse for mistakes made in essays. I usualy retort that spelling correctly in fact makes things easier to read. If the mood hits me, I write a couple of words on the blackboard. The kids blink, wonder what's written, until one of them reads it aloud, and suddenly they all know. Dutch isn't spelled like you hear it. Most of the words we borrowed from other languages have kept their foreign spelling. But we are used to that spelling, so we hold on to it. A trained reader reads words, not letters. You only go back to the letters when the words don't fit the image you have of them, but this takes time. If I would have misspelled every word in this little text, you would have stopped reading. Not because it's your pet peeve or something, but because it takes time and effort to read such a text. So, you should spell correctly if you want someone to read without effort what you've written.
I don't often convince pupils of being right though. They don't want to spell correctly, because it takes effort. Dutch uses some strange rules that you need to apply, and when you've only just begun to learn them you'll have to think about applying them with every word you write. When you grow older and more used to the rules, you apply them no matter what and you start using them even when they don't apply, because you weren't paying attention. That's also being lazy. You write "Ik wordt" (I become) whereas it should be Ik word, because well the version with -dt is a bit more prevalent in reading material**. Not noticing the misspelled word is pure lazyness. People don't take the time to reread what they've written or typed for that matter.
What I do find striking – but I don't know whether this is a contemporary problem or a problem with non-native speakers – is unwillingness to learn the rules. My friend teaches Dutch and English in secondary school and has told me his students stil misspell their verbs (the only words that have the weird -dt at the end). The rule is simple: regular verbs have stem+t in present time for second and third person singular. This is also the case for words whose stem ends with a d, hence the dt pronounced as t. Still at 16 they are unable to apply this rule to actual words in actual sentences and texts they write. I believe this is a lack of general language skills in any language, a problem that's based in growing up in more than one language and ending up not even achieving fluency in one of them.
You were young once, miss!
No, that one I never heard, but sometimes I thought it when a teenager myself. We give our children and teenagers more free reign nowadays. They can choose for themselves, don't have that many rules to abide to, and are allowed to criticise the ones we do set them. Teenagers don't ask of each other to spell correctly. They ask to put as much info as possible into one little text. So they think up abreviations, new words... Even my teacher-friend is an avid misspeller in texts. His messages are a constant play with words – probably more conscious than the word-play of your average 16 year old.
Where that average 16 year old and her teacher differ though, is that the teenager doesn't regard the rule that says you can't use text-messaging out of context and that different language rules apply for different situations. A teenager simply doesn't care, or changes the rules at will. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was and is famous for using that element of teenage culture and thus making the characters believable. They did as teenagers do: take language and use it in all the wrong contexts.
Language is a means to give yourself and your group an identity, to put yourselves against "the others", the ones that speak another language. There has been a study into language use by adolescents of Maroccon descent in Antwerp – I liked it so much I keep quoting it, although I don't know who conducted or if it got refuted. The general belief is that those young people can't speak standard Dutch, because they don't mingle with Flemings and talk only Arab amongst themselves. The study completely wrecked this belief. The Antwerp Maroccons mastered 4 different "languages": Arab at home, standard Dutch in school, Antwerp dialect on the streets, and a bastardised version of Dutch they used when talking to Flemings, because it was that what was expected of them – that they couldn't speak correct Dutch. Their crippled Dutch was indeed their slang to make fun of the outsiders.
*I am not considering my own pupils, who have an even worse behaviour towards Dutch, but it isn't their mother tongue. Of all my pupils only 15% has at least one parent who talks Dutch at home. For Brussels this is a high percentage, partially distorted because of the nature of my class. Morality does fish in the pool of native Belgians and not the pupils of foreign descent.
**Dutch must be the only language that has a t-sound written as t, d, and dt. If you got some time I'll explain the rule, which isn't that hard, come to think about it.
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long reply that I will crosspost to my own journal
Date: 2008-01-28 05:12 pm (UTC)I believe that every generation of teachers, parents and authority figures bemoans a lack of language skills - it's like those complaints about 'young people nowadays' that seem to be so now, but then turn out to be from Roman times.
That said, this decline is indeed real, but I often think that it gets fudged with other issues. For example, in my form (which of course isn't a representative sample) several of the children with an immigrant background have actually less problems with reading comprehension and vocabulary than some of the kids who are born and bred Germans. Sometimes, the bilingual (or multilingual) background actually helps them understand structures better.
Certainly, that study isn't far off the mark. There are kids though who are not at home in any of their languages, like one of the boys in my class who is originally from Russia but counts as a German because he's got German ancestors: He can't read Russian, but it's the language he speaks at home and he really struggled with German which I believe is more a problem of not getting enough input. He's catching up fast at the moment, due to the fact that he has more of a social life now.
Strangely enough, I've never heard students say that they don't care about their bad spelling because as long as they're understood they are not bothered by it. Maybe once they're in secondary school they know what is expected of them. As far as bad spelling is concerned it's often just a sign of a lack of concentration, though some of them do struggle with the rules.
Most of my students know that there are different registers and there are words that you shouldn't use in a text for school because they're too colloquial. Sometimes they make a conscious decision to use a colloquialism because to their mind it just fits the situation better, sometimes they just can't come up with an alternative and sometimes they don't realize that a certain expression is too slangy.
There are other students though who genuinely struggle with the structures of language, whose sentences are messy or incomplete or just go on forever. Sometimes it's because they're actually dyslexic, sometimes it's because they are just not good at languages. Not everyone can be good at writing and I believe there has never been a time when everyone spoke or wrote according to the highest standard.
Do we care less today about these standards? I don't think so, or there wouldn't be that many complaints. Are standards actually slipping? They're certainly changing - when we read a text today that was written 100 years ago, it often seems stilted to us and I'm sure that the way we speak and write will feel dated soon, too. Does that mean our language becomes less valuable because of that? I don't know - maybe there was a time when regular people wrote letters regularly and maybe people then were much better at it, but I'm sure that even then there were snobs who complained about the rough language of the common people. I believe that there will always be human beings around who are creative and original with the way they use language and thus I'm not worried that we're losing it, whatever that high ideal of language might be.