substandard

César   Thu Dec 29, 2005 4:00 pm GMT
My personal opinion is that I would never use the term "substandard" to describe the speech of anybody. The problem with such a word is that it simply tells you "you're not good enough at this."

Imagine yourself helping an English learner and coming up with this word every time you try to describe his/her speech. That person would never feel encouraged, and you would lead him/her to give up.

I'd rather use a word like "nonstandard," which is understood as "you're simply doing things in a different way" but not as "you're really bad."

Got the point? We should encourage learners, not make them feel bad.
Brennus   Thu Dec 29, 2005 7:09 pm GMT
Re: "The standard is prestigious, stable, widespread, and well documented. Substandard language is none of these."

I think that this is reading too much into the words 'standard' and 'substandard'. Standard English may be spoken by people as different as an eloquent newscaster and former Rhodes scholar on the one hand, and a hairdresser with only an eighth grade education on the other. To assume that the prefix sub- always has negative or pejorative connotations seems simple-minded

Re:"The problem with such a word {substandard} is that it simply tells you "you're not good enough at this."

To assume that the prefix sub- always has negative or pejorative connotations seems simple-minded;of course it does in a word like "subhuman" (German untermensch) but not in words like 'substitute' (a person filling in for an absent worker) or 'submariner' (a crewman abord a submarine) etc.
Mxsmanic   Fri Dec 30, 2005 6:31 am GMT
Telling ESL students that they aren't good enough is important, because nobody else will tell them that after they leave the class—they'll simply be rejected instead.

Pretending that ESL students speak good English may spare their feelings, but it will not accomplish their goals. If their English is substandard, they need to bring it up to standard, period. That's what they are paying for, after all. If they were not willing to acknowledge that their English is substandard, they would not be taking the class.

If a student asks me "is my English good enough for X," and it's not, then I tell him so.
Tiffany   Fri Dec 30, 2005 6:39 am GMT
<<To assume that the prefix sub- always has negative or pejorative connotations seems simple-minded>>

It is, but we are talking specifically about the word "substandard". Apparently substandard means just that to Mxsmanic: not good enough. Who else do you know that uses the word so frequently (and flagrantly I might add)? I've never seen anyone use it in a good way.
Kirk   Fri Dec 30, 2005 6:51 am GMT
<<Pretending that ESL students speak good English may spare their feelings, but it will not accomplish their goals. If their English is substandard, they need to bring it up to standard, period. That's what they are paying for, after all. If they were not willing to acknowledge that their English is substandard, they would not be taking the class. >>

My rejection of the term "substandard" is more in reference to native speech. Since nonnatives can clearly make errors with ungrammatical constructions and imperfect phonetics/phonology (as compared to the target language) and the like I agree the concept of "substandard" may apply to nonnative errors because they haven't attained the goal of native-like constructions. That being said, I still feel the terms "ungrammatical" and "nonnative mistake/error" better describe the situation than "substandard" even for nonnatives.

As César indicates, ESL students definitely need to be encouraged (and pointing out every single error someone makes is often not practical at the beginning and lower-intermediate levels. You'd be stopping every second) and ESL teachers need to be sensitive to individual differences in students. However, as Mxsmanic hints at, if a student consistently makes the same mistake they need to be made aware of it so they can consciously avoid it and learn how to avoid it in the future. However, I am rarely brutally blunt to students because I've found the same message can be made (and students can still learn they're making a mistake and fix them) with more considerate approaches.

<<To assume that the prefix sub- always has negative or pejorative connotations seems simple-minded;of course it does in a word like "subhuman" (German untermensch) but not in words like 'substitute' (a person filling in for an absent worker) or 'submariner' (a crewman abord a submarine) etc.>>

You'll notice "sub-" often carries negative connotations when attached as a prefix to a free-morpheme adjective, not a noun. Thus, things like "substitute" do not apply here (and no one's implying "sub-" implies negative connotations) but it does for something like "substandard," when applied to native speech where it's a wholly inappropriate term betraying a misguided view of how language works.
Mxsmanic   Sat Dec 31, 2005 7:57 am GMT
I am routinely blunt with students. If they don't like to hear that they are making mistakes, then it's unlikely that they will improve, and they probably shouldn't be taking English classes to begin with. If they don't mind hearing about their mistakes, then they will make progress, provided that their instructor tells them about their mistakes unambiguously.

Most of my students appreciate being told when they are making mistakes. Some of them insist on being told about every mistake, which sometimes means correcting them three or four times for every sentence they utter. These students improve quickly, as a general rule, and they are usually highly motivated personally to learn English.

Other students take English only because they are forced to. They don't want to learn English, they don't learn much at all, they don't like to be corrected, and they generally waste their time in class (and mine).

While native speakers are … native speakers, that doesn't mean that their English is sacred. If they've learned a substandard version of English as their native language, they would be well advised to switch to a standard version. If non-native speakers can do it, native speakers can do it, and they can do it more easily. If they want to spend their lives in their own neighborhoods, it may not matter, but if they want to move up in the world, they need to adhere to standards that have national and international scope.
Travis   Sat Dec 31, 2005 8:33 am GMT
>>While native speakers are … native speakers, that doesn't mean that their English is sacred. If they've learned a substandard version of English as their native language, they would be well advised to switch to a standard version. If non-native speakers can do it, native speakers can do it, and they can do it more easily. If they want to spend their lives in their own neighborhoods, it may not matter, but if they want to move up in the world, they need to adhere to standards that have national and international scope.<<

My position on this kind of thing is basically to hell with anyone who even suggests that I change my native dialect one bit.
Mxsmanic   Sat Dec 31, 2005 9:59 pm GMT
When and if you are the victim of prejudice as a consequence of the dialect of English you speak, you may change your mind.
Travis   Sun Jan 01, 2006 10:22 am GMT
>>When and if you are the victim of prejudice as a consequence of the dialect of English you speak, you may change your mind.<<

And changing how I speak would be only giving into such idiots, who should not be given a single inch to begin with.

But then, in reality the only people I've had problems with are some non-native speakers, due to simple unfamiliarity with informal forms in my dialect. They're the only people for whom I change how I speak in the first place, simply because they cannot necessarily be expected to understand such in the first place, and even then, I only do so if they appear to have comprehension problems with my normal informal speech.
Mxsmanic   Sun Jan 01, 2006 9:53 pm GMT
Language is a tool of communciation, not a part of the body. Changing language to suit the situation isn't really "giving in" to anyone, it's just adapting the tool to match the application. Of course, you might not want to communicate better with gangsters or the people who clean the toilets in your building, and that's fine. But if there are people with whom you'd like to communicate better, and they don't speak exactly as you do, adapting your speech to fit theirs can improve communication and may be quite easy to justify.

I will agree that it is rare to have problems with other people speaking anything like a standard dialect of English. Only foreign speakers of English and a handful of native speakers of obscure dialects present any real difficulty.
JJM   Sat Jan 07, 2006 12:25 am GMT
I have never in my life met someone who spoke a "standard dialect" of English.
Kirk   Sat Jan 07, 2006 12:50 am GMT
<<I have never in my life met someone who spoke a "standard dialect" of English.>>

Me neither. Probably because such a thing doesn't exist.
Mxsmanic   Sat Jan 07, 2006 1:45 am GMT
I have met many people who speak a standard dialect of English.
Kirk   Sat Jan 07, 2006 2:13 am GMT
<<I have met many people who speak a standard dialect of English.>>

Of course. Well I would expect you to say that.
Travis   Sat Jan 07, 2006 10:35 am GMT
Of course, that begs the question of what this "standard" is to begin with, as in the case of at least North American English, it is hard to speak of any truly specific "standard" variety to begin with, considering how vague "General American" is to begin with. Rather, when it comes to speech, in NAE at least, one can only have a vague notion of "standardness" within which there is quite a lot of room for actual variation, rather than any real singular "standard" at all.