4 Reasons Why We Need to Teach Our Children Proper Grammar | HELP! Educational Blog

[mephestopheles]

http://helptutorservices.com/blog/5-reasons-why-we-need-to-teach-our-children-proper-grammar/ (via shareaholic)

People judge you by how you speak- Whether you like it or not, people equate grammar with intelligence. It is important to teach children that the more broken their sentences are, the more slang they employ, and the more they mispronounce the words, the more they will be perceived as ignorant. Now does the use of incorrect English actually correlate to ignorance levels, or is that just perpetuating bogus stereotypes? I would argue in favor of the former, the latter being a complete cop-out.

Comments

Oh god, I have thougths....

[stangerine88.livejournal.com]

Now does the use of incorrect English actually correlate to ignorance levels

See, I disagree with this- I speak with a newfie accent. I use newfie slang. I can't pronounce matresses for the life of me. Could I sit down and write a ten page essay on the use of soliloquy in MacBeth? Easy.

I think there's a nice lesson for those who judge based on appearences or even how people talk: don't judge a book by it's cover.

Is it annoying when someone comes up ot me at work and talks like the bastard child of a rapper and a text message junkie? Oh yes- but saying they're ignorant because of it? What about the thousands of immigrants who come to Canada, who are doctors and lawyers and teachers in their homeland but simply haven't grasped all the ins and outs of the English Language?

If we really want to get kids to learn about grammar and spelling and just how to write coherently we need to get more of them reading. Don't children learn by example?

/rant

:D Thanks for posting the link. It made me think, even if I disagreed.

Re: Oh god, I have thougths....

[mephestopheles.livejournal.com]

I know where you're coming from, I live in Cape Breton, which has a dialect similar to NFLD. I also had a mother who ruthlessly stamped out every piece of slang mispronounced word and hanging participle in the bud before they had a chance to germinate. I don't sound like I'm from CB, in fact I've had people ask me when I moved here.

The sad fact is people do judge by the cover. No matter how much we wish they didn't. Immigrants a skewered for not learning English (when in point of fact they probably know it better than most native speakers), and those with dialect differences are treated as some version of the 'poor cousin'.

What needs to happen in the educational system is change. Grammar needs to be retaught. In schools around here, Word Spell Check is the be all end all. Spelling is not taught, vocabulary is not encouraged. Hell dictionaries are starting to go extinct.

Education needs to change, I'm not even talking about dialect or slang so much as just improper grammar. Learn the rules before you break them. :D

Thanks for offering your opinion, I was hoping to get some discourse. Disagreeing is part of the process.