Language Attitudes towards Prescriptive
and Descriptive Grammar Use and a Suggested Teaching Approach
Senzoku Ronso, March 2002
Maiko Hata maihata@hotmail.com http://www.geocities.com/maihata/Newindex.html
Introduction
This study was inspired by an incident that took place when
I was living in California. I had a conversation with an elderly Caucasian lady
at a bus depot. She asked me what I was studying so I told her I was studying
English education. She closed our conversation by saying, “Well, I’m sure
you’ll make a good teacher, because you speak very good English. Actually, I
think you speak better English than some people around here.” Although I knew
she was trying to encourage me, I was shocked to hear her opinion which was the
extreme opposite of those I was used to hearing in the Teaching English to
Speakers of Other Languages program at Monterey Institute of International
Studies (MIIS). This incident made me wonder how the majority of people in an
English speaking country feel about prescriptive and descriptive grammar. This
incident also made me feel the need to find a way of teaching the roles both
prescriptive and descriptive grammar play.
In this short paper, I would like to show what
native-speakers and non-native speakers think is correct English by examining
how people with various backgrounds reacted to the use of prescriptive and
descriptive grammar. By descriptive grammar, I mean utterances which are
prescriptively incorrect but often used by native speakers. A suggested
teaching approach for the prescriptive and descriptive grammar in ESL / EFL
classrooms will also be shown.
Procedure
The questionnaire was designed to elicit how the subjects
feel about the sentences with prescriptive and descriptive grammar. The
sentences with prescriptive grammar are:
That dress we saw in Carmel was really
cute.
There are just too many people here.
The
sentences with descriptive grammar are:
He’s
real tall. (An adjective “real” is used in place of an adverb “really”)
I’m
going to finish this real quick, can you wait? (An adjective “real” is
used in place of an adverb “really”)
There’s
some cookies if you’d like. (A
singular form “-‘s” is used in place of plural “-‘re”)
For
each of the sentence above, subjects were asked to indicate if they use it,
if the sentence is correct, if they hear people say it, and when
they hear people use it if it bothers them. For each of the questions,
they had multiple choices. For the frequency of use of the form, they had
options of always, often, not usually and never.
These were used as well for the question of whether or not they hear people say
it. For correctness, they could choose from correct, incorrect
and depends with a parentheses saying, correct if used in blank.
Five
of the subjects were asked to do the questionnaire at home. One was asked
outside a school bookstore, three were students who were on the MIIS campus and
one was around the school who was not a student. They were either interviewed
orally or asked to fill out the questionnaire.
Subjects & Analysis
A
total of ten people participated in this study. Six of them were students at MIIS.
One of them was a translator, one was an attendant at the school bookstore, one
was unemployed and one subject’s career status is unknown. Seven of them were in their twenties, two in
thirties, one was in her forties. Each subject was categorized into three
groups: female or male, native speaker (NS) or non-native speaker (NNS) of
English, and translation & interpretation major (T&I) or other.
The
first category, gender, is used in this study, since it is “[t]ypically, though
not always, women are found to use prestige variants more frequently when
discrete linguistic items are analyzed” (McKay & Hornberger, 1996, p.15).
Five female subjects and five male subjects participated in this study.
Prescriptive grammar, in this study, could be considered a prestige variant.
The
second category, NNS & NS status, is used, since I personally had trouble
getting rid of prescriptive grammar that I learned in Japan when I moved to
California, since that had been the only grammar tolerated at the Japanese schools that I attended. This
led me to an assumption that NNS might be more aware of prescriptive grammar,
with smaller tolerance for descriptive grammar, and use it more often than NS
do. Six NNS of English and four NS participated.
The
last category is that of people who major or majored in the translation and
interpretation (T & I) program at MIIS. The reason I used them as subjects
and even decided to use this category on this is because I thought that unlike
linguists in the TESOL field, they might have a lower tolerance for the use of
descriptive grammar since they are required to be grammatically “correct” as
well as being “correct” on the discourse level.
Although
differences in age might have affected the outcome of this study they are not
discussed, mainly because there was not a big range in age. Ethnicity will also
not be discussed because of concerns that it might not be reliable data since
all the Asian subjects were NNS of English.
Results
1. Gender
It
was observed that male subjects had a greater tolerance for descriptive grammar
than female subjects. A majority of men’s responses (14/15)[1]
were that it does not bother them when they heard people use descriptive
grammar. In looking at women, the responses for two sentences were mixed.
However, four out of five women were somewhat bothered when they heard people
say I’ll finish it real quick.
The
majority of both women and men considered the sentences with descriptive
grammar incorrect. However, while a majority of women’s responses (13/15) showed
that they consider descriptive grammar incorrect, only nine out of fifteen
men’s responses showed that they consider it incorrect. This might be the
reason why many of women’s responses (8/15) showed that they do not usually use
descriptive forms while many men’s responses (8/15) showed that they do use
them always or often.
There
was not a big difference observed in their frequency of use of these forms.
2. NNS & NS
The
most striking finding in this category might be the difference in the degree of
“bothered-ness” when the subjects heard people use descriptive grammar.
Descriptive grammar bothers many of NNS subjects (8/18 responses), while it did
not bothered any of the NS subjects at all. This might be because NS are aware
of descriptive grammar and accept it as a change in language since they have
lived in the English speaking environment and heard the descriptive grammar for
such a long time, while NNS had lived in the environment and experienced the
descriptive grammar for about only one to five years. Before coming to the U.S,
it is highly possible that the NNS subjects had learnt the prescriptive grammar
as the only grammar. However, it is important to note here that the NS subjects
consisted of 3 male and 1 female while NNS subjects consist of 4 female and 2
male, and this overlap might have affected the data.
There
was not a big difference observed in responses between NNS (15/16 – 83%) and NS
(9/12 – 75%) on their perception of what is considered correct. The interesting
finding here is that one male NS consistently considered all the sentences with
descriptive grammar correct, while none of the NNS did so. This might suggest
that there are NSs out there who have no problem using and hearing descriptive
grammar, and who are the very people promoting the change in the English
language.
There
was not a big difference in the frequency of use between NNS and NS. However,
while the majority of NS responses (10/12) showed that they always hear people
use the descriptive forms, twelve out of sixteen NNS responses showed they
never or do not usually use them. This is interesting since nine out of sixteen
NNS responses were that it bothers them when they hear these forms that they
think they do not hear often. One reason for this could be since they do not
hear (or think they do not hear) descriptive grammar often, when they do notice
descriptive grammar, it bothers them.
3. T & I
The
majority (10/12) of T & I responses were that they never or usually do not
use the descriptive grammar, while seven out of eighteen non-T&I responses
were that the subjects always used it. Also, eight out of twelve T&I
responses showed that it bothered them somewhat when they heard people using
it, while all of the non –T&I subjects said that it never bothered them at
all. One thing I have to note here is that it was observed that while eight
non- T&I responses showed that they consider descriptive form incorrect,
they still indicate that it never bothered them. Again, as I stated in the
NS/NNS category, it might be the case that people who actually learned the
language feel that prescriptive grammar is the only grammar, while non-T&I
students accept the language changes.
Limitations
Some
limitations were observed in this study. There was a limitation with the sentences
with prescriptive and descriptive grammar themselves. People sometimes focused
on the “incorrect” usage of some vocabulary, and may not have focused on the
descriptive grammar issues in this study. For example, one subject told me that
there are just too many people here is incorrect, since she was looking at just, rather than
the prescriptive form of there are. Another subject told me that the
dress we saw in Carmel was really cute is incorrect, attention being on
collocation of dress and cute, rather than really. This
might have happened since they might have assumed there was something
“incorrect” with every sentence. In fact, one NNS female T&I put incorrect
to every sentence, including the ones with prescriptive grammar. Also, on
overlap of subjects in the categories can be observed. As stated earlier, three
out of four NS were male and four out of six NNS were female. This might have
affected the outcome of the analysis. Also, collecting data orally and through
the written questionnaires might have affected the outcome, since it is
possible that the subjects did not feel as comfortable answering questions
orally as when they could take time to write their answers on the
questionnaire.
Sociolinguistic View
Wardhaugh
(1994) argues that “… what we see here is not so much a change in progress but
an unconscious resistance to a change being brought in from Standard
English”(p.203). I agree with this, since from the data I collected, it appears
that some of the subjects seem to hear descriptive grammar and accept the
change by saying it does not bother them when they hear people say it, and yet
think that they do not use the descriptive forms because they consider it
incorrect. Of course, this might be because they are “overreporting”(Wardhaugh,
p.201)their use of prescriptive grammar, since the majority of the subjects
were women, who are suggested to overreport (Trudgill, 1972, cited in
Wardhaugh, p.201). Also, it might be possible, since the majority of the
subjects were students at a graduate school that requires most of its students
to be fluent in or take courses in a second language, that this could have led
them to be more aware of the use of prescriptive grammar.
One
female subject in her forties who was not bothered by the descriptive grammar points
but never used them and considered them incorrect, made an interesting comment
on descriptive grammar. She said “I’m too old for these sentences”. This agrees
with a sociolinguistic view which suggests that “… younger speakers can be
observed to use the language differently from older speakers”(Wardhaugh, 1996,
p.196). However, this does not necessarily mean language change, since it might
be just different variables used by different groups of people, just like
regional differences. In order to see if the differences in age group is indeed
a reflection of language change, we would have to collect data over a long
period of time to see if the middle aged subjects continued to used the same
form (Wardhaugh, p.196).
Another
thing I learned in the process of this study was that no subject had a question
on judging if certain grammar was correct or incorrect. I was expecting a
comment like “there’s no such thing as correct or incorrect grammar” before I
started collecting data, but never encountered one. For non-linguists, in the
case of this study, non-TESOL people, there is a correct and incorrect grammar
with some exceptions being “depends – correct in spoken language”. From a
sociolinguistic view, it is not a matter of either correct or incorrect. Sociolinguists
observe and make some assumptions on how people use the language, and how they
feel about it, as suggested by Dyer (1996).
Teaching Suggestion
I
believe, as other linguists do (Wardhaugh, p.194), that languages are always
changing. I also believe that “change itself cannot be observed; all that you
can possibly hope to observe are the consequences of change” (Wardhaugh,
p.192). As long as people keep on using languages, it is inevitable that
languages will change throughout history. I did not conduct this study to
support either prescriptive or descriptive grammar, but simply to observe what
people think of them.
However,
what can and should we do as teachers when we are in a classroom with NNS
learners of English with questions like “Teacher, can I write here that I was
real hungry?”. Obviously for the most part, it depends on what class we are in.
If we were in a TOEFL preparation class with prospective study-abroad students,
the answer would be a solid no, for TOEFL strictly measures the correctness
based only on prescriptive grammar.
On the other hand, if we were in a more casual class, I
believe the use of descriptive grammar does not have to be discouraged for it
is a part of the target language. One suggestion I would like to make here for
such a class is to have a discussion on how you can use different levels of
descriptive and prescriptive grammar which are deeply connected to the
politeness of the speech as well. van Lier (1996), who was in such a situation,
came up with “… ‘a grammar stick’… which allowed me to indicate grammatical
shades of acceptability in context”(p.83). Using the grammar stick, students
and teachers can discuss how certain grammar usages are appropriate in some
situations but not in all. As van Lier suggests, the students can even collect
the authentic material themselves. This might help them have a better sense of
how the language actually works.
GRAMMAR STICK
10 Obligatory
9 Preferred in most contexts
8 Normal
7 OK in this context
6
5
4 Unusual in this context
3 Not preferred
2 Rather odd, sounds funny
1 Probably ungrammatical
0 Definitely ungrammatical
(Adopted
from van Lier, 1996)
Work Cited
Dyer, M. (1996). There’s five students who are real tall (and none of
them talks right!). A paper submitted for Sociolinguistic class at Monterey
Institute of International Studies.
McKay, S. and Hornberger, N.H. (Eds.) Sociolinguistics and language
teaching. (1996). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Trudgill, P. (1972). Sex, covert prestige and linguistic change in the
urban British English of Norwich. Language in Society, 1; 179-95.
Van Lier, L. (1996). Introducing language awareness. New York,
NY: Penguin.
Wardhaugh, r. (1994). An introduction to sociolinguistics. (2nd
Ed.) Oxford: Blackwell.