Reading folks out of the left

Todd Archer todda39 at hotmail.com
Sun Sep 29 06:52:42 PDT 2002


Chris said in response to me:


>>of the embarrassment an adult, who normally feels fairly confident of
>>his or her abilities, and who must "regress" to sounding like a child
>>when learning a new language, unable to express him/herself with
>>accustomed skill, feels when diving into a new mode of communication.


>Bill Murray dealt with this by teaching the memorable:


> Son of bitch! Shit!


>in _Stripes_.


>Chris

Heh! I vaguely remember seeing that, now that you mention it.

When I was working for my teaching certificate, we had a tremendous argument with the teacher one day in class about this topic. It started when one student was making a presentation to the class. Her topic was something along the lines of "teaching _real_ English" (as heard outside the classroom). At one point she mentioned teaching swearing in passing. The teacher immediately stopped her presentation and began to lecture her (and us) about teaching something like that to students. This immediately started a heated debate between the teacher and the class (pretty much as a whole).

She argued against teaching "bad language" (as she called it) because she felt new language learners wouldn't be able to understand the context in which such language would be appropriate and so would make mistakes in usage that would prove costly. She also seemed to be hinting that she thought the student giving the lecture would teach a unit on "how to swear". The vocal students, myself among the loudest, felt that there would be no need to do something as ridiculously short as teach "how to swear," but that we could and should help the students if they indicated they would like to find out about it. Especially if such language were used against them. It ended with a standoff: she reluctantly agreed that making up a whole lesson on the topic wasn't feasible enough to worry about, but she still hated the idea of teaching swearing at all.

Todd

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