MikeS

SMS messages are the worst. Actually, I've started demonstrating in class about the different ways we say the same thing in English in formal, informal, emails and SMS messages. Its quite hilarious to translate the same statement into four styles of message.

Formal: I would be very pleased if you could join me for dinner tomorrow evening.
Informal: Like to have dinner tomorrow night?
Emails: Wanna eat tomorrow night?
SMS: Ume chow 2mrw?



A poor example off the top of my head.

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risktohimself

Nung, song? And there you were referring, in an earlier post, to the use of Engrit. Your real point, as you put it, is a good one and valid beyond a certain point. That point begins beyond the level I was teaching at.
For Keegan, the school was a Prathom school using the Get Set Go series, and I taught P3 & 4. I followed where the Thai teachers were in their books and devised activities to allow the children to practise what the characters in the book had said. Hardly rocket science, but many children spoke, including ones who, ordinarily, would have spent the lesson talking amongst themselves in Thai, drawing on the desk, lighting farts etc.
They surprised themselves about what they could do and decisions they could make and express in English. Not once did anyone ask me about verb construction, Keegan, but if I had been asked a question that I was unable to answer coherently, I might very well have used the phrase you described. At P3 & 4 level, Keegan, I figured that such explanations would not be necessary.
My point, PB, is that with my ability to speak the language well, and my desire to stand in a classroom trying to make other people at P3 & 4 level speak it, a degree would have been almost superfluous. I'm not being flippant; I wish I had been astute enough earlier in my life to be bothered to go to university and study further than I did. I wasn't, and now regret that.
By the way, have you got a fetish with underwear, ditch digger?

hentaigaijin

they're not much better at university - at least the kids turn up!!

PeaceBlondie

Good point, MikeS - grammar has been so unpopular for so long that schools haven't taught much grammar to native speakers of English for fifty years. And if you could read e-mails and posts on non-EFL forums by native speakers, you'd wonder if they finished the sixth grade.

Beating the horse again: most TEFLers don't primarily teach grammar, but we surely need to understand it in order to teach English, correct students, and grade their papers. Not that exam or homework marks mean anything at all in the final evaluations, of course. But when a student writes, "Yesterday we go shopping and we buy new mobi" my red ink pen goes into auto-response.

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"The times I've been mistaken, it's impossible to say" - by the Moody Blues

keegan

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to be or not to be.......didn't know will was a tefler

getreal

notwithstanding the long-term commitment, dedication and achievements of individual producers to the profession and their craft, the answer is an emphatic NO.

the phrase ' "real" teachers' being wrt "real" carpenters, "real" bricklayers, "real" musicians, etc. - TEFL/CELTA teachers are not "real" teachers.

btw, I don't include myself in the former.

russellsimpson

bout time somebody considered putting a lock on the dumpsters

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If you're being run out of town, get in front of the crowd and make it look like a parade.
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getreal

argumentum ad hominem