Re: Tawake?

Ben Bullock wrote:

My feeling is that a search on Google is of little value in this case
since my corrections relate to Cindy's English writing as one
continuous construction - one continuous piece of writing.

Point taken, but I think you are focusing too much on the passage and not
enough on the purpose of error correction. Checking to see whether the
construction is actually potentially used by native speakers - and hence
could validly form part of someone's idiolect - might help to redress the
balance. If we can google up a million people saying "follow the
guidelines", how do we demonstrate to Cindy that she is wrong to use it
here, other than on some tenuous grounds of taste and style?

If I can ask you to take the trouble to correct Cindy's writing, leaving
the parts you think are OK and print it out and look at it carefully, I
will promise you that it won't sound like something written by a native
speaker.

Again, point taken, but how will it help the learner to see her passage
essentially rewritten, with changes made for stylistic reasons that, to her,
must often appear quite autocratic and random? I had a (non-native) French
teacher who did this to me, and for the entire year my grades steadily
plummeted. I later found that many of the expressions she red-inked were
actually perfectly acceptable to most native speakers. She fancied herself
as having the style of a Maupassant, and rejected expressions that, as far
as I was (and am) concerned may have been less elegant but did the job.

Rather than try and prove me wrong by doing a Google search, how
about the following experiment: take Cindy's writing and correct it in
the way you see fit, print it out, and then show it to another native
speaker of English and ask them if they think it reads like natural
English. I guarantee that no-one will think so - it will be quite
obviously non-native and non-idiomatic. Then, take the version
as corrected by me and ask them the same question.

Reconstructing learner English into perfect, idiomatic, native-speaker
utterances is a bit like teaching someone who's learning to ride a bicycle
by jumping on and saying, "Hey, look! No hands!" If you simply want to show
that you can take a piece of imperfect English and turn it into something
impeccably stylish, then you're doing fine, but I'd say it's of limited
pedagogical usefulness.

In fact, I'd have to say it struck me at first that you were crushing her,
whereas - from the tone of your response - it seems that perhaps you were
actually intending to nurture, in which case the discussion becomes less a
bit bantering and more of a genuine exchange of ideas.

My guess is that you have become desensitised to rather obviously
non-native constructions in English which perhaps indicates that
you spend a lot of time talking English to non-native speakers.

It may indicate that. However, tests do show that linguistic training tends
to make people more tolerant of other people's idiolects. Rather than
saying, "That's wrong", linguists are generally more likely to say, "Well,
it's a bit odd, perhaps, but it's not actually *wrong*". I think you may be
misattributing the reasons for my tolerance.

We frequently have comments in this forum on how Japanese people tend to be
rather stricter with non-native speakers than they are with each other. I
think this is also true of some native speakers of English. In another
newsgroup, someone inferred from my name that I was not a native speaker,
and an interesting dialogue ensued, during the course of which I was myself
accused of several "non-native-speaker-like" constructions, all of which, in
the end, boiled down to differences betwen British and American English.
Conversely, for years I was (for example) marking Japanese students who
wrote "elites" as wrong, because this word is not normally countable in
British English.

Our ideas about language are necessarily limited by our sociolingistic
background. We often do not appreciate just how different the background of
other native speakers may be and, to be effective teachers, we will probably
do best if we focus on what is definitely and unequivocally wrong, rather
than trying to polish up features which are largely a matter of taste.

John
http://rarebooksinjapan.com

.

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