I've read your previous threads about TXTing and the like, but I wanted to throw this out there. I teach high school English to the world's worst 9th graders and to a group of savvy 12th graders. I took up my 9th graders first real writing assignment and EVERYTHING was abbreviated using typical TXT type and also abbreviations yet known. There was little or no concern for spelling.

I just want to scream.

The goofy thing is that when I passed out the papers for the kids to peer review, they could actually understand what was written. In several cases I had students blushing because of what peers wrote (school INappropriate) that I didn't catch when I read them the night before.

Am I wrong for REFUSING to learn what all of these TXT references mean? How do I help these children learn that there are modes or formalities for writing?

As I sit here fuming about these papers, I also wonder what will happen if I continue to fail them for not writing for the correct audience and with the correct level of formality. How will I be "disciplined" by my administration for the increase in course failures?

I'm just disgusted. It wouldn't be so bad if I knew that they knew better, but the students didn't get a good foundation in writing in middle school.

Enough ranting. Sorry. I just couldn't believe what occurred in my classroom today with the peer reviews.

I'd mark it wrong. As I'd mark it wrong if it had been written in shorthand or a foreign language. The test is about the use of English, not some specialised language that the user decides he or she wants to adopt.

Where will it end if anything goes?

Here's the problem, SciFiJunkie, if you don't mark them down: When they go to college and/or take a job where they are expected to be halfway literate, they will fail. Period. You wouldn't believe what we get in colleges! And I haven't taught for a few years, so I am sure it's worse with all this texting.

I think educators must address this and take a stand. If we don't, our nation just won't be competitive in the future (and no comments from the peanut gallery, Richard. ).

No nation will be competitive if its nationals are unable to communicate effectively.

Bob, I remember a similar eye-opening as a young French teacher. Whereas I had diagrammed sentences in grade school, my 10th-grade students (just a handful of years younger than I was at the time) had been victims of a fleeting 'grammar-by-osmosis' fad. As I introduced some basics on les prénoms je, tu, il, etc to a roomful of blank stares, a hand went up: "Madame, what's a pronoun?"

quote:

Originally posted by bethree5:
Bob, I remember a similar eye-opening as a young French teacher. My 10th-graders-- just a handful of years younger than I was at the time-- had apparently been victims of a 'grammar-by-osmosis' trend. I was introducing some basics on les prénoms je, tu, il, etc to a roomful of blank stares. A hand went up: "Madame, what's a pronoun?"

Are you answering a comment I made in another thread (I have commented on this topic before) or a comment someone else made in this one as I haven't posted here yet?

One comment related to this that I believe I have made before (but am too lazy to look up right now) was from my German classes a long time ago when someone asked, with perfect seriousness , "Why does German have to have all these tenses when English doesn't?"

Er, I mean, Sci-Fi Junkie, sorry!!!

Har, har Bob. Perhaps we could find them one of these exotic languages which uses only the present tense...

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"Why does German have to have all these tenses when English doesn't?"

Actually I can empathise with that. Although German has no more tenses or other word forms than does English, what it does have is much more variation between forms. I seem to recall that there are getting on for a dozen words for "the" and we make do with just one.

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Har, har Bob. Perhaps we could find them one of these exotic languages which uses only the present tense.

Isn't txtspk a tenseless language?

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Isn't txtspk a tenseless language?

I believe so after reading the nonsense that was turned in by my illiterate 9th graders. LOL

It seems to me that SMS language (or txtspk) is more like a code (or non-standard orthography) than an actual language. The primary concern is with shorting phrases and words to make them easier to type on what is essentially a 12-key typewriter. The language beneath this spelling veneer is probably just some non-standard colloquial English. (Though I haven't seen a large enough corpus to be absolutely sure, it seems like an educated guess.) But, I am sure that if one standardized the spelling what one would be left with is non-standard English.

Having said that, one would expect them to be taught the spelling and grammar of standard English. After all, isn't this a large part of what school is about?

There's a difference between tense, which is a grammatical category (like number, gender, voice), and inflectional morphology (the changes in the forms of words). In some languages, (e.g., Russian, Hebrew), aspect is more important than tense, but I don't know of any language where one cannot distinguish between things that are happening or have happened.

(In the spirit of true disclosure, what I have opined about above is serious. I see no problem in people using different registers while talking or writing, both informally and formally. I try to use standard English, but I don't see it going away soon. It may change a bit, but then languages always do that. I don't think SMS language is any more of a threat to the English language than is TV advertising, feminism, or foreigners)

I've encouraged them to use different formalities when writing. We've discussed the differences. We've discussed when to use each. They just don't make the change from one formality to another. Actually, they do not seem to care about making the change. I must work on my skills to help them understand the importance of writing in standard English for school work, applications, resumes, etc. They just don't get it. I've stopped short of beating it into their brains. Maybe I need a softer, more gentle approach.

They just don't get it.

Many don't. I would suggest that you concentrate on the few who do and teach to them. Truth be told most people never learn the standard and don't really need it. Of course, they won't be competing for any high-paying jobs ...

quote:

Originally posted by Richard English:

quote:

"Why does German have to have all these tenses when English doesn't?"

Actually I can empathise with that. Although German has no more tenses or other word forms than does English, what it does have is much more variation between forms. I seem to recall that there are getting on for a dozen words for "the" and we make do with just one.

I think you've missed the point. It wasn't that she thought German had many tenses, it was that she thought English didn't.

It wasn't that she thought German had many tenses, it was that she thought English didn't.

Well, it helps to get our terms straight. In English, as well as German (and most other IE languages) there are quite a few grammatical categories associated with verbs: e.g., tense, mood, aspect, voice, person, number, gender. Verbal paradigms (usually called conjugations in Roman grammatical terminology) may or may not have distinct forms based on all of these categories. English, which went from a typically inflected Germanic language (as Old English) to a less inflected one, has collapsed many verbal forms (e.g., those exhibiting person) and have grammaticalized others using periphrastic constructions (e.g., replacing some moods with modal auxiliary verbs).

English and German have three tenses as far as I know: i.e., past, present, and future. You might make an argument for a remote past versus a more recent one, (e.g., as Greek did with its preterite and aorist tenses). Both German and English exhibit something usually called the future-present, where the future tense is expressed by a verbal form that is usually considered in the present tense (e.g., "I leave for Germany in two weeks". Both English and German have form the future periphrastically: English "I shall/will read that book" and German "Ich will bas Buch lesen". English and German both have two different verbal forms based on the aspect plus tense: simple preterite ("I read the book" ~ "Ich las das Buch") vs perfect ("I have read the book" ~ "Ich habe das Buch gelesen"). Both English and German use periphrasis for the passive voice: ("The book was read by me" ~ "Das Buch wurde von mir gelesen"). Where English and German differ greatly is in how person shown in verbal forms. In English, the only distinction in person is between third person singular and all the other ones ("he reads" ~ "I/you/we/they read" vs "ich lese", "du/er/sie liest", "wir/Sie/sie lesen", "ihr lest"). German has changed, too, mostly losing case distinctions in nouns, though some remain, and in the main marking case with articles which still display case (cf. English personal pronoun which have nominative and oblique distinctions still).

quote:

I think you've missed the point. It wasn't that she thought German had many tenses, it was that she thought English didn't.

I did understand that - as I understand that she was confused by the concept of the existence of a form (a tense in this instance) with the way that the form is expressed.

I agree that both English and German use different forms for their different tenses but I wonder whether she was actually simply confused about the plethora of other word forms in German. Of course, it could simply be, as I fear is too common, that she simply didn't know what a tense is.

Indeed, terminology is important and tense, aspect, mood and voice (I'm ignoring person and number here) are all important categorisations. However on the principle of "how things are often taught" rather than "how people in the know view them", schools rather muddy the water by treating the perfect/imperfect and simple/progressive aspects as if they were tenses, thus giving twelve. You and I know that this isn't exactly accurate and personally I'm always puzzled at why they do this but DON'T treat passive/active voice the same way, but it is,nevertheless, the way things are taught.

Nonetheless the way it usually taught --EVEN TO TEACHERS (with the intention that we teach it that way to OUR students)- is that there are twelve "tenses" simple, perfect, progressive and perfect-progressive in the present, past and future.

(It makes a kind of sense because my students are interested in how and when to use the different possible constructions rather than whether to call them aspect, voice or tense.)

quote:

Originally posted by Richard English:
Of course, it could simply be, as I fear is too common, that she simply didn't know what a tense is.

This was, as further conversation revealed, exactly the case. She seemed genuinely unaware that any such thing as a tense existed in English.

Nonetheless the way it usually taught --EVEN TO TEACHERS (with the intention that we teach it that way to OUR students)- is that there are twelve "tenses" simple, perfect, progressive and perfect-progressive in the present, past and future.

Yes, I agree that you don't need to teach students all the intricacies of linguistic analysis, though for the adult teachers, it might be a good idea to expose them to the terminology and the concepts. Calling them tenses in my estimation is simply doing them a disservice. Call them verbs forms, if you must, but calling them tenses is worse than teaching them that infer means imply or that irregardless is correct in Standard English.

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Isn't txtspk a tenseless language?

The only truly tenseless language that we know of is Feline.

It has no future tense and no past tense ..... just Present.

Everything is "NOW," or, as pronounced in their dialect, "Miao."

I've been thinking about this thread and remembering an article I read in the Tribune last weekend. Apparently texting has become so popular in China that it's taking the place of emailing. It made me wonder. Could texting be the language of the future? There'd have to be some changes, of course, so that it's not so difficult to text. My colleague who is Chinese said that the method of texting in China is much different than it is here; you press a button and you have a whole phrase or sentence. Could that happen here? I don't know.

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you press a button and you have a whole phrase or sentence. Could that happen here? I don't know.

My telephone (quite an old one) has what is called "predictive texting". This means that, when you start to key certain phrases, the telephone knows what they are going to be and completes them for you. I turned the facility off since, on those rare occasions when I send a text (invariably in response to a person who has texted me) my reply will rarely be in the form that the telephone's programmers would have predicted (I use such strange devices as capital letters and punctuation marks).

It is possible to change the predictive phrases, but I've not bothered since I rarely use the facility.

quote:

Originally posted by Richard English:

quote:

you press a button and you have a whole phrase or sentence. Could that happen here? I don't know.

My telephone (quite an old one) has what is called "predictive texting".

So does mine. Attempting to text "Merry Xmas" to cat resulted in the message "Merry Wobs".

SciFiJunkie, perhaps you should text your 9th graders their grades, and their orders to learn STD Nglish. Maybe then they'd listen to U.

L8R--

Wordmatic

P.S. I agree with you and wish you luck with the little monsters.

Wordmatic,

I laughed so hard...
1. I snorted.
2. My hubby came in from three rooms over to see what was the matter.

Thanks! Love the idea!!!

Em

TXTing makes a lot of sense if you're inputing your message on some device that is hard to use. (Examples would be a telephone or a Trio, with its small buttons.) In that case, you want to minimize keystrokes. And it also makes sense in a rapid real-time on-line conversation -- a chat, for example -- where you want to get your message sent out fast, because with a few second's delay the conversation could have moved past you.

Neither of these rationales applies to homework. TXTing in homework should be absolutely banned; an automatic flunking grade.

---

P.S. I'm not speaking from a curmudgeonly unfamiliarity with TXTing. To prove it:

TXT OK f devIs hard 2 uz (phon or Trio, w smal kEz, Uz les strOks) or n fast chat 2 msg fast, b4 convo is past u.

Not applIz 2 homewrk. Ban TXT ther; auto-flunk.

Now realistically, isn't that a perfectly valid and functional communication, in its own context? Indeed, isn't there some merit in a medium that forces you get to the point, without rambling?

(Not that I ever ramble, of course!

If tense is morphological inflection, then English doesn't have a future tense, and from what I remember, I don't think German does either.

I enjoyed reading the discussion on that link, goofy. It seemed that there were plenty of valid arguments on both sides of the fence. Do you have an opinion as to the best nomenclature for this 'tense' [or whatever]-- in terms of teaching proper usage to natives and to students of the English language?

Do you have an opinion as to the best nomenclature for this 'tense' [or whatever]-- in terms of teaching proper usage to natives and to students of the English language?

If you'd like to use old-fashioned, latinate grammatical terminology, you could use the noun conjugation for the process of inflecting verbs for tense, mood, person, etc., and conjugate for the verb.

According to English, Jack will is a modal.

The Oxford Companion to the English Language says on page 1032

quote:

The view that will and shall mark the future tense is widely held and often strongly asserted, but there are three arguments against it: (1) Morphologically, there are only two tenses, present and past; to talk about the future tense is to confuse time marking with grammatical tense. (2) Will and shall are formally modal verbs, and should be handled in the modal system, not the tense system. (3) Be going to is as good a candidate for the marker of the future tense as will and shall.

As for teaching English to students, I'm all for A Student's Introduction to English Grammar .

Unfortunately my students are second language speakers; many of them complete beginners; many of them not literate in their first languages; and I have yet to find any grammar book, no matter how well presented, that isn't beyond their current abilities or, for that matter, their needs. When you are busy learning how to buy a pound of apples or how to make an appointment with the doctor, you aren't that bothered to learn the technical terms that most native speakers don't know either.

It's pointless to try teaching the subtleties of grammar to someone who is still drilling "My name is Faisa. I come from Somalia." and getting that wrong fifty per cent of the time.

(1) Morphologically, there are only two tenses, present and past; to talk about the future tense is to confuse time marking with grammatical tense.

This is confusing morphology with syntax. How a language marks a grammatical category, such as tense, by inflection or periphrasis has nothing to do with whether the language has that category. It's like saying that I have read all the books in my library is not in a past tense because the auxiliary verb have is used. This is like saying that the passive voice doesn't exist in English because verbs use the past participle in its construction.

(2) Will and shall are formally modal verbs, and should be handled in the modal system, not the tense system.

Have is not a modal verb, and it is used to mark the modality in English: I have to go to work on Monday. Many languages combine more than one grammatical category in a single morphological package. See how Latin handles aspect and tense.

(3) Be going to is as good a candidate for the marker of the future tense as will and shall.

Yes. And the future present (I leave for Paris tommorow) is, too.

And in some varieties of English the present continuous is used as a past tense. It is not uncommon for Indian speakers of English to say things like "I am going last week" as in their variant of English this is not incorrect.

And our versions of English use the present tense as a narrative or dramatic past tense sometimes...

So there we are, at the game. The ball is on the twenty. It's third down and there's less than twenty seconds on the clock... etc

quote:

Originally posted by BobHale:
It's pointless to try teaching the subtleties of grammar to someone who is still drilling "My name is Faisa. I come from Somalia." and getting that wrong fifty per cent of the time.

I agree that communicative competence is often more important than grammatical accuracy. But bethree5 asked for a good grammar book and that's the one I'd use (along with Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage). I'm currently taking courses with the aim of teaching ESL, and the ESL grammar resources I've seen so far can be a bit prescriptive.

quote:

Originally posted by goofy:

quote:

Originally posted by BobHale:
It's pointless to try teaching the subtleties of grammar to someone who is still drilling "My name is Faisa. I come from Somalia." and getting that wrong fifty per cent of the time.

I agree that communicative competence is often more important than grammatical accuracy. But bethree5 asked for a good grammar book and that's the one I'd use (along with Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage). I'm currently taking courses with the aim of teaching ESL, and the ESL grammar resources I've seen so far can be a bit prescriptive.

I was actually referring all the way back to this previous post

quote:

Indeed, terminology is important and tense, aspect, mood and voice (I'm ignoring person and number here) are all important categorisations. However on the principle of "how things are often taught" rather than "how people in the know view them", schools rather muddy the water by treating the perfect/imperfect and simple/progressive aspects as if they were tenses, thus giving twelve. You and I know that this isn't exactly accurate and personally I'm always puzzled at why they do this but DON'T treat passive/active voice the same way, but it is,nevertheless, the way things are taught.

Nonetheless the way it usually taught --EVEN TO TEACHERS (with the intention that we teach it that way to OUR students)- is that there are twelve "tenses" simple, perfect, progressive and perfect-progressive in the present, past and future.

(It makes a kind of sense because my students are interested in how and when to use the different possible constructions rather than whether to call them aspect, voice or tense.)