I was substituting a GEPT class the other day and was surprised to see a section in their books devoted to teaching “gonna” and “wanna.” I suppose it’s appropriate to teach students how to listen for these terms, but this book actually encouraged the students to use them. Personally, I think students should not be taught how to use such poor English.
Lots of people where I’m from say “ain’t,” but that doesn’t mean I’m going to teach my students how to use it. What do you think?
Well, I ain’t a teacher, but in my opinion all of these are something a student is gonna wanna learn since they are all commonly used in N. American english. However, I am not sure about that poor English that is used across the pond or in the tests… Just my two cents, but like I said I AIN’T NO teacher.
Don’t you mean, “I ain’t sure…”? Just kidding. I agree that it’s probably a good idea to teach students how to recognize the phrases, I just think it’s inappropriate to encourage them to use it. It’s kind of like a driving instructor teaching students that rolling stops are okay because that’s what everyone does anyway.
Also, beyond the issue of simply passing a test, slang terms such as “gonna” and “wanna” will reflect poorly on the student if they (eventually) work in a professional environment.
Not teaching such lazy contractions gets in the way when pushing students to speak quickly.
Don’t teach them as slang, or mealy-mouth mumbling; do teach them as a natural contraction when speaking quickly.
Besides, it keeps students from getting tongue-tied and looking foolish when they want to holler, “I’m gonna kick yer ass!”
Just a quick reply cos I gotta go out…
They aren’t really ‘slang’ they are written representations of weak forms; a pronunciation thing. Should they be taught? Hell yes, but not as written forms. If students understand the relationships between weak forms and orthography, it will improve their listening comprehension and their spelling and will help them make the difficult leap from that pre-intermediate level.
(Mmm, phonology is yummy!)
I guessing that some GEPT pillock has inserted a hip and groovy ‘This is how Americans speak REAL English’, though. That’s just idiotic and I really hope ‘gonna’, etc, aren’t written test items…
Just make sure the students are saying “I’m gonna” and not “I gonna”.
I don’t know if the written forms are included on the test, but this particular book included a listening exercise requiring the students to fill in “gonna” and “wanna” in their books as needed.
I think you’re right that the best strategy is to teach gonna and wanna as spoken forms only, not written; that would be like teaching kids to write “how r u?”
[quote]Not teaching such lazy contractions gets in the way when pushing students to speak quickly.
Don’t teach them as slang, or mealy-mouth mumbling; do teach them as a natural contraction when speaking quickly.[/quote]
Good advice.
Idiots… Well, just hope your school just has really shitty materials and that GEPT doesn’t test that. The mind boggles.
Just as a general point, pron of weak forms and connected speech is really important. Good old-fashioned back-chained drills! Students are often taught using ‘phonics’ in Taiwan, and it gives them dodgy pronunciation and intonation at the sentence level. Go back to basics a little and spend five minutes per class on it and you’ll see a big difference in both their receptive comprehension and their production.
[quote=“Buttercup”]Idiots… Well, just hope your school just has really shitty materials and that GEPT doesn’t test that. The mind boggles.
Just as a general point, pron of weak forms and connected speech is really important. Good old-fashioned back-chained drills! Students are often taught using ‘phonics’ in Taiwan, and it gives them dodgy pronunciation and intonation at the sentence level. Go back to basics a little and spend five minutes per class on it and you’ll see a big difference in both their receptive comprehension and their production.[/quote]
I teach at Joy, so you can bet that exercise is taught at nearly 300 other Joy branches across Taiwan.
Joy does attempt to teach pronunciation using phonics; it is useful in an academic sense but fairly ineffective in teaching conversational English.
Context. It’s all about context.
I teaching, contextualize the useage and the phrase, and emphazise in the right place at right time.
People her think that if they can master slang, they are cool and have a high level of competence, hence, they like to show it off. That is why it is included in a textbook, to show off. Just as when you are told when translating to use complicated words so people will know they are getting their money’s worth even if they do not get the meaning of what you wrote.
Present examples from movies and songs and explain why this contraction is used. THEN present the dead data from the textbook. You decide if you want to point out any mistakes -and find a new job- or let it go and make it part of an exercise to determine whether the examples are correct.
Have the students do a little dramatization and encouraneg the fun part of the colloquial context. Hopefully by then they will be able to tell the difference.
I was taught this way, and still it was trial and error with stuff like “ain’t” which my cousins used, but as a joke or in certain contexts, and took me a while to discover that the joke was on me. I taught it later on in context, with songs, or if it came up in a video we were watching. Most of the time, people already know these phrases from the movies. What they do not know is why they are there.
Reduced syllables and connected speech is definitely the most neglected aspect of English training in this country. It is because they do not “focus” on this that people speak like robots and cannot understand anything native speakers say. Essentially what has happen is that the rhythym of the language has been taken out and English has been taught like a big substitution table with fanatstically complicated substitution rules that nobody knows and fewer can teach.
You iz right bob. There iz nuttin’ bettah than connected, like, speech, like really, taught reel gud, ya no wat I say’n. Be undastanding dis american languaj foo’, ya dig? You no das rite!
Nope, sorry, this is one of my pet peeves.
The fluent speech of native speakers of English is “characterized” by words flowing into one another, by unstressed syllables taking the schwa vowel. Many letters are completely silent. This is true regardless of the dialect and regardless (almost) of the degree of formality.
The faster people talk the more words run into each other and the less clearly each word is pronounced. Function (grammar) words particularly are prouounced very quickly, at low volume, with many silent letters and usually the schwa vowel (sometimes /I/ as in bit).
This isn’t just some nonsense I read about. You can observe it almost any time you hear native speakers speak to each other.
Connected speech isn’t taught, in fact the very opposite is frequently “taught” in those stilted dialogues you hear in English training programs. It is essentially English minus the music of the language. If you reintroduce the natural rhythyms, people’s listening comprehension improves, and when that improves everything else improves because they are finally able to learn the language naturally, ie, by watching what people do things and listening to (and understanding quite a bit more of) what they say in context. Speaking becomes easier too. We say I “haftgodethestore,dyawannacome?” because it requires less energy, effort and time to speak that way. Why would eany teacher “not” teach a form of the language that is not only a lot easier but extremely common?
(BTW - I wish you would come and help me with my stupid stock market story over in learning Chinese. 
)
[quote=“bob”]Why would eany teacher “not” teach a form of the language that is not only a lot easier but extremely common?
[/quote]
I guess my thinking here was that these particular students were at such a low level they might not be ready for the “shortcuts.” They have problems using “going to” and “want to” in their normal forms; teaching them the weak forms would most likely just confuse them.
Even though native speakers naturally use terms like “gonna” and “wanna,” it seems to me that low level students of English should learn how to use the proper forms before they learn the weak ones. It’s kind of like a math teacher teaching children how to manually add and subtract before letting them use a calculator.
[quote=“barfomcgee”]
Even though native speakers naturally use terms like “gonna” and “wanna,” it seems to me that low level students of English should learn how to use the proper forms before they learn the weak ones. It’s kind of like a math teacher teaching children how to manually add and subtract before letting them use a calculator.[/quote]
It’s really not, though. The blended consonants and not understanding these in spoken English is the reason they have trouble with the strong forms. They don’t hear the enunciated forms in speech, so they do not get any reinforcement from what they are learning. Also becausse they don’t hear them, they assume they aren’t important. If they don’t understand how schwas and blended consonants work, they’ll always be low level. It’s not a case of learning how to walk before you can run.
I think it is exactly a case of learning to walk before you can run. For most of these students, their only exposure to English is in the classroom. It’s not that they hear “gonna” and “wanna” in the outside world and simply don’t recognize them; they don’t hear anything outside the classroom.
Since the rate of their exposure to English is entirely up to the teacher, I think it is not necessary for students to learn the weak forms until they have mastered the proper forms. This is, of course, for children and teens; adults, who are perhaps already using English on a daily basis, would benefit from immediately learning the weak forms.
If you have to teach the kids Americanisms, make sure you give them nice American names like “LeShane” or “LeBron”.
With this approach they wind up “stuck” speaking English as though it were written English, with little pauses between each word and over-pronunciation of the function words. They come to expect robotic English and therefore never adjust to the language as it is actually spoken.
Perhaps we should take an active stance against the creep of the grammaticalization process. We could teach students that “gonna” means the same as “going to”, and thus that when speaking to Americans, it is perfectly OK to say “I’m gonna Climax, Michigan”.
By controlling their exposure in that way, you deny them access to authentic material and teach them some weird simplified code, rather than English…