No, it most definitely isn’t. It’s a phonetic rendition of ‘want to’ but some teachers don’t make that clear because they don’t know. That’s got to be confusing for students.[/quote]
Others will suggest it is the colloquial version of “want to”, meaning “wanna” is widely used and thus a word people should know. Of course, i would expect from those who see it that way that they would also explain when it is considered appropriate (= useful/ effective) to use that word and when not.
Ah, come on, your english looks nice - you know what I’m talking about.[/quote]
and
Wanna, gonna, ain’t, hella, just to name a few off the top of my head. Teaching coloquialisms with teaching the “whys” and “whens” of usage. Poor punctuation, poor spelling, poor pronunciation.[/quote]
I think i got you guys’ point (and i don’t disagree with the underlying sentiment), but i also think it very much worthwhile to think a bit deeper about the concept of “wrong” in the context of language teaching. You may make assessments as to what is “wrong”, others prefer to use such concepts as “not how native speakers would usually use the language”, “non-standard”, “not likely effective in a real communication situation” and so on. In fact, i am of that school myself - why? I have lived in several countries and experienced different varieties of English first hand, and i also work as translator. Also, as a long-term subscriber to translation related mailing lists i have seen enough discussions of “right” and “wrong” (related to word usage or grammatical points) where what some people considered “wrong” turned out to be “right” in other parts of the world (one example that comes to mind is the use of the contraction “i amn’t” for “i am not”: although many say it’s wrong (and should be “i aren’t”), we learned on that list that there is actually a region - in England, if my memory serves me correctly - where native speakers use English that way.
Nobody can know all variants of a language, especially not in the case of one that as widely used as English, so that’s why such surprises are possible. In addition, languages constantly change - there was a time when “no go” and “long time no see” and “how goes it?” would have been declared outright wrong, but in the US you can hear plenty of people use expressions like that (somewhat depending on the region). So, some of us dealing with languages - perhaps translators more likely than teachers - shy away from the idea of “right” vs. “wrong” and assess the issues at hand in other ways, that is to say, rather than taking a prescriptivist view of language (“this is how it should be”) we take a descriptivist view (“this is how it is”).
Anyway, i think English teachers need to be aware of this situation, even if they choose to be prescriptivist. 