I received an email from a Bulgarian teacher recently who asked me an interesting question:

Dear Jamie

Last week I was using the story of Cinderella with my students and there was a sentence containing ever + the past simple:

She was the most beautiful girl I ever saw.

My group reacted to it - they began an argument. I had taught that in these cases, ever should be used with the present perfect. To me, that sounds more natural. My students asked me why the book didn’t say:

The most beautiful girl I have ever seen.

All I could do was to look in our Oxford grammar book but we couldn’t find any suitable examples. Then we tried the British National Corpus. For the phrase ever saw we found more than 100 examples; But there were almost 1000 examples of ever seen. We discussed some of them and part of my class turned into a grammar lesson. My colleague says that she has met this structure before and it’s more American.

Can you send me a link to some more theoretical explanation or a title of a grammar book? Or perhaps some rules as a native speaker?

Thanks very much

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I think that this teacher has answered her own question:

• She has realized that the grammar book does not hold the answer in this case
• She has used a corpus to compare the frequency of ‘ever seen’ with ‘ever saw’ (click here to find out more about corpora). Incidentally, a Google search of these two items gives similar results: “ever seen” = approx. 40 million Google hits; “ever saw” = approx. 4 million Google hits)
• She has identified that this is a case of linguistic variation. Perhaps this particular structure (ever saw) is more common in the English spoken by North Americans.

I imagine that situations like these arise in language classes (not just English) all around the world. They are certainly familiar to me: You teach a rule, a student finds an exception, you get challenged and before you know it, you have a mutiny on your hands.

For me, the important point for dealing with such situations is that the grammar book does not hold the answer. The linguistics book does. In the subject of linguistics, we are dealing with a phenomenon that is observed in every human language in the world - that is, Variation.

Variation is observed at all levels:

Vocabulary: I talk about going to the cinema. My dad talks about going to the pictures.
Grammar: I say, “If I was you …”. My dad says, “If I were you …”
Pronunciation: I say the word theatre with an /i:/ (like the ee in feet). My dad pronounces it with an /i/ (like the y in very).

Sometimes in the TEFL world, we could be forgiven for believing that there are two main varieties of English: British English and US English. This is, of course, a gross oversimplification of the situation. Variation can be observed between or within:

• Members of the same family
• Men and women
• Generations
• Occupations
• Different situations / register (formal and informal the most commonly cited)
• Regions, cities and communities
• Classes (working and middle, for example)

The two most obvious types of variation are accent and dialect. According to Wikipedia, “A dialect is distinguished by its vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. Where a distinction can be made only in terms of pronunciation, the term accent is appropriate, not dialect (although in common usage, “dialect” and “accent” are usually synonymous).”

In the following clip, Amy Walker demonstrates 21 different accents in 2 and a half minutes:

And here is an strange dialect that might be a bit alien to some:

Anyway, in this week’s lesson plan, which can be downloaded on pdf below (look for the icon ), students are given the opportunity to hear an exchange between two individuals in which one of them accuses the other of being ungrammatical. Following this, students are then given the opportunity to identify non-standard (dialectal) grammar in a number of sentences:

1. I amn’t doing anything special tonight (link here)
   
2. I’ll give it you tomorrow (common around Manchester)
3. I seen you in town yesterday when I was on the bus (I was told not to speak like this when I was a child)
   
4. I didn’t do nothing wrong (the double negative - “We don’t need no education / I can’t get no satisfaction”)
   
5. What would you do if it would happen to you? (I think that this is a young North American way of speaking?)
6. Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits (the first person singular -s, a feature of African-American Vernacular English)
7. Where’s me cup of tea? (I used to hear this a lot when I lived in Yorkshire)
   
8. When I was young I was eating 3 or 4 times in a day. Of course now I’m not so young and I can’t eat so much (link here)
   
9. Can you help me? I’m needing some advice (I speak like this. According to my TEFL grammar books it is incorrect. I should be using the present simple)
10. I’ve ate hardly anything today (watch the dog at 4 minutes, 22 seconds)
11. I like swimming but I haven’t still learned the technique of putting my head to the side and taking a breath (watch the jelly fish at 1 minute, 20 seconds)
12. It don’t sound right (link here).

Note that for a personal touch, this activity will probably work best if you use your own experiences of non-standard grammatical features from people you know or have known, or from the communities in which you have lived.

Finally, it’s impossible to talk about variation in language without mentioning attitudes towards it. Usually, people are happy to accept variation but sometimes they are not:

Despite what the presenter thinks, this contestant is not being ungrammatical. He is being 100% grammatical. It’s just that this aspect of his grammar is different to hers. It is not ’standard’ or prestigious, and it’s not what we want our students to learn in the classroom. But it sounds correct to him and that is how he speaks. Of course, he might be advised to change his way of speaking if he wanted to work as one of the Queen’s butlers.

For more on variation in language and attitudes towards it, I’d like to recommend Larry Trask’s Language: The Basics. The chapter on variation can be read online (click here). In the chapter on attitudes to language, Larry (like contemporary linguists) asserted that no established dialect or accent can be wrong.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that we should be telling students that they can make no mistakes in the English classroom. The point is to strengthen their understanding of variation in language, a strategy for dealing with those awkward questions of the type mentioned at the beginning of this posting.

Download lesson plan here: can-you-say-it-grammatically.pdf

Posted by admin on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 9:47 pm.