Appropriateness

My wife, who was born in Brazil, follows a number of online social media ESL teachers.  At this time I am not one of them.  However, she often comes to me with questions because she is confused about what the teachers are putting out there. It seems to very popular to discuss unusual expressions or idioms without including appropriate contexts.  I believe that language should not be taught without teaching appropriate, contextual usage at the same time. This also applies to teaching the rules and skills of native language to native language speakers.  Wheeler & Swords (2004)  made some interesting observations about how this can work in a classroom when trying to teach students with varied home languages to speak in a more formal way in the classroom.  Students are able to begin code switching - changing their language usage to a different variety - when they understand that there may be a difference in the variety of English that is appropriate for the classroom from the one for home communications.  

Many ESL teachers make sure to teach that there are many "Englishes" so students are less likely to become confused and frustrated when they encounter differences in varieties.  However, if everyone used an agreed upon standard of a language then we could avoid many language misunderstandings. The closest thing we have to this is what we call Formal, or Academic, or Professional English.  Formal English avoids expressions and idioms, such as contractions and phrasal verbs, that could be interpreted differently according to social, linguistic or cultural contexts.

In my opinion we should be teaching formal, academic and/or professional English from the very beginning in our classrooms. Students are more likely to acquire it in a shorter time if we are explicit about teaching the appropriate uses.  Students tend to acquire less formal, conversational language more naturally as they use it in localized social contexts such as in conversation with friends.  In the classroom, which is a different social context, it would be appropriate to encourage more formal discourse, which would help students build academic language skills (Vargus, 2012).  Teaching formal English first could help students avoid the pitfalls of using expressions and idioms inappropriately.

- Dan

References

Vargas, I. i. (2012). A Language-in-Use Study of EFL Students' Social Discourses in Project-Based Learning. Colombian Applied Linguistics Journal, 14(1), 108-126.

Wheeler, R. S., & Swords, R. (2004). Codeswitching: Tools of Language and Culture Transform the Dialectally Diverse Classroom. LANGUAGE ARTS, (6). 470.