to shudder when I hear DS1's teacher speak

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I've been to see DS1's yr5 teacher this afternoon and had a generally good meeting.

I have no problem at all with her as a teacher and DS1 is thriving in her class, but her spoken grammar is dreadful.

TBH, DS1 is never going to have perfect Queen's English, having the parents he does and living where we do, but this is from a teacher. I'm more than capable of dropping in an "ain't" or dropping an "H", but do speak properly (enough) in a professional situation.

She doesn't seem able to keep her speach in check. She has a particular problem with done instead if did and during our short meeting used it several times. e.g "DS1 done well in Science today." "The whole class done Maths yesterday afternoon"

AIBU?

But EAL parents aren't going to be as aware of regional variants in English - I'd lay bets they're a lot more relaxed about dialectal and idiomatic variants in their mother tongues.

Who stole my n?

Many of our EAL parents have excellent grammar, but want their children to speak with a standard English accent.

No such thing, Goblin! Do you mean RP? Pfft.

Have you noticed how the Queen's RP is sliding into much more understandable language over the years?

YANBU this is a nightmare problem because of the repurcussions.

All teachers in my children's school speak like this and now they are in Y2 the kids have started saying "we was" and "I done good" etc now and again. I correct them every single time, and make them repeat what they are saying, and replace the t or h they have dropped too if necessary.

I won't have them speaking like this, even if sometimes I annoy myself by banging on, but seriously I am not giving in to it.

The problem being that (a) all the other mums think I am vair vair snooty and (b) there is an awkward silence when I automatically do this in front of said teachers and other mums who carry on talking like this anyway.

Last term I was greeted with "Oh ta for bringing that book back, we was sure you would cos she is always done with it so quick" It makes me shudder.

No - I don't ever hear her. Have never once listened to the Queen's Speech. Is that odd?

EAL parents can be just as snobby about their mother tongue, the same sort of prejudices exist throughout the world (I've had parents tell me how much better they are than other parents because they speak 'proper' Bengali/Urdu/Polish etc. unlike all those other dreadful parents with their horrible regional dialects).

My toes curl whenever I hear things like done(did), was(were), never(didn't) etc. in front of kids, I work with one teacher who I happened to come across asking a child 'where was you?' and I very nearly corrected her on the spot. I'm really anal about such matters and spend half my time getting them to repeat spoken sentences correctly. This is because most of the children I work with are already deprived, if they can't speak correctly this puts them at even further disadvantage in our class ridden society, and most will only hear standard English at school and occasionally TV.

BTW accent is they way in which people pronounce sounds (usually vowel sounds), dialect is when grammatical structure and vocabularly differ from the 'standard' language.

(and yes I'm sure there are errors in my post, I'm far from perfect!)

The Head of the DC's OUTSTANDING primary spoke like this (and wrote like it). One of the class teachers also hear my DD read "allowed". Root and branch clear out needed in the teacher training colleges IMO. And a module in how to communicate with parents as though they are intelligent adults.

I remember correcting my teacher when I was about 7...

She said, 'You can't begin a complete sentence in English with "because".'

I piped up: 'Because it was raining, I brought my coat.'

I was such a little pedantic shit

It's a pet hate of mine. We live in SE England and f/th, should of, we done it, I brought a new dress etc and common round here. Worst I heard of was a child who was spelling "feel" feeow. Had the discussion with my tutor on a language/dyslexia pg course - she said it was dialect, I think it is wrong, and we are not offering children the widest possible educational opportunity. I do lots of f/th work with pupils. It's important. Educare = to lead out, therefore we need to offer the best opportunities to children.

Grammatical errors by teachers are just wrong. Bad pronunciation affects phonic learning.

Well, the pronunciation of "feel" as "fee-ow" is accent, obv, not dialect, so the spelling is not a dialect form (at least not one I've ever heard of). "Bad" pronunciation is a tricky one, though - perhaps clear articulation is a better goal, otherwise you start to give one accent higher status than others. And then one might argue that Scottish and West Country accents are better for phonics as they're rhotic...

Its appauling. . . . student teachers shoulnt even get to be student teachers if they cant speak properly.
How sad is that , "We done this and we done that".............horrendous.[shocck]
And yes, i know what you mean about words like, "feel"

..."fe-ow"

Oh dear me !!!

More gin please.
Before I start handing out apostrophes and capital letters with a disappointed teacher face.
I think I need a holiday in Pedants' corner.

OK, Habbibu, it's accent. That's no reason to spell it like that in Y3. There are countless examples of children in this area who lose the skill of discriminating between sounds because of lazy pronunciation. I don't work regularly as a class teacher, and I am aware we shouldn't correct accent, but as a parent I want my children to have the opportunuity to go to Oxbridge to study English. It won't happen if they don't learn basic grammar. That's the job of teachers - they should get it right.

Apostrophes and who's/whose wind me up too, but that's a whole other thread.

I don't know the answer - with the local accent, if we don't correct children they are speaking and writing incorrectly. It may be politically incorrect to do so, but is that not our job?

I once asked my English teacher why I couldn't start a sentence with And because Jane Austin did. The answer was "because you, girl, are not Jane Austin" . Apologies over apostrophes and commas - stopped listening in English!

God, that is awful OP. I would have been like this at said meeting.

"I don't know the answer - with the local accent, if we don't correct children they are speaking and writing incorrectly. It may be politically incorrect to do so, but is that not our job?"

Yes, it is actually on the curriculum; we are supposed to teach the children that there are occasions when they need to use Standard English, and also times when they don't have to.

And it's Austen, onceamai.

It used to be standard that teachers corrected children's written and spoken language.
Then it became unacceptable as it was seen as being critical of the child's background and family.
In the 80s I had to learn a lot of stuff about Afro-Caribbean English to ensure that I wasn't being racist and dismissive of another person's culture by not accepting alternative forms of English as equally valid.
Striking a balance is very difficult without clear guidelines that don't shift and change on a yearly basis depending on the prevailing winds.

'And it's Austen, onceamai.'

Innit Gob an I ony jus aksed. It was the thought of the tweed suite and boom - still makes me shudder.

I mean suit. She still makes me nervous - thank goodness for maffs.

But you can speak standard English in any accent, that's my point. And of course a child should know how to write and speak Standard English, but that doesn't necessarily mean changing accent.

I do think, as I said earlier, that a bi-dialectal approach to language would, in an ideal world, be most appropriate - Standard English isn't intrinsically "better" than other dialects, it's just gradually evolved and been adopted as a standard. But it is undoubtedly useful to have a standard, which serves as a lingua franca across regions, and also as a sign of formality. So you could teach children that it's helpful to write in this way and use this form of grammar in school and formal contexts, whilst not implying that the way their family and friends speak in informal contexts is somehow inferior and wrong.

How you do that in practice is, of course, another matter!

Or what Feenie said. More pithily.