to not want school to teach my kids how to speak in the way the teachers wants?

[bellabreeze]

Having irish accents the teacher of some of my kids has told me they would do little speech classes so they speak different.. its not the accent but its things like saying 'ting' not 'thing' and dat not that and stuff like that really.. I think.. I don't think it is important enough to waste time doing? But maybe I am wrong?

Bonsoir, do you actually know any academics? Because all the ones I do - and I do mean all - find their work and their field fascinating. It excites them. A linguist referring to "exciting new sounds" in the context of a child's learning a language is therefore unsurprising. If you think that's odd, you should have listened to the computer scientist saying how "impossibly sexy" some new development or other in his field was. I doubt he was planning to get down and dirty with a microchip; he just found the research enthralling.

What is the point you're trying to make? That LRD can't find the process of a language being learned exciting, and say as much? That she can't anticipate a child finding it so? What? Given the number of times you've raised it, you plainly think you're landing a killer blow of some sort. I just can't see what relevance it has at all to the conversation everyone else is having, that's all.

For the record - I am not a linguist, and I wouldn't call myself a grown-up academic. I've studied linguistics as part of my degrees, and I do work with academic linguists. But the main focus of my degrees, as I said upthread (but it is a very long thread!) are in English Lit.

I do find my work fascinating, and I absolutely do think children find learning about sounds fascinating, and complicated, and exciting.

Bonsoir

"I don't think that "racism" is the right term, Himalaya."

Well Irish and Traveller are both classed as ethnic groups for the census I think, and in lots of equal ops monitoring, so I think it applies.

"Personally, no, I think the opposite: it would be discrimination for schools and teachers not to teach standard English pronunciation (why do some pupils not merit being given access to standard English and others do?)"

But schools don't teach standard English pronounciation (if there ever was such a thing) they don't teach pronunciation at all (otherwise there wouldnt be regional accents). My son's teacher in the home
counties is from Lancashire. They've all learnt how to mimic her quite well, but it's not on the curriculum.

Even for non UK accents - There have been kids in his class from India, Trinidad, Japan, France... No one suggests special pronunciation classes for them to correct their accent. As long as they can speak and write with standard grammar and spelling, and be understood in their accent no body sees it as a problem.

You know, I remember a storm of controversy when Caron Keating joined Blue Peter when I was a kid, on the grounds that she Didn't Talk Properly, and it was Setting a Bad Example. Only RP should be demonstrated as acceptable to young minds, apparently, and the BBC was Dumbing Down to suggest otherwise.

You'd have hoped things would have moved on somewhat in 25 years.

Ok Turniphead1 if that's the case, then can English people start pronouncing their "r"s then? Because once, someone's mum told me to go and sit in her "caa" and I spent ages looking for a Ka.

Because there is an "r" there at the end of the word, you see. So can you all please start talking properly, because the rest of the world can't actually understand you.

And their 'th's too as I had a long and rather convoluted conversation with my FIL about how he could take 4 people to a concert with the 'free' tickets I was giving him. How can I possibly get 'free' tickets for four people? Cos I'm Irish that's why

Esme, I bet you can even roll your Rs! Despite a lifetime of speaking latin languages, I've never been able to do it. Am aware of sounding like a sort of guttural Wooster to native speakers. I say "cwassant"

I've got a fantastic range of 'throat' sounds to make up for it (guttural, see?) I should have been born a Klingon.