This presentation is AWESOME!!!

Thanks for the support, Jade. I hadn't realised that about Aboriginal English, and it sounds like a positive approach to what functions as a living language in a real community. I agree we sometimes get over enthusiastic with correcting communications when they are already clear and those involved have had their needs met regardless of our pontificating.

Greg,

Where do you draw the line between students' non-standard forms and the standard form of the language? If you don't draw the line at all, you get a pidgin which is inadequate for in-depth and complex communication, and over time becomes mutually unintelligible with the standard form. The are numerous historical examples of this.

What happens when you have an German speaker of English using their own idiolect or interlingua, communicating with a Malaysian doing the same -- both ignoring standard forms? You get confusion and breakdowns (especially over the telephone). Obviously there are also sociolinguistic issues associated with non-standard forms of the language and like it or not, the inability to code-switch to the standard variant causes problems in business and relationship-building contexts.

If you refuse to correct non-standard utterances in class, then you run the danger of having students who fossilize these errors and struggle to make noticeable progress. I'm not saying accuracy is more important than fluency but I am saying that they are both important and good teachers focus on both. Despite your belief in the needs of learners to ignore standard forms, the larger fact is that language has a well-established standard as a default for people to have recourse to, especially when writing. Chinese hanzi characters are a good example of how a long-established written standard transcends massive geographical dialect variation. This shows that the default standard form is especially useful in facilitating communication between speakers from a diverse range of nations. Why actively allow this to corrode?

Standard English makes the world more, not less integrated. Willful ignorance of standard grammar makes the world less, not more globalised. Standard English is both attainable and desirable and I think it is pretty defeatist and even intellectually dishonest to create such big shortcuts in language learning. In reality, there are no shortcuts to mastery.