Prescriptivism and the Second Language Learner of English
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2013-12-09
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Abstract
The teaching and learning of English in Ghana, and other Anglophone countries of West Africa, has been plagued with the use of unacceptable structures in the writing and pronunciation of English sentences, resulting in the chorus of ‘falling’ and ‘fallen’ standard of the language. One major reason for this is the insistence on the identification of rules of behaviour rather than of performance, one that insists on knowledge of dos and donts of learning of any kind thrived from well over fifty years ago. What all this led to is prescriptivism as a theory of teaching and learning English. This paper examines the notion of prescriptivism and points out its deficiencies and proposes the cultivation of a self-correcting mechanism; one which helps the learner to select appropriate choices given particular contexts. This is perhaps less tied to knowledge of the rules of behaviour per se and obviates situations in which learners can repeat all the rules, however complicated, but fail to apply them in the very next sentence they make.