"Last year, when I thought things couldn't get no worse, he came up with this here song."
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Chapter 1
The first thing I want to talk about here is - because it was the first thing I noticed and really freaked me out - the really bad grammar in this book. Ok, I know it's written from a teenage girl's perspective and it's probably some dialect or weird accent, but honestly, writing like this? I think it would be ok if this was only in direct speech, but until now it seems as if the whole book is written like this. It might also be ok for native speakers, but for second language acquisition it might be confusing. But apart from that, it just freaks me out :D Especially the sentence
"Last year, when I thought things couldn't get no worse, he came up with this here song."
"Last year, when I thought things couldn't get no worse, he came up with this here song."
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Hey, well that's really bad. I do agree with you and wouldn't use in in school. If the pupils read such sentences they will keep them in mind and later wonder why they get bad marks in tests...
ReplyDeleteI'm better not reading any of your posts now because i want to read the book first and then i will have a look on your posts and comment on them I don't want to see the book throug your perspective but I'm curious to see if there will be any similiarities when I start reading it.
ReplyDeleteWell this is how black people speak and I think that this is very important for students to see that they speak like this and to know that it is wrong. But you are right that young learners should not read this kind of text because they might pick up the wrong grammar but I am of the opinion that it is absolutely ok for 12th graders. I read the book "a rasin in the sun" in 12th grade, which was about black people too and I didn't know that black people have their own "grammar". It was really interesting to see and it didn't have any affect on my grammar!
ReplyDeleteI meant to say that some black people talk like that. Not all of them of course! Mosty black people of lower classes.
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