An historical study of the concepts of error and standard in English language teaching.

摘要

This study traces the development of the concepts of error and standard in English language teaching and learning. After an explanation of the study's significance and a justification of its historical methodology in Chapter 1, I trace the roots of the prescriptive paradigm in the work of the first-century rhetorician Quintilian. Quintilian believed that the standard for good speech lay in orators, speakers who were required to be both skilled and moral. This belief contributed to the conflation of language standard and morality, which was later reinforced by eighteenth-century grammarians. It ultimately manifested itself as an obsession with mechanical correctness that subsequently shaped nineteenth-century composition courses and the grammar-translation method popular in foreign language teaching.; Chapter 3 describes how philologists (early modern linguists) such as Vietor, Sweet, Jespersen, and Palmer promoted the descriptive paradigm. They argued based on scientific observation that language is always changing and a fixed standard of correctness is untenable. Sweet and Palmer contended that the standard of accuracy varies according to the locality of the speech as well as the type of language the learner chooses to learn (colloquial or literary, spoken or written).; Chapter 4 depicts how descriptivism continued to develop with contributions from structuralists such as Bloomfield, Fries, and Lado, who added that the standard language is not intrinsically superior; that language has been used as an indicator of one's socio-economic class; that obsessing over correctness sacrifices larger problems of communication for trivial grammar rules; and that structural differences between an L1 and L2 may cause difficulties/errors in learning.; Chapter 5 describes the persistence of the prescriptive paradigm and the newly developed multifarious views since the 1960s. Although the prescriptive paradigm remained deeply rooted in professional and academic attitudes towards correctness, major challenges emerged with the advent of psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, transforming error and standard from monolithic concepts to sets of multiple notions in different disciplines. This study reveals that there have been two paradigms through which we conceptualize error and standard, and the shift from the prescriptive to the descriptive paradigm has generated a variety of views on the two concepts.