Research Paper
Judging the Quality of English
Judging the Quality of English
There are two main approaches that can be used to judge the standard of people’s English, both spoken and written. The prescriptive approach relies on the use of a set of rules and standards that prescribe how English should be used, whilst the descriptive approach relies more on an understanding of how English is used as a tool for communication in reality (McBee Oryulak, 2012). These two different approaches give an insight into how judgements can be made about the quality of the language. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the judgements that can and cannot reasonably be made about the quality of English. It will become clear that the judgements made depend on the approach being used to assess the quality of English, but the descriptive approach is more useful for assessing the quality of English in terms of its utility as a tool of communication.
The Prescriptive and Descriptive Approaches
There are two main approaches to understanding the way that language is used, or should be used, and both of these can provide an insight into how to judge a speaker on the quality of their language. Prescriptive approaches focus on the rules of grammar, syntax, and vocabulary as prescribed by the language (Jones et al., 2013). The prescriptive approach is usually used with language learners as they grasp the basics of the language, as it is a set of information that gives insight into the underlying grammar of that language (Matsuda & Matsuda, 2010). As such, the prescriptive approach to assessing the quality of English is much stricter, and is likely to find a large number of errors even in someone who can communicate well with that language. Native English speakers are likely to make errors when assessed by the prescriptive approach (Granath, 2012).
The descriptive approach is a lot more flexible, and aims to highlight the way that English (or another language) is actually used and understood as a tool of communication (Davis, 2006). The descriptive approach describes the patterns of everyday English, and can be used to assess the quality of English types that do not follow the standard rules of grammar. In this sense, dialects of English that rely on grammar that is not the prescribed grammar, such as those spoken in Jamaica or India, will be found to have less flaws than when they are assessed using a standard international approach (Curzan, 2009). Native English speakers are unlikely to make quality-based errors when assessed using the descriptive approach, as they are using the language according to the structure that they feel most comfortable with (Adams & Smith, 2006). Descriptive grammar is also more flexible when it comes to understanding the evolution of language through time, and the approach tends to be much quicker in terms of accepting new words and grammar rules.
Judgements on Quality
Voices such as those that use AAVE make judgments on the quality of English more difficult in a number of ways. English is a particularly flexible language, and as such can be adapted to a number of different grammars (Bergenholtz & Gouws, 2010). As English is widely spoken, new words also get incorporated into the language at a fast pace (Carter & McCarthy, 2006). If the prescriptive approach restricts quality judgements to rules that have already been created, then it cannot make allowances for these changes to the language, and speakers are more likely to be classed as low-quality. These rules are useful for learning how to speak English, but they do not give as much insight into the development and use of the language as a tool for communication. Quality judgments that focus on the descriptive approach are much more flexible in terms of highlighting whether a sentence or utterance can be understood.
This issue flows both ways. Prescriptive grammar rules may also find sentences such as the famous sentence “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” of a perfectly reasonable quality, but the sentence itself cannot actually be understood by native speakers of English (Schaffer, 2010). The descriptive approach would find this sentence low quality because it lacks the ability to convey meaning, and is not a sentence that would actually be used (Ur, 2011). In this sense, the descriptive approach again has the upper hand when it comes to making quality judgments about how well the utterance (or speaker) is using the English language because it makes a judgment on whether the speaker can be understood, and whether what they are saying fits into the general corpus of the English language.
Pronunciation also has an effect on quality judgements. In prescriptive approaches, each word has a certain pronunciation that must be used in order for it to be deemed correct (van Ostade & van der Wurff, 2009). Lev-Ari & Keysar (2010) suggest that this goes much deeper than simple linguistics, as listeners actually find English speakers with an accent less trustworthy than those that are using the correct pronunciation. In this sense, the prescriptive approach may be useful in highlighting quality issues that are preventing an English speaker from being using the language in such a way that allows them to be accepted in the same way as a native speaker. The descriptive approach allows for differences in pronunciation, as this has little effect on how well the speaker can be understood, but it should be noted that these pronunciations may be having an effect on how the speaker is perceived. Despite this, it can be argued that this is no judgment on the quality of the English being used, but the sociocultural perceptions of non-native English speakers.
Conclusions
There are two main approaches to assessing the quality of a speaker’s English: prescriptive and descriptive. Prescriptive approaches to grammar rely on previously ascertained rules and regulations about syntax and grammar that are related to how English should be spoken. Descriptive approaches to grammar make judgments on how English is actually spoken, and thus is more flexible in terms of making quality judgments. It is argued here that the descriptive approach is more lenient when it comes to assessing for quality, and is also more useful in a number of contexts. If the purpose of assessing the quality of a speaker’s English is to highlight how well they can communicate with other speakers, the descriptive approach is the most appropriate. If the aim of judgment is to assess how well they can pass a test in English, then the descriptive approach is the most appropriate. As such, the descriptive approach has the more wide-ranging applications and is the best way of making quality judgments about English in its real-world use.
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