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ERIC Number: ED046963
Record Type: RIE
Publication Date: 1968
Pages: 195
Abstractor: N/A
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
A Comparison of English Teachers' Own Usage with Their Attitudes Toward Usage.
Johnson, Robert Spencer
In spoken and written situations which focused the teachers' attentions on information rather than on their language, samples of 100 English teachers' actual language were obtained with respect to five debatable usages: "everybody...their,""reason...is because,""who" as an object pronoun, "will/would" with the first person subject to express futurity without determination, and "myself" as a non-reflexive, non-emphatic object pronoun. The majority of teachers expressed disapproving attitudes toward four of the five usages for both speech and writing. Nonetheless, 99% of the teachers were found to use at least one of the "incorrect" usages, each of the "incorrect" usages was used by a majority of teachers in their speech, and three of the usages were used by a majority of the teachers in their writing. Morover, 94% of the teachers used at least one of the "incorrect" usages that they themselves disapproved of and would correct in their students' work. However, when the teachers were alerted to the discrepancies between the language they teach as correct and the language they use, 99% of the teachers expressed a willingness to change their attitudes toward language correctness and to modify their teaching accordingly. (Author/DD)
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Publication Type: N/A
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: N/A
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Note: Ed.D. Dissertation, Columbia University