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Teach English in Gaogeng Zhen - Chengdu Shi

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We aren’t in the 1900s anymore! The English language has evolved from what it once was, like everything in the world; language grows and shed its skin. Some words can now take on double, triple, quadruple meanings and depending on how it’s worded in a sentence, it can mean something totally different. Depending on how old the student is slang could be very beneficial. From understanding popular music, television shows, movies, or young adults. Slangs and idioms are beneficial to understanding and communicating authentically with English speakers of all ages. Lets say that the students learning English are young, middle school to college age, slang will be in every part of English culture. Take music or TV shows for example, they are trying to connect to a young audience and they want it to be authentic, so they’re going to put slang in a lot of the lyrics and the dialogue. Now if I told my students to go home and listen to some English songs or watch an English TV show, they might say they understood the adults but the young actors were hard to follow because the sentences didn’t make sense. This becomes a problem because young students want to connect to other young students around the world. Sometimes those students want to travel and meet others like them but they’ll need a more authentic speech pattern to help them blend in more with the locals. Even adult learners should know a little bit of slang because they might make a friend and they need to know certain words that might come up in an informal conversation. When people travel to an English speaking country, like England, America or Canada you have to take into account the dialect and the slang of that country. People don’t talk in proper English anymore, most of the time you’re going to hear people shortening and compressing words together to make new words, or they’re changing the meaning of an old word to fit the current times. People tend to talk in slang or use idioms to convey themselves nowadays. Which can be a problem if you only know formal/ informal English. For instance, I’ve taken around 8 years of French (give or take) and I thought I’d be pretty proficient when I went to Paris, France but I was wrong. I had a hard time understanding people if I was not in a formal setting, like at a restaurant or at store, when I went to clubs the language was totally different because I was then around younger people and they were using slang, mixing, switching and sometimes flipping words. It was already stressful trying to learn French as a second language but when you know a bit of the language and still can’t communicate, it’s frustrating. Which then made me wonder why I didn’t learn any form of slang when I was being taught French in school. Of course learning proper English first is important so that you can get the basic structure and grammar right but once you are taught proper English I believe you should transition into informal English. Informal English and slang go hand in hand. But slang can be seen as rude if you are not in the right situation. Take the word “Hello”; “Hi” is the informal way of saying “Hello” but if you already know the person you can use “Hey” as a form of greeting. “Hi” and “Hey” are both informal ways of saying hello but “Hey” can be considered the slang version. Because it is even more informal than “hi” but if you went up to a person on the street and said “Hey you!” it would be considered rude. Since slang can be considered rude being aware of it allows students to communicate properly and helps avoid awkward situations. As a fluent English speaker I can attest to the fact that slang is ever changing, some words that we are you using today won’t be popular in a few years, but there are some words that have developed over generations. According to yourdictionary.com there are different types of slang; the type of slang I feel students should learn is evolving slang. Evolving slang is words that’s meaning have evolved throughout different generations. Busted, ride, and hip are just some of the words that have changed throughout the years. The reason why I feel like students should know this type of slang is because the meaning doesn’t change all that much. An example of this is Busted, the definition of busted is to break, split, or burst something. In the beginning it was only used to describe something breaking then it changed to explain someone’s house being raided or that someone got caught doing something wrong. In present day the word can be used to say someone is ugly or that something is messy. As we can see the meaning is evolving but it’s not changing to such a degree where it’s unrecognizable. Lets also take an idiom, which can be defined, as “a figure of speech established by usage that has a meaning not necessarily deductible from those of the individual words.”(writingexplained.org) If you don’t teach some slang/idioms you start to miss certain parts of English culture. For example, let’s say you’re listening to an American pop song and the phrase “ride or die” comes up. If I were to read the phrase literally I would think someone is talking about having to ride a bicycle or they might die. But in actuality the phrase “ride or die” is contributed to someone who is extremely loyal, someone who will stick with you to the very end. This is a popular phase that comes up a lot in American pop culture but if you’re not taught some of these phrases you won’t be able to discern the meaning and will get lost in the conversation. In conclusion once students know how to use some slang/ idioms when they come across new ones they’ll be able to gleam the meaning and connect to other people. Because at the end of the day, as humans we all want to feel like we connect with people and slang/ idioms are a great ways to help connect groups of people. As the world becomes more and more connected slang becomes more and more prevalent and popular around the world.


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