Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Fencheng Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Linfen Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language.
There can be no doubt that formal and non-formal language needs studying and teaching. I had been studying the emotive aspect of the subject and defended the thesis titled “Situational variability of means of expressing emotions in modern English”, so I can say that the topic is my passion. But I will try to stick to the point and mention only the points, which seem worth mentioning. There are three styles (or registers) in the English language: formal, neutral and non-formal. Formal style is normally appropriate in formal situations (negotiations, conferences etc.). Neutral communication takes places at work or in public places, e.g.: market, hospital, school etc. or between people who barely know each other or keep the distance. Non-formal style implies communication between close friends or family members. Depending on the situation in which speakers find themselves they choose some set of language means to express their thoughts, ideas, wishes, orders and emotions. The sentence structure is different in the mentioned above styles: omitting words and contracting them is not as welcomed in the formal style as in the non-formal. Compare: “I don’t know” and “Don’t know” (“Dunno”). The second option is only possible in a conversation between friends, not at a formal meeting at work. The same is about grammar. For example, the verb ‘be’ in the passive voice can be replaced by ‘get’ in an informal situation, but not in a formal one, where only ‘be’ is possible. At home one can say, “It got broken”, but performing on a TV program, he or she would rather prefer “It was broken”. The same is about double negative form: “I don’t know nothing” can be heard in everyday speech (it is better not to say it like this though), but absolutely inappropriate when you want to make a good impression. The intonation is also important: the less formal the situation is, the louder one’s voice may be raised and vice versa. As to the verbal means, first, I would like to mention interjections and exclamations. One can use the interjection ‘oh’ in any situation, but such interjections as ‘wow’, ‘whoa’, ‘yay’ and exclamations as ‘gosh’, ‘dear me’, ‘oy vey’, ‘blimey’ and the ones much less polite are only possible to be pronounced in informal settings. Such emotive intensifiers as ‘bloody’ or ‘fricking’ are also used only in informal situations. The same can be said about such phrasal verb as ‘come on’ (meaning ‘stop’) adjectives ‘rad’ ‘lousy’, noun ‘nuts’ and like. The use of ‘who’ and ‘whom’ and prepositions at the end of the sentence (which is informal) are also the matter of formality of the situation: “Who did you give it to?” – informal/neutral, “To whom did you give it?” – formal. Dictionaries mark words as formal or informal so that an English learner can easily learn which word can be used in a given situation if not sure. In a dictionary one can see informal variants of the words derived from the neutral ones: comfortable – comfy, husband – hubby. In my opinion, at higher levels students should be taught the differences between formal and informal language to be able to use the language properly and not to get into an awkward situation at work or travelling abroad.
