By Richard Firsten
Retired ESOL Teacher, Teacher-Trainer, Columnist, Author

Back in July 2010 I wrote a piece for Teacher Talk called “Go with the Flow: Yes or No?” about some changes in what is considered acceptable, basic English. Such changes have been making the job of teaching ESOL more and more frustrating as time goes by, because lesson plans based on currently used textbooks probably aren’t keeping pace with what average educated as well as uneducated native English speakers really say these days. Well, I’ve gathered a few more of those changes, some of which are quite odd in my estimation, which have been taken from what people really say or from signs, ads, and headlines.

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By Richard Firsten
Retired ESOL Teacher, Teacher-Trainer, Columnist, Author

I was raised in a Brooklyn neighborhood called Flatbush. What made Flatbush so typical of New York neighborhoods was what we commonly refer to today as the diversity in population found there. Talk about celebrating diversity . . . we “celebrated” it every single day. When I ran errands for my family when I was a kid, I might go to the German greengrocer’s, the Italian cobbler’s, the Jewish deli, or the small Puerto Rican grocery. My folks might get Chinese takeout or buy greeting cards at the Lebanese gift shop. What made all of these small business people so interesting was that none of them was a native speaker of English. They all communicated well enough in English to function successfully in their businesses, but they were all using what linguist Jim Cummins refers to as BICS, Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills – and that’s the first acronym language teachers need to understand.

I’m sure many of you have known people such as family members, neighbors, or friends who have a good, basic command of English and can use the language in just about any informal situation, but whose language skills still leave something to be desired. These people may neglect all 3^rd person singular verb forms, probably don’t use irregular verbs properly in the past all the time, may leave out the articles, and have their own peculiarities of pronunciation, just to name a few defective areas of their language skills. But the main point is that they still communicate well enough and know how to get their ideas across appropriately so that the majority of native speakers don’t have trouble understanding them. My own grandmother was a perfect example of someone like this. I used to get a kick out of some of her pronunciations and syntactic constructions. “That really argavated me!” she would say, instead of aggravated. “Write to your cousin a letter maybe,” she might say instead of “Perhaps you should write a letter to your cousin” or “Maybe you should write your cousin a letter.” And then there was the super in the apartment building I lived in as a kid who’d say in anger, “He’s a real summunubeet!” (I’m sure you can guess what he meant.)

Although Jim Cummins and other linguists have focused their attention on L₂ development in children , I think we can apply these ideas to adults as well. According to the literature, it takes about two years for the average child to reach the level of communication in the new language that we refer to as BICS, so it most likely takes longer for an adult to attain that level.

But even if a speaker attains BICS and our impression is that the person does quite well in the L₂, the pitfall is that we may assume that person can also do well in more formal or academic situations. Usually, however, that’s not the case. The ability to handle formal or academic language well is referred to by Cummins as CALP, Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency – and this is the second acronym all language teachers need to understand. It’s claimed that children require between five and seven years to attain this level of language ability, and in adults it may take even longer. This is a daunting claim, one that many language teachers may disagree with based upon their personal experiences with students and observations of how those students can perform in the L₂. I, for one, tend to agree with the concepts of BICS and CALP, although I’m not sure I agree completely with the time frames given.

Being aware of BICS and CALP makes perfect sense. I know for a fact that my grandmother and those small business owners in my Brooklyn neighborhood functioned perfectly well on a day-to-day basis in English, but I’m certain that even if they had solid educational backgrounds from “the old country,” those same people would have felt very uncomfortable and very insecure in formal or academic surroundings and in dealing with formal or academic reading.

The point is, as language teachers we should keep in mind that it takes a great deal of patience and quite a bit of time to achieve BICS and a lot more time to achieve CALP.  And even though the prospect of having to wait so long before our students can feel comfortable in their L₂ in formal or academic settings is a daunting one, we need to face this reality and get our students to understand this as well so that they don’t become too frustrated because they’ve been thrust prematurely into a situation where higher language skills are required. This goes equally for adults and children, and it’s something all language teachers should keep in mind.

By Richard Firsten
Retired ESOL Teacher, Teacher-Trainer, Columnist, Author

Have you ever taken a course in another language? If you have, then you entered the realm of comparative linguistics without even realizing it. That’s because you would be subconsciously comparing how something is said in your native language to how it’s said in the language you were learning. So, for example, if you learned some Spanish or French, you quickly realized that the typical place to put an adjective is after the noun in those languages rather than before the noun, as we do in English. And you realized that the English phrase of the or of a closely resembles the way a genitive phrase is expressed in Spanish or French, but that there’s no equivalent of the –’s in those languages. Voilà! Comparative linguistics!

So why, then, do many ESOL teachers end up pulling the hair out of their heads when trying to teach something so seemingly easy as the use of that –’s? Why do their students often drop that inflected form and say things like the neighbor dog? The reason may not be that the students are just poor language learners; it may be due to language interference. There are languages in which the proper way to form a genitive phrase like the neighbor’s dog is to say “the neighbor dog.” This is something that would be useful for ESOL teachers to know so that they could anticipate the problem and hopefully nip it in the bud before the problem becomes fossilized.

To pursue this item a bit more as a case in point, let’s take a look at how this genitive phrase is produced in a few unrelated languages:

• In Amharic, spoken in Ethiopia, you’d say the neighbor dog.
• In Haitian Creole, you’d say the dog the neighbor.
• In Arabic, you’d say dog the neighbor.
• In Cantonese, a form of Chinese, you’d say neighbor the dog.

Aha! So it may very well be that it isn’t the fact that your students just don’t have the smarts to get it; it’s probably language interference with the structure of their native languages getting in the way that’s created this problem.

If you’re an EFL teacher, getting into comparative linguistics to make teaching certain grammatical points go more smoothly is relatively easy since just about all the students you have in any class speak the same language, the native language of the country you’re working in.

If you’re an ESOL teacher working in an English-speaking country with students from lots of other countries, the task of delving into comparative linguistics is more daunting, but definitely doable. You don’t need to become fluent in any of the languages spoken by your students. If you see that some or all of your students are struggling with a certain point of grammar, all you need to do is a bit of research into how that form is structured in their languages to see whether or not it may be creating a bigger problem to teach than you might have thought. And in those cases when a certain form is a big problem for certain students, you may find it useful to give them some comparative phrases in their languages and in English to show them how to switch from one way of communicating this to the other.

I guarantee that your students will be very impressed that you’ve familiarized yourself with something in their languages and can demonstrate how it crosses over from their languages to English. You’ll definitely win brownie points with them and, in addition, you’ll become a more effective teacher!

By Richard Firsten
Retired ESOL Teacher, Teacher-Trainer, Columnist, Author

One of the many challenges that all teachers face is finding ways to keep the learning experience interesting and dynamic. A good way to do this in a language classroom is to introduce thought-provoking themes or topics that students will relish discussing. Not only are such topics great for conversation practice, but they also allow for flexibility so that a teacher can apply them to focus on specific grammar points and writing assignments.

Here are two juicy themes that always get students thinking and discussing:

In Exile

Teacher speaking to class . . .

You were part of a group that tried to start a revolution in your country. You didn’t succeed and the government captured you and your group. A court has ordered that you and your group will be put into exile. You will be transported to an island where nobody lives. There are many animals and plants on the island that you can use for food, and there is a lot of fresh water. You will have to spend 15 years on the island as your punishment.

You will have no way to communicate with the outside world: no radio, no television, no phones, and there is no electricity on the island. But the government will allow your group to bring ten items – only ten – to the island to help you survive. You need to work together to decide which ten items you should bring to the island. You have 20 minutes to do this.

If you have a small group of students, treat this as a whole-class activity and let everybody discuss the topic together. As they suggest which items are important to take, list them on the board and let the whole group discuss the value or worthlessness of each item. Try to reach a consensus to create a final list of which items they will take. Make sure they clearly explain the reason they have suggested this item or that.

If you have a medium or large class, break the students into small groups, perhaps five or six students per group, with one student acting as the group secretary who will write down which ten items the group decides on. Walk around the room and eavesdrop on your students’ discussions. Help out if need be. When time is up, ask one person in each group to call out the list of items and write them on the board. Then compare the items in each group and have the class as a whole choose which ten items from all those lists should be the final list of things to take to the island.

Who’s Most Responsible?

Teacher speaking to class . . .

A young woman is married to a salesman who travels a lot on business. In fact, he’s almost never home. She’s very lonely. There’s a river that separates her town from one on the other side. While her husband is away on another business trip, she decides to go to the other town to have an adventure. She doesn’t want anybody in her town to know what she’s doing. To go to the other town, she decides to take a ferry across the river.

When she arrives in the other town, she goes to a ____ (You can fill in a place that will be appropriate for the backgrounds of your students. For example, you can say a bar or night club, a park or an outdoor café, etc.) She meets a young man there, they talk and feel a natural attraction for each other, and later she goes with him to his apartment, where she spends the night.

The next morning, she remembers that her husband is coming home that day, and she panics. She must get home right away. She runs out of the young man’s apartment and makes her way back to the ferry. But there’s a problem. She doesn’t have enough money to pay for the ferry ride back to her town and the ferryman refuses to take her if she can’t pay. She runs back to the young man and asks him for money. He gets angry, thinking she’s really a prostitute, and throws her out. She begs the ferryman to take her and she’ll pay him later, but he refuses again.

The young woman knows that there’s a bridge over the river about a mile away from the ferry. Nobody uses that bridge because there’s a dangerous mentally ill man who lives under it. She doesn’t want to use the bridge because of the danger from the man under the bridge, but she’s desperate. She must get home. When the mentally ill man sees her start to cross the bridge, he thinks she’s the Devil who has come to hurt him, so he runs over to her, attacks her, and kills her.

My question to you: Who is most responsible for the young woman’s death? Is it her husband, who was almost never home and made her feel so lonely? Is it the young man in the other town who wouldn’t give her the money to take the ferry back home? Is it the ferryman who refused to take her if she couldn’t pay him? Is it the mentally ill man under the bridge, who killed her because he thought he was protecting himself from the Devil? Or is it the young woman herself who is most responsible for her death?

Have the students discuss this question just as in the first discussion mentioned. Make sure they understand that they have to be able to defend their choices of who is most responsible for her death by giving convincing arguments.

Believe me, you’ll find your students get fully immersed in these discussions with lively, animated conversations. And if you choose to, you can create all sorts of exercises like open-ended sentences and modified cloze procedures based on these topics to practice specific grammar points. You can also have them work on short writing assignments to get the most bang for your ESOL buck.

Have fun with these and any other thought-provoking topics you come up with.

By Richard Firsten
Retired ESOL Teacher, Teacher-Trainer, Columnist, Author

I taught ESOL for over 35 years before I retired, and over all those years I learned to enjoy the challenges of teaching grammar the most. There were rules. I taught the rules, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly by example. There were right ways to say things and wrong ways. I figured I was teaching the right ways. I mean, I followed what was stated in textbooks and sometimes consulted what the “experts” had to say. I considered myself a teacher in the know, and did my best to pass on that knowledge to my students. Nothing was fuzzy back then. Now lots of things seem fuzzy.

Let me ask you something. As ESOL teachers, at what point do we decide to teach what a great many people really say rather than what textbooks tell us we should say? Since we have no arbitrators for English the way the French do with their Académie Française, when do we determine that we should teach our students a form or a term that isn’t found in our textbooks?

Here are some examples of the kinds of utterances I often hear made by quite a cross section of native English speakers, both educated as well as uneducated. Oh, and by the way, when you look over the following utterances, don’t think that just because one may sound more “hillbilly-like” than another that it hasn’t been said by an educated speaker:

• On December twenty-two, did you deliver the shipment as scheduled?
• It was a moment where I found myself wondering if I was seeing things.
• The kids threw a surprise anniversary party for Frank and I.
• Me and him just couldn’t agree on anything.
• They gave copies of the invoices to both Bob and myself.
• We couldn’t figure out where he was at.
• Two coffees, please.
• A: Would you mind if I asked you a personal question? B: Sure. Go ahead.
• If I knew he was injured, I would’ve taken him to the emergency room.
• Your child just bit mine. Look at the teeth marks on my kid’s arm!
• Because of his obesity, his heart is having to work harder than it should.
• I’ll try and* get help.

Not the way you’d teach those elements in bold face to your students, you say? I guess you’d go with the following instead or at least most of the following:

• December twenty-second
• when
• me
• He and I
• me
• n/a
• cups of coffee
• No. or Not at all.
• had known
• tooth marks
• has
• to*

Am I right? Yet day in and day out, I hear native speakers say such utterances the way I’ve listed them above. Are we to consider so many people wrong? After all, isn’t it a rule of thumb in English that if enough people consistently say something a certain way, it becomes an acceptable alternative? And if it is an acceptable alternative, shouldn’t it be actively taught? There isn’t one thing I’ve listed that isn’t constantly said by a very large number of native speakers on a daily basis.

And then there are some cultural issues that influence the way we speak. For example, when I was a kid, I was taught that in business or polite conversation, I should address a person with the appropriate title (e.g., Mr.) and that person’s last name. At a certain point, that person might tell me to call him or her by the first name instead, or I might ask if I could do so. Nowadays, mostly with salespeople, it seems they immediately go for using my first name, and I really find that objectionable. In a business situation especially, I feel the distance created by using the title and last name is appropriate, and I also feel it shows more respect to me if I’m addressed as Mr. Firsten rather than Richard. Is it just me? Am I that much of a throwback to an earlier era?

On top of that, at least in my part of the country (Florida), I’ll often be addressed in a similar situation as Mr. Richard instead of Mr. Firsten. That drives me nuts, and I immediately counter by telling the person I’m Mr. Firsten. Does that ever happen to you? And if it does, do you accept it? Do you like it?

The point is, so many people use those alternative grammatical forms or ways of addressing people in business situations that I wonder if we have an obligation to address those alternatives in our lesson planning.

What’s your opinion on these subjects? You tell me. I’m sure everybody who reads this piece will have an opinion, and I’m sure everybody who reads this piece will be interested in learning what everybody else has to say. Okay, folks, go for it! Click on the word “Comments” and tell us what you think. I myself am really anxious to hear what you’ve got to say on this very perturbing issue.

*Yes, I know that you may think there’s nothing “wrong” with saying I’ll try and get help instead of I’ll try to get help, but put try in any other form and and doesn’t work. For example, would you accept I’m trying and getting help or I’ve tried and gotten help? Hmm . . . So if it’s not right in those forms, why would you consider it right in that one form?

A: Mr. Firsten, I’d like you to meet a colleague of mine, Sue Van Etten.

Okay, I’m sure you can figure out what Speaker C says on that blank line without having to put your thinking caps on, right? You’ll probably say How do you do? or you might put Nice to meet you or some such response. That’s because your communicative competence is just that, competent!

But would your students have that same competence in this formal situation? In fact, how do you even know it’s a formal situation? Well, Speaker A addresses me as “Mr. Firsten,” not “Richard.” And then there’s the use of that formal, first-time greeting, “How do you do?” These two elements tell me right off that the situation is formal. That’s because my communicative competence is working fine. And I know that a typical response to such a formal greeting is to repeat the same greeting; that’s why it’s correct for Speaker C to say “How do you do?” if she chooses to. Just imagine: in only these three lines, we’ve had to deal with both cultural and linguistic skills.

We’ve also touched on the use of punctuation as an aid to the reader. Notice that the blank line has no punctuation at the end. That’s to allow for either a question (How do you do?) or a statement (Nice to meet you). The students have choices.

A: Flowers by Devon. Frank ________________. ___________________?
B: Yes, please. _______________________________________________.
A: I’m afraid that’s job’s been taken.

I should mention right off that students should be told to read an incomplete dialogue all the way through at least two or three times before they attempt to fill in the blanks. Doing so will give them a basic idea of what the dialogue is about and what the speakers are saying. I should also mention that working on incomplete dialogues is great for pair work. Two minds are better than one.

Now, let’s discuss what our students will have to deal with if presented with these next three lines of dialogue. First off, it would be fun to see if the students can figure out whether the two people are speaking face to face or on the phone. Because of the way Frank starts off the dialogue, it should be obvious that he’s answering a phone call. In fact, we’d probably fill in that first blank with speaking or here.

And now something else that’s interesting happens. In order to figure out what will be appropriate for the next blank, the students need to be sensitive to the fact that it ends with a question mark, so a question will be required, and they need to drop down to the next line and see what Speaker B’s response is to help them figure out a proper question. Since Speaker B says “Yes, please,” it seems reasonable to assume that Frank has asked, “Can/May I help you?” “What can I do for you?” or “How can I help you?” just won’t work. But what on earth does Speaker B say next? If the students drop down again to the following line, they should be able to figure this out. Aha! Because of what Frank says now, Speaker B must have asked if he/she can apply for a job that must have been advertised, so the students can fill in this blank with something like I’d like to apply for the job of flower arranger or I’m calling about the job as a salesperson.

As you can clearly see, incomplete dialogues offer our students quite an array of practice for various language skills. Reading comprehension is right there in the forefront. Knowledge of punctuation comes in a close second. In addition, critical thinking is an overall must, including powers of deduction.

Now let’s take a look at yet another use for incomplete dialogues.

A: Who are you sending that fax ___?
B: Our main office.

A: Who are you sending that fax ___?
B: The boss. She said to get it out right away.

Here’s a great opportunity to see how much language sensitivity our students have. By reading each answer given by Speaker B, they should be able to figure out which preposition will work in each blank. The only possibility in the first blank is to. The only possibility in the second is for.

Incomplete dialogues can be as simple or as challenging as you would like them to be. They can be very controlled, honing in on one element of language (like the prepositions above), or they can be very open ended and allow students a great deal of flexibility with their answers. They can cover cultural or communicative competence (key and register) and language skills (sensitivity to punctuation, reading comprehension, and language sensitivity such as vocabulary choices). But perhaps most important of all, incomplete dialogues allow students an opportunity to play with their new language and see what does and doesn’t work in a given context.

Let’s look at one more example to show you what I mean.

A: You don’t look so good. _______________________________________?
B: I feel really dizzy and nauseous. I feel like I’m going to pass out.
A: ___________________________________________________________.
B: No, don’t do that. I don’t need paramedics!
A: ___________________________________________________________?
B: Well, if I don’t feel better soon, maybe you should take me there.
A: Okay, just let me know ________________________________________.
B: I will. And thanks.

Here are some possibilities that students could use to fill in the blanks:

A: You don’t look so good. What’s the matter? / What’s wrong? / Are you okay? / Are you all right?
B: I feel really dizzy and nauseous. I feel like I’m going to pass out.
A: I’m going to call 911. / Maybe I should call 911.
B: No, don’t do that. I don’t need paramedics!
A: Would you like me/Do you want me to drive/take you to the emergency room/the hospital?
B: Well, if I don’t feel better soon, maybe you should take me there.
A: Okay, just let me know if you want/you’d like to go / if you want me to take you (there).
B: I will. And thanks.

Just think about how many skills this dialogue covers. Besides all the ones I’ve already discussed, we now also have survival skills, being able to handle a real-world situation in the United States: knowledge of 911, what paramedics do, and emergency rooms. A dialogue like this one is a great way to find out how much or how little your students know about certain situations and how to deal with them, and they offer a great oppor
tunity to plan lessons or discussions on aspects of life in the US that students may need to know more about.

If you haven’t already done so, start incorporating incomplete dialogues into your lessons. The more you create them, the better you’ll get at writing them. And the biggest plus is that your students will have the chance to practice many linguistic and cultural skills all at the same time. It doesn’t get better than that!

By Richard Firsten 

• “… it absolutely is possible to be an excellent user of English … without ever visiting the US or England or any other native English-speaking country.”
• “I’ve personally met enthusiastic and talented groups of teachers in countries such as Ukraine, Libya, and Algeria who had excellent English language skills … who had never left their own country before or met a native speaker of English before me.” 

1.  Have you ever seen a catfish?
2.  Have you ever seen a cat fish?

1.  (driver talking to passenger) What’s that in the road ahead?
2.  (same driver talking to same passenger) What’s that in the road, a head?

1. (student walking into a university administrator’s office) “Hiya, Dean. Wussup?”
2. (same student entering his dorm room, seeing his roommate) “Hiya, Dean. Wussup?”If you’re aware of communicative competence, you cringe upon hearing the first utterance, but you’re fine with the very same utterance in the second context. I don’t believe such things can be mastered outside of an English-speaking/cultural environment. 

By Richard Firsten
Retired ESOL Teacher, Teacher-Trainer, Columnist, Author

Okay, you’ve shown your students how to form the present perfect aspect. You’ve explained to them how since and for are used with this form. You’ve had them practice affirmative forms in statements, negative forms in statements, interrogative forms in questions. You’ve gone over long answers and short answers. You’ve had them use verbs in parentheses to change them into the present perfect and fill in the blanks of sentences.

You’re bored. You’re eyes are getting heavy. Your students are bored and feeling a bit numbed by it all. Congratulations! You’ve succeeded in treating that grammar point like it’s a fish out of water. You’ve made that grammar point into something like a formula in a chemistry class. But this isn’t chemistry. It’s language! It’s got vitality! It’s a living thing, for Pete’s sake! So let’s treat it like that!

Any grammar element you want to deal with will only be meaningful if it’s put into context, into something real and relevant and motivating to you and your students. It doesn’t matter if you’re teaching fourth graders or college students. What matters is that they get to see how a point of grammar works in context, not just in disconnected sentences. The students need to claim it as their own and run with it. And the best way to accomplish this is by figuring out which context will be optimum for dealing with that specific grammar point.

Since the example cited here is the present perfect, let’s stick with that. Our objective today is to get the students to understand basic uses of this form, that it means something began in the past and continues up into the present or that something happened in the past and may happen again in the future. Now what kind of context will lend itself to using lots of verbs in the present perfect?

If you’ve got those fourth graders, how about introducing a discussion on how they have or haven’t helped their mothers at home from some point in the past that you decide on till now? “Clarita, how many times have you made your bed since the beginning of the week? Have you made your bed every day? What about you, Pepito? Have you taken out the garbage for your mom? You haven’t? Why not?”

If you’ve got college students, how about a discussion on movies? “Does anybody know how long movies have entertained the public? Do you know which Hollywood movie studio has made the most pictures? How many movies have you seen this month? Has your country produced lots of movies?”

Any and all of the questions above can get a good discussion going amongst your fourth graders or your college students. And backup material can be at the ready: teacher-made reading passages based on the topic at hand; written exercises full of context; hands-on activities for your students to do in class or out of class, such as conducting short interviews on the topic and reporting back to the class, or writing a short, personal narrative on the topic and reading it to classmates.

As long as your students keep using the present perfect appropriately in the discussions and in the activities you’ve devised for them to do, you’re doing your job and doing it well. You’re using the grammar point as a tool to accomplish clear communication with the focus on that overall use of language rather than just that element of grammar. And there’s a bonus to this way of elegantly working a specific grammar point into context. Your students will be forced to use other grammar points they’ve learned as well and build on their previous knowledge of grammar. It doesn’t get much better than that.

So make it real, make it meaningful, and make it live! Lift that grammar point out of isolation and put it into context. You’ll see how dynamic your grammar classes will become!

By Richard Firsten
Retired ESOL Teacher, Teacher-Trainer, Columnist, Author

For quite awhile, I had an ongoing conversation via e-mail with a young EFL teacher from the Middle East who’d come across my blog and determined to start a dialogue with me. He’s a very bright young man who teaches English at a technological university, and the following “conversation” is based on some of that ongoing correspondence we had. I’ve copied Amir’s sections just as they were sent to me.

I’d love to hear your reactions to this conversation and receive any extra observations you can make on this subject.
______________________________________________________________________________

Amir: Why don’t the Americans follow exactly the English way of using grammar, words, pronunciation, etc? Since I think there are two versions of one language. At the word level, for example, tap is British English and faucet is American. At grammar level, for example, the British past participle of get is got, but in American English gotten. At pronunciation level, water in British English is pronounced very different from the American one. You see that I didn’t say the opposite, that is, why don’t the British follow exactly the American … since I think English is originally English not American and so it must be better. What do you think?

Me: I think that’s a marvelous question, Amir. The easiest way for me to answer it is to turn the question around and ask you the same about Arabic. The homeland of Arabic is the Arabian peninsula, but the language spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Do you speak the same Arabic in your country that’s spoken, say, in Morocco?

Amir: Of course not.

Me: The reason for that is that languages keep evolving. In any region, the causes can include geography, the natural environment, other languages that have an influence, the arrival of immigrants, and the history of the region.

Amir: Since your answer is wonderful, it deserves a good reply, and I will do my best. Firstly, I expected you turning the question around.

Secondly, let me explain what I was talking about is the “standard English” accepted in Britain and America.

Thirdly, I’m going to talk about the Classic Arabic or standard Arabic compared with standard English.

Fourthly, I agree with you that we speakers of Arabic do not speak the same in term of pronunciation since everyone has their regional accent, but we use exactly the same words. For example, the word window has many names according to the country one lives in, and that is so-called “dialects”. But when it comes to speaking Classic Arabic, one should use the very word which is understood from the north to the south and from the east to the west.

Fifthly, at the level of grammar, it is completely the same.

Sixthly, there are dictionaries designed for British English and others for the American one. This drives me to presume that they are different. If not, why to have different dictionaries as long as the same? Likewise, in Arabic we have different dictionaries but they differ in the way words are presented but not in the content, that is, a dictionary may start with a word that another may not start with. Yet the meaning and the understanding of word is still the same.

Seventhly, and the most strong factor, is that Arabic is a sacred language. It is used in religious texts, especially the Qur’an and the prophetic traditions.

Me: Your original question had to do with why American English doesn’t follow British English exactly. I answered that by explaining that American English has been influenced by American Indian vocabulary and by vocabulary from every immigrant group that joined us to create the country we now have. Immigrant languages also had some influence on certain grammatical patterns, although not a strong influence.

Pronunciation in American English was first influenced by various pronunciations in the UK. Then American pronunciation was influenced by the way immigrants pronounced certain words.

I hope you get a general picture now of why American English hasn’t strictly followed British English.

As for “standard” English, this is a very tricky area. We don’t have a sacred language like Classical Arabic, so we have nothing to turn to as a reference. Nor do we have a national academy like in France and Spain that makes decrees on what is “correct” and what is “incorrect.” So what do we have?

Well, first, “standard” American pronunciation is based on how television and radio reporters, especially in the 1950s, pronounced English. One of the greatest influences on this aspect of American English was a TV news reporter named Walter Cronkite. His Midwestern pronunciation was so clear and easy to understand that it became the norm for broadcasters all around the country, and that led to its being adopted more or less by all educated speakers who made a conscious choice to speak with a “standard” pronunciation. In the UK, it was how broadcasters on the BBC sounded that became the accepted “standard” British pronunciation except for another version called RP, “received pronunciation.”

As for vocabulary, that becomes a much more difficult area to discuss. My guess is that the majority of English words are what we can consider “standard” vocabulary, and the test for that is that they’re understood by most educated American English speakers. So it doesn’t matter really if you call it a faucet, a tap, a spigot, or a spicket ― most of us will still understand what you’re talking about.

Of course we have words in one region that may not be understood by people in other regions. Those words are classified as “nonstandard.” They may have a standard counterpart, but they’re still considered nonstandard.

Here’s one example: If I say frying pan to native English speakers, they’ll understand what I’m talking about. But then there are regionalisms such as fry pan, skillet, spider.

Here’s something interesting about faucet and tap. I’m mentioning these again because I want to show you how words can become integrated so well into the standard language even though they may originally have been nonstandard. I’m from New York, and I grew up calling that device on the kitchen sink a faucet. People in some other regions call it a tap. But if I’m thirsty and I don’t want bottled water, I’ll say I’d like a glass of tap water even though for me it comes out of a faucet. So I get tap water from the faucet!

The main point is that one variety of English isn’t necessarily better or worse than any other variety. Yes, there’s something we gingerly call “standard American” or “standard British English,” but nobody’s 100% sure what that means except to say it’s the common language used by most educated people in the country.

Okay, Amir, may
be I’ve given you more information than you wanted to know.

Amir: No, I understand, and I think I know much better why you have many differences and why you don’t copy British English. Thank you, Richard.
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So what’s your take on this topic? Anything to add? If something comes to mind, let me know.