If you are interested in looking at my growing list of the errors made by Singapore's language experts and others click here. I add to that list every time I write a new blog post on the subject.
I saw in my letter box this evening a colourful pamphlet from a school called Mind Matters.

Now, this is a sentence which is meant to start the story and its main purpose is to whet the reader's appetite for more. But Mind Matters has succeeded in that one sentence to pack more grammatical mistakes than even the writers of ENGLISH AS IT IS BROKEN can possibly achieve in a single sentence. There are three errors in that one sentence. The error in the tense is an error almost all language teachers in Singapore make and that is my unshakeable belief after having made countless trips to school when my kids were very young. Many English language teachers in Singapore are never sure when they should use the present tense, the past tense, the present perfective and the past perfective. For them, it's really a game of Russian roulette and as I used to tell my kids, their teachers are all universally dense on the tense. So, it will be unfair if I pick on that error. But there are still two other glaring errors.
One of them is rather obvious even to a child of eight. It should be "...the day when..." and not where.
The other error is also pretty obvious. Any school-going kid in Singapore and anyone who speaks and writes British English can tell that the preposition in the first sub clause is wrong. Burchfield writes that even though it has a long history (since the mid-13th century) and Shakespeare used it too, "at the present time it is non-standard in the UK". What's non-standard in the UK is non-standard in school exams in Singapore and let's not pretend we are unaware of this.
Such a construction is only acceptable in Singapore if you are singing this song and it only works if you have Randy Vanwarmer's voice.
If the youtube link doesn't work, please click here.
No comments:
Post a Comment