I’ve just watched a delightful interview with David Crystal, and thought many of you would find it interesting. In this fragment of the interview, David talks about many aspects of the English Language, including «the myth of the native speaker», accents, the importance of vocabulary, why everyone should learn languages…and much more.
For those of you who do not know David, he is British linguist, author of many books (Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language and the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language ) and extremely known and respected in the world of linguistics and English teaching.
He is one of those people you could be listening to for hours.
As a non native (English native…I am a native somewhere…) academy owner , who employs native and non native teachers, I find his answers enlightening.
– What do you think of this kind of obession in the TEFL world where everything should be modeled on the native speaker
Answer:
«That´s history for me»