STANDARD AND NON-STANDARD: TOWARDS FINDING A SUITABLE TEACHING STRATEGY

Abstract

It is well-known that the standard of performance of pupils in the mother tongue is gradually dropping year after year. Although various factors may jointly be responsible for this, it should be noted that most of the language errors made by pupils, reflect the use of non-standard speech forms. This paper deals with some of the language errors made by pupils, teachers' attitudes towards Ihe mother tongue and suggestions on the choice of teaching strategies to alleviate this problem. The adoption of a relativistic approach of bidialectalism in language teaching, as well as the introduction of sociolinguistics as a subject at teacher-training institutions, is advocated as two ways in which to halt further deterioration in the performance of students in the mother tongue subjects.