Especially for getting over the Intermediate plateau and getting advanced scores in tests, I’ve been moving more and more towards pushing my students to be ambitious with their language use. One tip I often give from my (single) successful language learning experience is to instantly abandon a phrase once you know it, try a slightly higher level version until you feel comfortable with that too, and so on up the ladder of complexity until you finally pass the Cambridge CPE. For example, any classes above Elementary are banned from saying “I think” or “I agree”, being forced to at least move on to “I really think” and “I totally agree”, then “Absolutely”, and etc.

One advantage of this emphasis on more complex language is that they can reach a higher level much quicker than concentrating on spoken accuracy, which will take an awfully long time to improve whatever they do. It also seems to fit in better with my vaguely left-leaning politics than an emphasis on standardisation and correction. Perhaps for that reason, I’ve always subconsciously associated this approach with the also politically-pinkish emphasis on communication, and I also have a vague feeling that communicative vs accuracy-based was set up as a conflict back on my CELTA. However, a recent conversation while marking the most popular English tests you’ve never heard of has made me reconsider.

Since that conversation, I’ve started to wonder for the first time how exactly I thought teaching “You took the words right out of my mouth” helped communication when stopping at the (apparently) intermediate form “I totally agree” would’ve been at least as good, if not better. Should I perhaps have been concentrating on them getting their prepositions and articles right instead, a lack of which could actually lead to communication breakdown? And isn’t this even more true in a world where 90% of their speaking will be with people who have never heard the expression “I couldn’t agree with you more” and who might assume it means disagreement?

As I’ve said many times before, any future English as a Lingua Franca (or at least the high status version) will be basically textbook English, with few or outdated idioms, written grammar in speaking, overuse of linking expressions, etc etc, just like we were teaching before corpus linguistics came and messed it all it (for the few teachers in the world who have heard of such things). In such a world, getting the basic forms right will be more and more important at every level, and teaching “Never had I…” for CPE will seem even sillier than it does now.

Or not??