What our learners want to learn

Question

I have seen a handful of questions get closed on ELL, and the close reasons usually start something like this:

I'm voting to close this question because it's about a rare or non-standard form of English that learners don't need to worry about.
_{(italics often in original)}

This comment is often followed up with a link to an Ngram or a Google search designed to prove that the wording being asked about is rare, along with more close votes from native speakers.

Frankly, this rubs me the wrong way, and strikes me as condescending. I think it should be our learners who get to decide what interests them.

Our learners are trying to learn English from a wide variety of sources – classic books, new books, English language textbooks, children's books, news articles, internet discussion boards, television, and movies, and so on. As such, they are bound to run into odd phrases, strange words, and non-standard forms. This will often pique their curiosity – and they should feel free to ask about such expressions here. Moreover, we natives are here to help, and should make an earnest effort to NOT be so dismissive of such questions.

I have a theory about what's going on, and I'd like our learners to tell me if I'm right or wrong. I'm not fazed by questions that ask about a non-standard usage or word – because I'd surmise that such passages are more likely to prompt a learner to ask a question. After all, a sentence with no unusual words or constructs is unremarkable, understandable, and not puzzling at all. But passages or quotes containing something out of the ordinary are the ones that make a leaner think, "Wait a minute – now I'm confused."

These are exactly the kinds of question I believe ELL was designed to field, if we can just remember that:

  (a) learners often have trouble detecting when a usage is an error, or something they simply haven't learned about yet;
  (b) sometimes finding an answer on the web isn't as trivial as we think it might be – particularly when someone doesn't understand the original text or have a firm grasp on the language;
  (c) learners are not solely interested in proper, formal, standard, textbook English;
  (d) it's good to know that a mysterious construct is seldom used, but that won't make a learner's curiosity vanish.

It's one thing to put a question on hold because it doesn't have enough context, and needs to be fleshed out more. (Learners, please tell us more about why you're asking the question! The more you tell us about where you heard or read something, the more likely we are to understand your confusion.) But I don't think it's right to put a question on hold because it has a limited scope, or because it's asking about something we rarely run across.

So, learners of English, this is your chance to sound off! Am I onto something here? Or am I barking up the wrong tree? What do you want to learn about?

Answer 1

Some might interpret a curt comment like the one paraphrased in the question as condescending to all learners and I might see that same comment as

I'm voting to close this question because it's unlikely to be of use to anyone but the OP and a handful of other folks that may or may not come across this site. Keeping questions like this around makes it more difficult for learners to find the answers to more common usage questions and sacrifices the user experience of the many to satisfy the curiosity of the few.

There are some questions that a learner comes across that just aren't useful to keep on the site. For example, questions about typos or mistakes specific to a particular source or usage that is so rare or archaic that questions about it are more of an EL&U question than an ELL question.

There are plenty of things that learners are interested in knowing that might not be appropriate for this site. It wasn't that long ago that we were discussing Genocidal questions and Do we need to welcome "thesaurus" questions? so I don't think it's the learners that get to unilaterally decide what questions stay open based on what they're interested in. Of course most folks would rather have their questions answered than be told "don't worry about it". If there's an answer that will fit into a comment, like "it's a typo" or "it's archaic, here's a link to more information" I will provide one even though I'm voting to close.

It's understandable that a learner would not know that what they're asking about falls into these situations, but if the question is not likely to be useful to many other users, we should close it. A question that is about advanced grammar might have a more limited audience than a more fundamental question, but that's not the type of limited scope I'm thinking about when I consider closing a question for scope reasons. Some of these questions I think are actually EL&U questions because they aren't about practical usage so much as about the underpinnings of the language. We shouldn't expand our overlap with EL&U just because some folks are more comfortable asking here, or because the person asking the question isn't a native speaker.

That said, there's a huge gray area and we aren't always going to agree on whether a question is a one-off or something that might be useful in the future to someone else. The only way to resolve that is to discuss it. Edit the question to make it better. Bring it to meta to get a wider audience than the 5 folks that closed it. Closing isn't meant to be the final word, and I have been convinced to retract a close vote or vote to re-open a question quite a few times by someone pointing out something I hadn't considered.

Answer 2

As English learner, I am interested to know when a word is used everyday or it is used in specific contexts. Since I am a learner, I don't know which case is, and I need the guidance of somebody else to know it.
I think it should be the same for users learning Italian, and wondering if a word they found in a newspaper or in a blog is used everydays. Maybe in Italian is different, since people often speak a second language (which is very often confused as dialect of standard Italian) which sometimes influences how people speak in Italian, but I can imagine users would wonder the same if a word should be used when speaking in Italian, or it is a word that should be avoided when speaking in public.

What I think could make the difference is where I find the phrase for which I am asking the question. If I read it in a newspaper, I think it is legitimate to ask the question, but if I am reading a Sci-fi book where the author is making words, I could expect that after 4 questions about words found in that book, a comment makes me notices there are chances the author is using a word in a totally non standard way just to give the effect of events happening in a far future.

For the rest, I think that a question about a phrase that is likely to be heard or read should be acceptable. English learners need help even with those strange words. After all, when I started learning English, I found the word inversion in phrases like So do I. strange, and I thought it was an old way of saying; if I didn't ask about those, I would have not have learned that is normal, in English.

Answer 3

Non-standard is a technical term. Certain dialects are labelled as "standard" They are widely understood even by speakers of other dialects. Most speakers of non-standard dialects are also capable of diglossia, shifting from a regional dialect to the standard one.

Thus learners should focus on speaking one of these "standard" dialects. By doing so they access 1) good dictionaries and grammar guides in the dialect. 2) The maximum speaker community and 3) No judgements from natives speakers that they are making a mistake through ignorance. It is important on ELL to identify non-standard English and a disservice to learners to suggest all dialects have the same wide acceptance.

But more advanced learners should also be aware of non-standard and dialect forms. Learners who are living in the UK or USA will begin to incorporate local dialect terms into their speech "naturally" by language acquisition.