Attitude to Language Reading Answers with Explanation

IELTS Reading Passage: Attitude to Language

Staying neutral and methodical about language is harder than it sounds. Public arguments about language have a habit of turning bitter and one-sided rather fast. Since language belongs to everybody, pretty much everyone feels entitled to an opinion on it, and once opinions start clashing, feelings tend to run high. A disagreement can flare up just as easily over a tiny point of usage as over something as significant as how language should be taught. And because we use language so publicly, all the time, in front of everyone, any unusual or non-standard way of speaking gets noticed and judged almost instantly.

Nothing about how we behave socially escapes this kind of judgement either. The way someone speaks quietly shapes how we rate their personality, their intelligence, their social standing, how well-educated they seem, even whether they look suited to a particular job. Given how much rides on it, it is hardly surprising that people get genuinely hurt when their way of speaking is criticised, and just as capable of hurting others the same way.

Broadly speaking, prescriptivism is the belief that one particular form of a language is simply better than the rest, and that everyone in that language community ought to fall in line with it. This view usually gets applied most strongly to grammar and vocabulary, and often to pronunciation too. The favoured version tends to be some form of the standard written language, especially as it shows up in literature, or the most formal spoken style closest to it. People who use this version are considered to be speaking or writing 'correctly'; anyone straying from it is judged to be getting it 'wrong'.

Every major language has, at some point, been studied through this prescriptive lens, and the trend was especially strong during the 18th century, when grammar books and dictionaries were being written at pace. Those early grammarians were driven by three goals really: pinning down the underlying rules of the language to prove there was order behind the apparent mess of everyday usage, giving people a way to settle disputes over correct usage, and flagging what they saw as common mistakes so the language could supposedly be 'improved'. This whole approach leaned heavily on rigid rules, some usages were prescribed, meant to be learned and followed to the letter, others proscribed, meant to be avoided entirely. There was not much room for grey areas back then, usage was either correct or it was not, and the grammarian's job was not just to note down the alternatives, it was to pass judgement on them.

Plenty of that attitude has survived into the present day, and it is exactly what keeps alive this ongoing worry that linguistic standards need protecting. But there has always been a competing view too, one that cares less about upholding a standard and more about simply recording how language actually gets used. This alternative position holds that a grammarian's real job is to describe language, not dictate to it, to document linguistic variety as it exists rather than attempt the impossible task of judging that variety or trying to freeze language in place. This view is not new either, you can already find people arguing for it as far back as the latter half of the 18th century, Joseph Priestley among them, who wrote in his 1761 Rudiments of English Grammar that everyday speech itself is the only legitimate standard any language can really have. From this angle, questions about language cannot simply be settled through logic or by decree, and this basic idea has gone on to underpin how modern linguists approach grammatical analysis.

These days, the gap between so-called 'descriptivists' and 'prescriptivists' has widened into something close to caricature, with each side distorting the other. Descriptive grammarians get painted as people who do not care about standards at all, simply because they treat every form of usage as equally legitimate. Prescriptive grammarians, meanwhile, get dismissed as rigid traditionalists clinging blindly to the past. The whole disagreement has even been dressed up in political language at times, framed as a clash between radical liberalism and elitist conservatism.

Questions for Reading Passage: Attitude to Language

Questions 1 - 8

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in the passage?

In boxes 1-8 on your answer sheet, write

YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer

NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer

NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

1. There are understandable reasons why arguments occur about language.

2. People feel more strongly about language education than about small differences in language usage.

3. Our assessment of a person's intelligence is affected by the way he or she uses language.

4. Prescriptive grammar books cost a lot of money to buy in the 18th century.

5. Prescriptivism still exists today.

6. According to descriptivists, it is pointless to try to stop language change.

7. Descriptivism only appeared after the 18th century.

8. Both descriptivists and prescriptivists have been misrepresented.

Questions 9 - 12

Complete the summary using the list of words, A-I, below.

Write the correct letter, A-I, in boxes 9-12 on your answer sheet.

The language debate

According to 9 ……………………, there is only one correct form of language. Linguists who take this approach to language place great importance on grammatical 10 ……………………. Conversely, the view of 11 ……………………, such as Joseph Priestley, is that grammar should be based on 12 …………………….

A. descriptivists          B. language experts   C. popular speech

D. formal language   E. evaluation                 F. rules

G. modern linguists  H. prescriptivists         I. change

Questions 13

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

Write the correct letter in box 13 on your answer sheet.

13. What is the writer's purpose in Reading Passage?

A. to argue in favour of a particular approach to writing dictionaries and grammar books

B. to present a historical account of differing views of language

C. to describe the differences between spoken and written language

D. to show how a certain view of language has been discredited