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To butt in is to interrupt someone who is talking.

Examples of use:

1. We tried to talk to Natalie at Sam's party, but Peter kept butting in.

2. Arthur is so annoying. He always butts in when people are talking.

3. Don't butt in while your father is talking to you!

4. He started to tell her about his day, but she butted in and talked about hers instead.

Can you write a sentence with the phrasal verb 'butt in'?

Do you think it is rude to butt in when people are talking?

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The phrase nineteen to the dozen refers to something that is happening very fast, or moving very quickly.

If someone is talking nineteen to the dozen they are talking very quickly, so quickly that they say 19 words where normally only 12 would be spoken.

Examples of use:

1. She was so excited about passing her exam. She was talking nineteen to the dozen and I could hardly understand a word!

2. The car accident gave me such a shock. My heart was going nineteen to the dozen.

Some people believe that this phrase has its origins in eighteenth century Cornish tin mining. (Cornwall is a county in the south-west of England)

Cornish beam engines were introduced to reduce flooding in the mines, and they pumped out 19,000 gallons of water for every 12 bushels of coal needed to operate the engines – a much faster and more efficient way of pumping water than the hand pumps they replaced.

If you would like to learn more about Cornish tin mining, the BBC Nation on Film site has some clips of archive film about Cornish tin mines, including interviews with Cornish tin miners.

English is spoken in more than 60 countries in the world and, according to some figures, is used by more than 1 billion people.

Many varieties, accents and dialects of English exist worldwide.

English accents in the UK

The UK is a relatively small country, but we have a surprising variety of English accents and dialects.

Visitors and immigrants who have learned to speak English abroad can find the range of dialects and accents in the UK confusing, and some accents difficult to understand.

Areas of the UK with distinct accents include Scotland, Wales and Ireland; the counties of Cornwall, Yorkshire and Norfolk; and the cities of Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol, Newcastle, Birmingham, Belfast and Dublin. And these are just a few examples, so you begin to get an idea of the wide variation in English pronunciation across the UK.

Immigrants to the UK, or students residing here temporarily to learn English, are very likely to learn to speak English with a specific accent, depending on their location in the UK.

Many students tell me they want to learn to speak ‘English English’ (as opposed to American English, for instance) – they are often surprised to learn just how many variations of English accent exist here in the UK.

You can hear how pronunciation varies across the UK with recordings of modern and old dialects, received pronunciation and minority ethnic English pronunciation, on the British Library Sounds Familiar? web site.

English dialects in the UK

Generally speaking, English accents are varieties that differ only in terms of pronunciation: for instance, Standard English can be spoken with a regional accent, whereas English dialects differ in terms of pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary.

However, the distinction is not always clear-cut and there is much debate about how many non-pronunciation features (grammar, vocabulary, idiom) it takes before an accent becomes a dialect.

Regional dialects of the UK include those of Orkney, Shetland, Glasgow and Edinburgh, Wales (where the dialect is strongly influenced by the Welsh language), and Ireland where we have:

• Anglo-Irish used by the descendants of English settlers;
• Ulster Scots – the speech of the descendants of 17c Protestant Scots settlers;
• and Hiberno-Irish spoken by usually Catholic people whose ancestral tongue was Gaelic.

These are just a few of the many English dialects in the UK.

Listen to English dialects

You can listen to 288 extracts of English dialect from the Survey of English Dialects, a nationwide survey of the vernacular speech of England, undertaken by researchers at the University of Leeds. You can search for dialects by county or date.

English accents and dialects are discussed on the BBC's Radio 4 radio programmes Routes of English. You can also hear examples of the accents and dialects on these shows.

How much does accent and dialect vary in your country and in your language?

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A few days ago I wrote a short post about correcting errors in spoken English.

This morning I received an email with a teacher's thoughts on this subject which I have included here as a guest post.

Khazin teaches English in Indonesia and we have had some very interesting chats by email and Skype.

I hope one day he will also write a guest post about his experiences as an English teacher in Indonesia.

Thank you, Khazin, for your permission to include your thoughts on error correction here.

Correcting Students’ Speech Errors (by Khazin)

All people sometimes make speech errors caused mostly by Shift, Exchange, Anticipation, Preservation, Addition, Deletion, Substitution, Blend or other causes.

For example, one of my students said, ”Ok my friends, I am going to talk about regelion now" (religion). During the 1992 campaign, President George Bush began his remarks for one speech by saying, ”I don’t want to run the risk of ruining what is a lovely recession." (reception) (Newsweek,1992).

Many teachers are trying to find a model of correcting the students’ speech errors. The problem is when and how they should correct the speech errors of learners in their classroom. This problem has also become the most difficult question among teachers.

Teachers must be careful to administer students’ error treatment. If the teachers make too much correction of the students’ speech errors, the students will feel that their English is too bad, making them unmotivated to go on speaking. But if the teachers do not correct their speech errors, especially their pronunciation, I am afraid the wrong pronunciation will fossilize.

Brown (2000) stated that too much negative cognitive feedback – barrage of interruption, corrections, and overt attention to malformations – often leads learners to shut off their attempts at their communication. They perceive that so much is wrong with their production that there is a little hope of getting anything right.

On the other hand, too much positive feedback – willingness of the teacher-hearer to let errors go uncorrected, to indicate understanding when understanding may not have occurred – serves to reinforce the errors of the speaker-learner. The result is the persistence, and perhaps the eventual fossilization of such errors.

Some students like and hope their errors are corrected as soon as possible but the others do not. Some students do not like to be interrupted when they are speaking. They think that the interruption will make what are in their mind disappear. Krashen and Terrell (1983) recommend no direct treatment of errors at all.

In short, I would like to say that teachers ought to be close to the students in order that they know who the students are. They should know what the students are like and what they expect from the teachers. Never let the students make wrong pronunciation to avoid them from wrong pronunciation fossilization. And don’t “kill” the students’ willingness to express their opinion.

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In my English lessons I sometimes I find there is a tension between the correction of errors on the one hand, and the desire for communicative fluency on the other, and it can be relatively tricky to achieve a balance between the two.

It is difficult (and often counter productive)to interrupt group discussions that are in full flow in order to correct grammar or pronunciation and, although it can be much easier to correct errors when working one-to-one with a student, even then it can be distracting for the student to be stopped, corrected, and then have to continue where they left off.

Making a note of errors during activities for follow up work in successive lessons works to an extent, but I find this is not always satisfactory either.

I recently asked one of my student’s opinions on this, and she said that she much preferred to be corrected as soon as it was clear she had made a mistake. She felt that going over corrections at a later date was not very useful because the mistakes had often been forgotten by then, and discussions about the ‘mistake’ were out of context and consequently of little use.

How do you feel about error correction?

Do you prefer it if your teacher stops you immediately she or he recognizes an error, and then explains the language point to you?

Or do you prefer to carry on talking and then discuss any grammar or pronunciation problems when you have finished your speaking activity?

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