Six Expressions in a Speech: What to Correct and What to Leave
A student's two-minute assembly speech on road safety contains these expressions: (i) 'We must bite the bullet and wear helmets' - intended as 'accept something unpleasant and act'; (ii) 'Accidents happen once in a blue moon' - intended as 'very often'; (iii) 'In a nutshell, the rules are simple' - intended as 'summarised briefly'; (iv) 'The traffic police gave us a green signal to hold the drive' - intended as 'permission to proceed'; (v) 'We should make a photo of the violators' - intended as 'take a photograph'; (vi) 'He gave an exam on road rules last week' - intended as 'he sat an examination'. The teacher has a 5-mark language-accuracy component to fill and must decide which items to correct, which to correct only in writing, and which to leave alone in a spoken performance. The class has just finished a unit on idiomatic usage.
1. Sort the six into must-correct, optional, and leave alone, with the rule you used.
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Must correct:
- (ii) once in a blue moon means 'very rarely'. The sentence therefore says accidents are rare, which contradicts the speech's own argument. This is a meaning error, not a style preference.
- (v) make a photo → take a photo. A fixed collocation, and exactly the kind of item a vocabulary section tests.
Optional:
- (iv) green signal is established Indian English and transparent in meaning. Leave it in speech; prefer green light in a written idiom item.
- (vi) gave an exam is standard Indian English for 'sat/took an exam'. Leave it in a spoken component; use took the exam in formal writing.
Leave alone:
- (i) bite the bullet and (iii) in a nutshell are used correctly and idiomatically.
Rule: correct what changes meaning or is a fixed collocation the syllabus tests; leave regional standard usage alone, especially in a spoken performance where fluency is being judged.
2. Explain to the student why 'once in a blue moon' cannot be stretched to mean 'often', and give a teaching test.
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An idiom is a fixed unit with one agreed meaning in the speech community; it is not a scale you can slide towards the sense you want. Once in a blue moon means the event is rare - roughly 'almost never'. If the student wants 'often', the available expressions are all the time, nine times out of ten, day in and day out.
Teach idioms in context, not as glosses. The failure here comes from learning 'blue moon = rarely' as a label and then reversing it under pressure. Instead give two sentences and ask which one the idiom fits:
- Buses to that village run once in a blue moon, so we usually walk.
- Buses to that village run once in a blue moon, so we catch one every ten minutes.
Then have the student write a true sentence about their own week. An idiom that has been used once is remembered; one that has been defined is not.
3. A colleague wants to deduct marks for 'gave an exam'. Give your ruling and the principle behind it.
Read the worked answer
Do not deduct in the spoken component. Give an exam is standard Indian English, perfectly comprehensible to any examiner, and a 5-mark accuracy component on a speech should spend its marks on meaning errors like (ii) and collocation errors like (v). Deducting here penalises the student's dialect rather than their accuracy.
Do flag it once in writing. In a formal letter or report, took/sat the exam is what is expected, and a careful marker may note the register difference without taking a mark. The general principle: regional standard forms are not grammatical errors, but a candidate who can switch to international usage in formal writing loses nothing and occasionally gains, so the useful feedback names the register each form belongs to rather than declaring one 'wrong'.