Bob,
   There's no real sense in arguing this out on line since, as you know 
full well, neither one of us is presenting a personal position. If you 
say "It's true" that grammar and vocabulary are distinct, you are really 
saying that you buy into that view of it. I am saying I am much more 
swayed by the functional and cognitive claim that they are intertwined.
   Any theory of language acquisition has to account for automaticity. 
The fact that some aspects of grammar are below our current conscious 
radar is not "proof" that they were never learned. Cognitive linguistics 
has taken on that question very seriously, and I find their explanations 
very convincing.
   I use the term "mentoring" very carefully, as opposed to 
"instruction", which probably brings in workbook images and the like. It 
may make more sense to say that language is "learned" than it is that it 
is taught, but it is always learned interactively. It involves intention 
reading and pattern finding, which are normal cognitive processes. I 
like Tomasello's notion of a "joint attentional frame" to describe 
moments in which two people are attending to the same phenomena, perhaps 
finding ways to embody it in words. Those of us who raise our children 
well do that all the time.
   You and I have very different frames of reference for grammar. I see 
a strong interconnection between grammar and genre. Even the corpus 
grammars are finding empirical correlations between the kind of text and 
the kind of grammar that is likely to occur. It is possible to see those 
as functional patterns.
   If, in fact, language is learned and not just "activated", and if 
interaction is a huge key to that, and if children differ radically in 
the kinds of language they bring to school, then there are huge reasons 
for rethinking our current practices.
   I don't expect us to agree, but it is not a personal argument. If 
Langacker and company, Halliday and company are right, then there is a 
far more compelling argument for direct exploration of language, 
including grammar, in the schools. Grammar is not just a biological 
process with a small social layer on top. It is not just a set of habits 
that occasionally need correcting. It is constantly evolving, deeply 
connected to how we understand and function in the world.

Craig



Robert Yates wrote:
> Craig Hancock is doing us a huge service in his proposals about why and how grammar needs to be taught.
>
> Craig has a clear understanding of how language is learned and is not afraid to reach the conclusions from that view.
>
> I want to consider what he says in his recent post: 
>
>  It seems to me a tired old position that children learn the grammar of the language naturally and that all we need to do in school is "correct" them on the 5% or so of the time that their language is non-standard.
>    We wouldn't make this mistake for vocabulary. (The only thing we need to do is correct the 5% of word meanings that are "incorrect.") Why do we make such a radical distinction between grammar and vocabulary? Only because the dominant theory has been that the two are distinct. Current theory says they are deeply intertwined.
>    At what point does a child learn a construction like "would you be so kind as to..."? At what point do they learn the grammar of a good story?
>    You can learn to steal cars without instruction, but I wouldn't recommend it.
>
> *****
> Let me answer the question "why do we make such a radical distinction between grammar and vocabulary." For him, there is no such distinction and because we have to learn vocabulary explicitly, it follows we have to learn grammar the same way.
>
> I don't think so.  To answer his question on the radical distinction -- because it is TRUE.
>
> If I have any expertise, it is in teaching ESL.  There are vast areas of English grammar that NO native speaker learns by mentoring or explicitly that MUST be taught to non-native speakers.  
>
> Here are some examples: count-noncount distinction in nouns and what that distinction does for choices of determiners and question formation  (An aside on this point: when native speakers learn a new noun, with that knowledge comes whether the noun is count or noncount.  Go look at a native speaker dictionary and see whether it regularly reports whether a noun is count or noncount); relative clause formation; tense-aspect-voice morphology in English auxiliary system (an aside: who teaches a native-speaker about do-support); the entire pronominal system (no native speaker is taught that English is an obligatory subject pronoun language).
>
> When it comes to vocabulary acquisition, it is interesting that in learning a new vocabulary item native speakers get the grammar for free.  An example: No native speaker ever says I'm boring when he/she means I'm bored.  Yet, this is a very common error by non-native speakers.  Native speakers get the fact that the experiencer boredom is the object of the verb bore and not the subject.  (Look at a native speaker dictionary and see the complete absence of this discussion about bore and then examine a dictionary designed for non-native speakers.)
>
> ***
> Finally, Craig seems to think that the grammar of a story is the same as the grammar of a sentence.  I have no idea what that means. 
>
> Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri
>
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