On Sat, 21 Jun 1997, Juan Chamorro Pons wrote:
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> I enjoyed reading Johanna's message a lot. I found it very
> interesting. Students' communicative proficiency has to be the goal
> even before actual knowledge of English grammar.
Right on!
>However explicit
> reference to general grammar or syntactc rules can be a short cut to
> proficiency.
Caution! Knowing a rule isn't the same as being able to apply it
spontaneously. That's what all the argument is about: does knowing the
rule really help with production? It can if the speaker has time to use
her Monitor and consciously think about production of a sentence.
I do believe that it is helpful to know some rules consciously; I used
the Monitor strategy with certain difficult constructions when I was
learning German and French. But what helped me most was using the rule to
formulate phrases in my head, on my own, when I was walking around town or
sitting on a bus, and drilling them in my head over and over until the
pattern established itself and was able to transfer subconsciously to new
constructions.
What amazed me, once I left Germany and began teaching German, and when I
began looking at the linguistic structure of German, was how much German
grammar I had learned _subconsciously_: I knew far more at the
subconscious level than at the conscious level. More than I had ever been
taught in my years of German instruction in high school and college. I
felt kind of dumb, being a linguist, that I _consciously_ knew so little
about a language that was a second language for me!
>Additionaly sometimes a teacher will have to tell the
> students that a particular phrase is not following any grammar rules
> because it is informal or colloquial...
Caution again! Informal and colloquial expressions DO follow rules! It
isn't just 'anything goes'!! Consider the reductions I referred to in my
original message: The possible reductions of 'Are you coming with me?'
are:
You coming with me?
Coming with me?
You coming?
Coming?
NOT
*Are coming with me?
*Are coming?
*Coming with? (except in certain dialect areas)
There is a very common misconception that informal, casual, and
nonstandard forms of language do not follow rules, and that only formal,
'proper' language follows rules. This is not true. The variations found in
informal language are just as strictly rule-governed as formal language.
Moreover, a lot of study has been done on systematic patterns of
difference between formal and informal language, and spoken and written
language.
Another example is in the realm of pronunciation. When you examine the
ways informal language or nonstandard dialects vary from the standard
formal dialect, you find certain typical reductions and not others. For
instance, final clusters of consonants will be reduced to one consonant,
but only in certain predictable cases, such as when you get two obstruents
in a row: 'desk' may become 'des', but 'milk' does not become 'mil',
because in 'milk' you have a sonorant + obstruent cluster, while in 'desk'
you have an obstruent + obstruent cluster. 'Asked' reduces to 'ast' not
'act', because fricative + stop (ast) is easier to articulate than stop +
stop (act). Similar rules apply in foreign accent, with a lot of variation
due to the nature of the learner's native language.
Variation in language is not random.
> Thank-you Juan
Thank you! I hope you find this message equally interesting.
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Johanna Rubba Assistant Professor, Linguistics ~
English Department, California Polytechnic State University ~
San Luis Obispo, CA 93407 ~
Tel. (805)-756-2184 E-mail: [log in to unmask] ~
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