This is a post forwarded from johanna.  I'm packing to go to Chicago,
so it will probably be a day or two before I can do full justice to
such a complex post in response. I have given these issues much
thought.  I agree with Johanna's sense that what we are doing in our
public grammar, Scope and Sequence project is of major importance.
Even without funding (which would be nice) we can lay out a thoughtful
program.  I'll trhy to keep up with the discussion.

Craig



---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Re: Civility
From:    "Johanna Rubba" <[log in to unmask]>
Date:    Mon, March 20, 2006 9:41 pm
To:      "Craig Hancock" <[log in to unmask]>
Cc:      "Jo Rubba" <[log in to unmask]>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Craig,

I hope you will post this for me.

First of all, I am humbled by the expressions of respect and support
from other subscribers to this list. I know a lot about language, but I
also have some pretty huge gaps, and learn from others on this list,
like Bill Spruiell, Harb Stahlke, and (way back when) Brock Haussamen,
among others. The teachers keep us aware of how urgent the need is for
sensible explanations of grammar and how to deal with reluctant
students, etc. They are the experts in their work, and we are in ours.

I once again have to disagree to a certain extent with some whom I most
respect, namely you and Herb. I think Herb may have lost track of the
fact that Mr. Hanganu has two degrees in linguistics already, and is
studying for a Ph.D. in Language Education, though I'm not sure what
subject matter that covers (ESL? Language arts?) Therefore he at least
represents himself as an _informed_ scholar of language, but then goes
on to articulate (or seem to articulate) positions that, I think it is
safe to say, the vast majority of linguists would strenuously disagree
with. Or perhaps he defines himself as the other kind of linguist: one
who has competence in several languages, and has expertise in areas
such as correctness and "civilized" forms of language. Let's not forget
that this is the definition the general public is much more familiar
with. Even novelist Tim O'Brien made this mistake when he made the
smarmy protagonist of "Tomcat in Love" an elitist, prescriptivist
linguistics professor.

So, one reason some of us have been shocked and offended by Mr.
Hanganu's  claims is his own claim to being a linguist, which I
interpreted as a linguist of my type. I doubt any of us would be
surprised to see such opinions coming from a person who has no training
in linguistics, as much as we might object to them. Subscribers to this
list who haven't had a linguistics education (which does not reduce
their dignity, competence, or worth in any way, I must add) do look to
us for information about language. When someone presents himself as a
language expert, claims superior knowledge to Ph.D. scholars with
decades of research behind them, and then asserts just plain falsehoods
about language, there is reason for serious concern. When those ideas
support the perpetuation of outright harmful pedagogical models and
methods, there is reason for very serious concern. It's somewhat
analogous to revisionist historians, or those who would have us believe
that human-caused global warming is accepted by only a leftist fringe
of scientists. Now, I'm giving Mr. Hanganu way more credit for
influence than is perhaps justified. But we have a thick wall of
invisibility and ideological opposition to break through.

Western Civilization has been struggling a very long time with notions
of human rights and equality. Wealth, arms, and the power that comes
with combining the two have led to the tragic oppression of millions of
people at least since feudalism (I'll leave out discussion of the
Classical period, though the foundation for much of Western Civ. was
laid there). Peasant revolts with pitiful outcomes, total disregard for
the welfare of workers and the poor, and assumed superiority over all
non-Western, non-Christian peoples has devastated not just the
Americas, Australia, large parts of Africa, India, and Southeast Asia,
but Europe itself (from debtor's prisons to the Inquisition to the
expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Europe, to the massacres and
injustice perpetrated against millions under Hitler, Stalin, Milosevic,
Franco, and the dictators of Central and South America). There have
always been a few enlightened individuals along the way -- a few
colonists of the Americas who respected the indigenous people and
admired their languages, some partisans of the Reformation who wanted
to give individuals power over their relationship with their god.
Democracy began filtering down the social ranks when barons and earls
gained enough might to pressure kings to share some power through
parliaments. Then some outcomes of the Enlightenment set a slow
progression towards human rights in motion -- the French Revolution,
with its disappointing outcome, the American Revolution, votes for male
landowners, the campaign for voting rights for women (while, in the
19th century, lawyers and judges wondered whether women could be
defined as "persons"), abolitionism, the workers'-rights movement,
antitrust laws, social welfare, the Geneva Convention, attempts at
desegregation, the modern rights movements for African Americans,
women, other ethnic majorities and minorities, gays and lesbians, and
postcolonial rights movements from Africa to India to the Caribbean and
Central/South America. This has been a centuries-long march (or creep)
towards true equality and equal opportunity. Wealth and arms are still
extremely powerful and constantly threaten (and in many cases succeed)
in rolling back some of the progress made.

No, I haven't flown off on an irrelevant tangent. Language-based
prejudice is a powerful arm of repression. The English suppressed Irish
in Ireland after English migrants there abandoned English; Turkey still
suppresses Kurdish severely; South African police machine-gunned
children who marched for the right to be educated in their native
languages (the Soweto massacre); the descendants of the Conquistadores
have managed to imbue indigenous Mexicans with deep shame about their
native languages; Europeans in Australia, New Zealand, the USA, and
Canada have (often deliberately) suppressed and extinguished indigenous
languages. Africans imported to the Western Hemisphere were first
brutally deprived of communication in their native tongues. When
creoles arose from their basic human need to be human and have a real
language, the creoles were disrespected, their speakers required to
acquire the English of the elite in order to have access to any decent
standard of living, which would then be denied them anyway because of
outright racism and sexism. One such creole (the creolists have
convinced me) is African-American English. After all these centuries,
and after having once robbed Africans and their descendants of their
languages, we want, once more, to eradicate the language they created
to sustain community under the most challenging conditions imaginable
-- slavery. The lives of how many -- millions? -- of children in
violent, dirty, drug-infested ghettos isn't much better. Their language
is still despised and ridiculed. The language of the rural poor
(Appalachia, the Ozarks, the South) doesn't fare much better.
Immigrants' languages are OK as long as the immigrants also become
fluent in English and belong to the right socioeconomic group. (When I
was in high school, there was a boy who had emgirated with his
middle-class parents from Spain. He was an attractive kid, and adored
by the "white" girls and pals with the "white" boys. His accent was
charming; they all wanted to help him with his English. These same
children would not associate with the many Puerto Rican children in our
school, descendants and children of migrant farm workers in our town,
who had "Spic" accents and were "dumb", "dirty" and "uncivilized".)

Including the level of language-based prejudice we see in our schools
and in our society today in this litany of inhumanity may seem like
equating a mosquito bite to Ebola, but that's from our point of view,
at least those of us who are "white", middle class, and very
well-educated, and don't have much experience of the lives of the poor
and marginalzed. I guess my point with this dramatic exposition is to
emphasize how I see the situation: elitist, prescriptivist
language-arts teaching is just another prejudice that a progressive
society has to debunk and fight. A good deal of progress has been made
(relative to the inhumanity of the past) on several fronts, but we are
still in the extremely early stages of universal equality, if that is
indeed ever achievable on any kind of scale at all. The salience and
(until recently) government support of rights movements -- even the
obligation residual bigots feel to be "politically correct" -- gives us
a window through which we can push some truth about language.

I say this because of my own experience with my students. We just ended
a quarter (and I am going to be behind with my grading thanks to this
long message!), and once again, most of my students have expressed in
their reflective essays and in performance on exams that the strongest
message they have received from my classes is the message of
discrimination and unfairness in language arts teaching, and the strong
advantage middle-class children have over poorer children and ethnic
minorities (let's not forget that large segments of the white
working-class population speak nonstandard English). On one final exam,
I presented the students with a 3rd-grade  grammar lesson and a page of
a multiple-choice grammar test from one of the publishers whose
materials are approved for CA use. They astutely evaluated these items,
expressing clear understanding of how problematic they were: their
correctionist, "one right way" approach; characterization of ordinary
nonstandard-dialect rules as mistakes, not as aspects of the grammar of
a different variety of English; and a clear advantage to children who
can come up with the right answer without paying any attention to the
grammar rules or terminology, but just by picking or writing the one
that sounds right to them. How much smarter are they going to look to
themselves, their parents, and their teachers, than the kids who have
to try to understand the rule, the terminology, and deal with the fact
that their natural language steers them time after time to the wrong
answer? The impoverished, correction-oriented teaching grammars will
not impart any kind of "language awareness" except that an awful lot of
people can't seem to get language right.

Still, all the kids have to learn standard English. But the traditional
way DOESN'T WORK. It hasn't worked for the majority of white, middle
class folk, who are losing "whom" and changing the subject-verb
agreement rules and saying "I feel badly" in spite of their college
degrees. It's much worse for children unlucky enough to have been born
to the wrong economic rank. The constant message of deficit and
disrespect for who they are turns many of them off to reading and
writing, and therefore to education altogether. Bash the "self-esteem"
movement in the case of the kids it affects -- middle-class kids. How
do kids get self-esteem when they have to dodge bullets to get to
school, or arrive hungry at school because their immigrant parents have
to use most of their income for rent and transportation, or when they
just got out of bed after being raped by their father? If you think I'm
exaggerating, read "The Freedom Writers' Diary".

Craig says that teachers make a mistake when they tell their kids "it's
OK to be themselves when it's not". I know he did not intend this to be
as damaging as it sounds when taken out of context. With all of the
other burdens nonstandard-dialect speakers have, being told that they
cannot be themselves is just too unfair, and is one of the straws that
eventually break the camel's back of their motivation to be serious
about school. What we need to tell them is that they should -- and CAN
-- expand themselves; learn other dialects and languages, because they
have already learned one just fine, and they have as much potential as
any other kid.

And, contrary to what a few people have said, we do now have
alternative methods to bring to the classroom. I have heard of programs
that take an approach similar to ESL teaching, but I'm more familiar
with methods such as Wheeler & Swords contrastive analysis. Now, there
is only the very merest preliminary data to support this approach, but
we should take seriously any incident in which the achievement gap
between white and black kids is completely closed in one year of third
grade. Also, I hark back to my story of the Bridge readers which
brought children up to grade level in 4 months. Why aren't these
stories as infuriating to other people as they are to me?

What put a chink in other prejudices? Science, for one. Proof, both
from science and from experience, that blacks/Mexicans/women/Native
Americans are not genetically inferior to white men. Integration: when
you work and study side by side with despised groups, you find out that
they're human and even pretty much just like you. Some of them are even
bigots! Then law was persuaded to support these two.

We have the science end of things. The schools are supposed to be
desegregated, but of course they aren't. But the mass media is
increasingly integrated; the workplace is somewhat integrated, though
that may reverse. But perhaps the most valuable thing we have is FUTURE
TEACHERS, who can be major instruments in educating the general
populace out of prejudice. Look at the readers and the illustrations in
today's materials: black, white, Asian, Native American, handicapped,
girls and boys, all over the place. The reading selections include
tales from all sorts of cultures, and even a few from poor communities
in contemporary America. Women are pictured as doctors, lawyers,
firefighters, and so on. Men are depicted as caregivers. People of
various backgrounds are taught about in social science and the arts --
blacks, whites, men, women, etc. The curriculum is multicultural,
folks!!! The stage is set for the message of dialect equality.

I return to the future teachers, our students. Most people want to
become teachers because they love children; they're compassionate
towards them. They want to nurture them and bring out their full
potential. They often have misguided beliefs about how to do so because
of the tradition of prescriptivist language arts, as well as continued
conscious and subconscious biases, and lack of experience of diverse
communities. So many of my students have written about how they
discovered their own heretofore invisible prejudices about language in
my classes. Their love of children makes them want to create a
nurturing learning environment for those kids.

But they face tough obstacles. They will be junior teachers in a system
of entrenched language prejudice. They will have materials that do
everything right up until the grammar section. They have had one,
ten-week linguistics course to battle a lifelong diet of "proper
English". I don't doubt that some, maybe most, will lose that light
bulb that lit up in my class.

This is why I continually hammer on our need to get the attention of
the entrenched educational bureaucracies, teachers, parents, and the
public by RAISING TEST SCORES. Nothing succeeds like success! Like the
general mindset of tolerance (real or fake) of our current society,
testing, rather ironically, presents another window of opportunity. How
can we do this? Obviously, basic work needs to be done, such as the
formulation of a new curriculum, the project of New Public Grammar and,
once upon a time, of the ATEG Scope, Sequence and Standards group. Then
the development and field testing of programs like contrastive
analysis. All of this requires funding. We're trying to get some for
teacher ed thru major sources like NSF and NEH. People like Rebecca
Wheeler and Walt Wolfram are in positions to get field experiments
going. We need more collaborations between linguists and teachers on
developing and testing materials on a piecemeal basis as well. Wherever
we can get into classrooms and get results, we will begin to get
people's attention. Yes, the prescriptivist ethic is still a plank in
our society's platform. But interracial marriage, segregated schools,
churches, and neighborhoods, the place of woman in the home, were all
once planks as well. Those planks have been planed/sawed
at/chipped/sanded away to lesser and greater extents. Time to get the
termites going on the language plank.

Johanna Rubba, Assoc. Prof., Linguistics
Linguistics Minor Advisor
English Department
Cal Poly State University
San Luis Obispo, CA 93047
Tel. 805.756.2184
Dept. Tel. 805.756.6374
Home page:
http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba

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