In the discussion on the theory of language, Bill Spruill (on 2/11)
wrote:

“It doesn't do the wider public any good, though, *especially* since a
majority of the differences between the paradigms has no real
implication for what we need to do in classrooms.”

I want to demonstrate that an important difference between views on
language makes a very real difference in the disposition we as teachers
need to have in understanding what our students do and how we respond to
what they do.  

The difference I consider here is whether we need a
competence-performance distinction in our understanding of language or
whether performance is the only way to consider language.  In other
words, whether there is a difference between our knowledge about what is
possible in a language (competence) and how that knowledge is used
(performance) or the distinction doesn’t exist at all.  In an earlier
post Craig noted: 

“For a formal or structural grammar, you need to theorize ways in which
knowledge of the underlying forms can be put to work. In a functional
model, those connections are already there.”

I claim a teacher must theorize about how knowledge of underlying forms
are put to work by our students. Consider sentence (1) that one of my
non-native speakers (a graduate students whose first language is
Chinese) wrote:  

1) They are not agree with the Input Hypothesis. 

(1) is obviously ungrammatical: ARE should be DO.  I’m interested in
trying to understand why a non-native speaker would write (1) because,
if I can figure out why, my correction may prevent the error in future
writing.  

I can only speculate on how someone who believes language can be
understood as performance would respond to this sentence.  (I hope I
will be corrected on the following if it is not correct.)

From a performance perspective, when to use IS/ARE and DO in making
sentences negative can appear to be confusing.  Consider 2 and 3.

2) They do not agree with X.
3) They are not agreeing with X.

So, perhaps if we only know performance, the writer of (1) is confused
about DO or ARE and “agree” just lacks -ing.  And, of course, such
learners will see sentences like (4).

4) They are not in agreement with X.

So, from a performance perspective, the number of different forms a
learner might encounter with “agree” is so variable, the learner has no
clear indication whether ARE or DO is appropriate.  Moreover, we as
teachers cannot be sure whether the student should have written
“agreeing” or “in agreement.” 

On the other hand, if we as teachers understand language to have a
competence-performance distinction, another explanation for (1) is
possible.  If the learner’s underlying knowledge about AGREE is that it
is an adjective and not a verb, then what makes this sentence
ungrammatical is not with ARE (or missing morphology on “agree”) but
with what word category the learner has assigned AGREE to. So, because
AGREE for this student is an adjective, ARE is the only form possible.
In fact, that is exactly what the student told me.  

Craig, in the passage I cited above, is absolutely correct.  As a
teacher, I had to theorize on how this writer’s underlying competence
(agree is an adjective) lead to the ungrammatical sentence.. Such
theorizing, I believe, is a disposition all teachers need to have to
respond to their students’ writing.

I hope this example of a real sentence a real student wrote shows that a
whole lot is at stake in how we understand what it means to know
language.

Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri

(By the way, if we as teachers had done the obvious surface correction
of sentence (1)– cross-out the ARE and insert DO, we really haven’t
provided much help to the student. The student has to figure out why the
ARE was crossed out and DO was inserted.  That would require the student
to realize that only verbs require do-support when made negative and BE
is used for adjectives. A student who could arrive at such a conclusby just crossing out ARE and replacing it with DO probably wouldn’t
write (1) in the first place.)

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