Herb Stalke, responding to Johanna, writes aptly and correctly, in my
opinion. He says

"However, there is a lso a sizable number who, although they do the work
and perform reasonably well on assignments and exams, simply don't
believe us.  We are up against a structured body of myth, that no
feasible amount of teaching seems able to overcome.  Perhaps it's just
that they know that when they start their teaching careers they'll
answer to older teachers, administrators, school board members, and
parents who not only don't believe us but believe that linguistics is
perverse, if they've heard of it at all.  They're much more likely to be
persuaded by the Mark Halperns than by the Labovs, McWhorters,
Lippi-Greens and Lakoffs.  I've worked with a lot of teachers, and the
pressure on them to conform to public grammar is not something they can
resist.  This is what we're up against, not simply educating future
teachers better.  We have to change a complex body of myth."

Herb has hit the nail on the head with "structured body of myth," and
"we have to change a complex body of myth." Indeed, doing so seems to be
nearly the POINT of my language and linguistics classes [undergraduate
courses: Language and Teaching; Advanced Grammar (which is simply basic
English structure); graduate course: The Study of Language (which is a
course about language varieties in the schools and communities)].

One of my approaches to working to change the myth of language (myths:
grammar is broken, language is proper or improper, good or bad, Black
English is broken English, slang, etc. etc.) is to CONSTANTLY challenge
student reference to "the correct" way to say this... Thus, I actually
do not let a single claim of "proper grammar" or "the right way" to say
this stand in class.  A student will refer to the way a person "should"
speak, and I'll ask, "what do you mean by "should. Please explain"? Or
they'll refer to "the correct way" and I'll ask them to flesh out yet
again what 'correct' means and doesn't mean in the context of competing
linguistic codes.  I will go into examples of "correct" and "incorrect"
Applachian English, and correct/incorrect AAVE, etc,  to reinforce that
language varieties are structured rule-governed systems. Of course, the
key is to then talk about the social pressures, norms, expectations and
realities regarding the socio-cultural mandate that citizens command
Mainstream American English (both written and spoken) if they seek to
join the broader community.

This is a nearly sisyphan task, but I do think I'm managing to get
through to a great many students in unseating the langauge myth..I guage
that by the stories they tell me long after the class is over, about how
THEY in turn present the case for langauge as a rule-governed system,
when they encounter people in the world who believe that rural
southerners are "just talking bad grammar." They return to me and report
their struggles and successes and astonishments  in spreading the
message.

I've also got teachers who are taking the vantage of code-switching
between varieties (Home speech and school speech) into their classroom,
as they make sentence strips showing the translation between African
American Vernacular English and Mainstream American English, using
examples drawn from the writing of their inner city kids. This approach,
one teacher reports, is working far far better than the correctionist
approach she had taken with her inner city 3rd grade students before she
took my class on language varieties.

Now, part of the cost to me, as a teacher, is an increased narrowing of
my subjectmatter. I don't get to talk about things like Functional
Linguistics as a tool for analyzing the whys and wherefores of
sentences. In my Advanced Grammar class, which is the undergraduate core
of English structure, I model the scientific method constantly as it
comes to language structure, using, as most here know, Morenberg (which
is coming out in 3rd edition). My students say that the class is like a
math class. Actually, it's not this course where I challenge the myths.
That challenge comes in my English 311, Language and Teaching where we
analyze spoken language data, contrasting it with the expected patterns
of the Standard variety. It is a very descriptive approach.

There, it becomes nearly embarassing, the degree to which I challenge
the notion that Standard English is "correct." Sometimes I wonder if I'm
absurdly heavy handed, and monomanaical... But the results seem to be
that a good number of the students do get the message. However, Herb's
comments are surely correct. There are surely a lot of people who emerge
simply not believing what we are talking about. I know for sure there
are 1 or 2 in each class. I need to see if I can identify how many more
there might be, and how to reach those.

cheers,

Rebecca

>

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Rebecca S. Wheeler, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Linguistics
Department of English
1 University Place
Christopher Newport University
Newport News, VA 23606-2998

Telephone: 757-594-8891
Fax:       757-594-8870

Rebecca S. Wheeler is Editor of Syntax in the Schools, the quarterly
journal of the Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar (ATEG), an
assembly of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).
www.ateg.org.

Research Interests:
* dialects and language varieties in the schools,
* reducing the achievement gap between inner city minority children and
middle class children,
* discovery learning of grammar in the classroom

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