Herb,
    When messages leave my server, they go out as both plain text and
html, a default selection.  I don't know how the listserv filters that
out or if your own default reading is influenced by that.  Stuff happens.
   Our talks are always a pleasure to me, not least of all because you
are such a good listener. Even when you disagree, you flatter me by
 respectful attention.  I aspire to this as a teacher and want to
commend you for helping me remember why.
  One way to discover problems in a system (even a system of knowledge)
is to find where the system breaks down or fails to deliver. If, in
fact, the physicist were unable to help us make a building safe from
earthquakes, one could see that as a problem in the system of knowledge.
If the physicist turns around and says "that's an engineering problem,
very much beneath me," we have pretty much the situation before us now.
It's not just a pedagogical gap (a failure to communicate the necessary
physics), but a gap of the other kind, a failure to build the necessary
knowledge in the first place, perhaps because applications have been
thought of as unworthy.  With you, I feel I'm preaching to the
converted, and those linguists who join us on this list are to be deeply
commended for joining the public enterprise.  But someone should point
out to those people in your field that they may not have a viable field
for long if they  believe that real world uses for language are
unimportant. Or perhaps we should say it the other way:  Applications of
theoretical linguistics into the public world are now at the cutting
edge. That may be wishful thinking, but why not?  Someone who finds a
cure for cancer may win great acclaim and great prizes.  Can the same be
true for the key to universal literacy (at least as a goal)?
    My own sense is that Chomsky was so concerned with establishing the
biological basis for language (the complexity of our unconscious
understanding) and so successful in doing that, that we then were in a
position to disdain direct instruction, especially since grammar has
been thought of as a set of forms, not as a set of interactions or of
meanings. We experimented with approaches like sentence combining
because they were attempts to develop a fluency of forms, not a base of
knowledge.  The emphasis has been on behavior, with knowledge the
exclusive province of the specialist.  The two primary unanswered
questions (at least from within that tradition) are how those forms
enter into the  production of meaningful text AND how a conscious
understanding of those interactions might be useful to the non specialist.
    Certainly, a deep knowledge of grammar can inoculate us against the
worst aspects of traditional grammar, but traditional grammar still
exists primarily because it has not been replaced and because it is the
only metalanguage most people have. The notion that we don't need a
metalanguage, that conscious understanding of language is intrusive or
unimportant (our short-term experiment) seems a colossal failure at this
stage.
    We need to get on with the business of  building a new paradigm and
hope the rest of the world comes along. The struggle is made more
difficult because a generation of English teachers were told that
knowledge of grammar is  irrelevant or harmful. We deal now with a mix
of  misunderstanding and (in the classical sense, lack of knowledge)
ignorance.

Craig

Stahlke, Herbert F.W. wrote:

>Craig,
>
>I suspect the odd appearance is some epiphenomenon of the chain of
>servers and browsers and the mysterious ways in which they interact.  Is
>the internet sufficiently complex a system now to produce classic chaos?
>
>You wrote:
>
>
>
>>You seem to be implying in your last post that linguists have developed
>>
>>
>a >full understanding of grammar, but aren't concerned with how that
>trickles
>
>
>>down.
>>
>>
>
>I'm not sure how I gave the impression that linguists have developed a
>full understanding of grammar.  I've certainly seen nothing in the field
>that I would recognized at that.  Rather, what I was saying was that
>what we're occupied with is theory and structure of utterances,
>discourses, discourse interactions, and other sorts of linguistic
>objects.  Just what qualifies as a linguistic object is difficult to tie
>down, especially at the edges, and I wouldn't try to limit that domain a
>whole lot.  When I said that the relevance of linguistic insights for
>language teachers and writing teachers is not a function of their
>importance to linguistics, I was defining domain, though.  I'd be
>interested in how obstruents behave in English, how tonal systems act,
>and how serial verb systems work whether they had application to
>language teaching or not, because those are the sorts of things I do as
>a linguist.
>
>I've often told classes of non-linguists that one of the important
>reasons they take linguistics courses is to immunize themselves
>intellectually against some of the more pernicious linguistic myths
>society is prey to. This is a sort of passive relevance.  But making
>linguistic findings make sense and have active pedagogical relevance to
>teachers requires a certain kind of thinking that not all linguists do
>well, including a lot of very good ones.  It is a very different
>endeavor from the sort they normally undertake.  That such a goal can be
>achieved and is thoroughly desirable is certainly true, but achieving it
>calls on the talent of those academics who cross easily between fields.
>The divide is great.  I've been in linguistics departments where
>publishing in a pedagogical journal was considered a career-threatening
>waste of time.  I don't happen to agree, but I do understand the point
>of view.
>
>There is something of a continuum from the theoretical to the
>pedagogical, rather than a deep divide between them.  The sense of
>division is more a matter of personal traits than of content, I think.
>The kind of grammar you talk about evolving out of the needs of the
>world is an important goal too, and one that linguists can contribute
>to, but the problem is finding linguists who are interested in doing so.
>Fortunately, there are several on this list.
>
>I don't like analogies, even though I've indulged in a few, but to pick
>up your physics/bridge analogy, I think the relationship between the
>physicist and the engineer is similar to that between the linguist and
>the writer/writing/language arts teacher.  Once the physicist has worked
>out the physics of interacting forces and masses, the bridge problem is
>solved.  This doesn't put a bridge across the Straits of Mackinac,
>though, and that is an engineering problem.  The physicist may marvel at
>the beauty and ingenuity of the achievement, but the physics isn't all
>that interesting.  As a linguist, I marvel at what writers, language
>arts teachers, and writing teachers achieve.  The linguistics that they
>employ is selected by how well it supports what they're doing, but their
>responsibility is not to evaluate the validity of that linguistics as
>linguistics but to see how they can teach and perform as well as
>possible.  And using good linguistics is an element of that, but,
>perhaps, less of an element than some of us linguists might delude
>ourselves into thinking it is.
>
>Herb
>
>Herb,
>    When my messages come back to me, they are fine.  I'm not sure why
>they would be different on your computer.  I would be happy to do things
>
>differently if guided accordingly.
>   I think you are unequivocally one of the good guys and deeply
>interested in teaching applications and teacher training, though I
>remember from a past conversation your thoughts about how difficult it
>is to go from  linguistic grammars to applied grammar within the
>classroom. They are completely different frames of reference, not just a
>
>more scholarly or watered down version of the other. You seem to be
>implying in your last post that linguists have developed a full
>understanding of grammar, but aren't concerned with how that trickles
>down.  From my perspective, it seems that their understanding of grammar
>
>is enormously limited, in part because they have never thought it
>important to ask about the role of a conscious understanding of grammar
>in the language uses of normal life.  If I carried through on your
>physics analogy, I'd say it would be like the physics people saying that
>
>physics has nothing to do with bridges or buildings or airplanes
>crashing or the tensile strength of aluminum, and so on. It would be
>like their saying that none of it is ever meant for application in the
>real world. Teaching a disinterested grammar is not the same thing  as
>evolving a grammar out of the needs of the world.
>    Linguists have told us that dialect differences are rule driven (I
>am an enormous fan of Geneva Smitherman), but they haven't been
>successful in  erasing the stigmas associated with those differences. It
>
>is difficult to help students like that (I do that all the time) because
>
>they don't have the base understanding they need to negotiate the
>differences in these language worlds. The students who get hurt the
>worst by failure to teach (articulate) clear standards (not just impose
>them) are those on the margins, those supposedly helped by the
>"progressive" attitudes of the middle class.  This same understanding
>has also led to a general sense among the progressives that the learning
>
>of grammar is natural and inevitable, so that teaching a native speaker
>about his or her own language is unnecessary, even harmful.  The logic
>goes something like this: everything a native speaker says is
>grammatical, by definition.  Learning this is a natural process.
> Teaching a native speaker to speak grammatically is nonsensical.
>Therefore, we do not need to teach (study) grammar in the schools,
>although we seem to need to correct errors in as unconscious a way as
>possible. (Nowadays, by people who themselves don't know much about
>grammar when they are doing this "correcting.") This way of looking at
>grammar, which has a very uneasy co-existence with prescriptive
>grammars, has given us the choice between bad teaching and no teaching,
>and no teaching has, for the most part, won out. There are certainly
>pockets of traditional grammar teaching still left and pockets of
>minimalist intervention, but we do not have a systematic grammar in the
>public schools that draws at all reasonably on the insights of a
>scholarly discipline.
>   Has anyone done a good study yet on whether students actually do
>learn to write simply by being exposed to good writing? This is one of
>the truisms that seems to have been taken for granted. Certainly one of
>the questions that hasn't been though of as important enough to ask is
>whether conscious understanding of grammar is at all useful in the
>production of meaningful texts and, if so, exactly what is most useful.
>
> It is not enough to say that the sentences of the text are grammatical
>or correct,  because that does not allow us to differentiate between the
>
>nonsensical and the thoughtful, the effective and the ineffective.  The
>answer I get from most American linguists is that this has nothing to do
>
>with grammar, though I believe that is simply because their study of
>grammar has never concerned itself with such questions.  In other words,
>
>we don't have the theory at any level; it's not just that we are missing
>
>pedagogical applications. (A major exception would be functional
>grammar, but that isn't accorded anywhere near the kind of respect it
>needs to have the influence it deserves on this side of the Atlantic.)
>    In order to solve our present problem, we need to acknowledge that
>linguists have been an inadvertent part of the problem, that they have
>done much to result in grammar disappearing from the public school
>curriculum. Nothing of consequence will happen if people in each camp
>place the blame elsewhere. As the battle lines are currently drawn, none
>
>of the sides can win, and our students continue to lose out, the
>neediest losing most of all.
>    For change to happen, people in a position to answer these questions
>
>need to see them as important.  Given the hierarchy of the academy, that
>
>won't happen easily.  That's why I tried the analogy of a cure for
>cancer.  It's not just "pure biology", but has been worth an enormous
>investment.  It will also be transdisciplinary when it comes, with the
>potential to re-energize a number of disciplines.
>
>
>Craig
>
>
>Stahlke, Herbert F.W. wrote:
>
>
>
>>Craig,
>>
>>Something digitally strange is happening with this thread.  Bob got my
>>
>>
>posting in scrambled form, and I got yours without any wordwrap.  When I
>hit reply, what you wrote got formatted with wordwrap, but what Bob and
>I had written still wasn't.  I don't know how this happens, but Max
>Morenberg occasionally emails me that a posting of mine has come through
>scrambled.  But these things are intermittent and probably in the domain
>of the list manager.
>
>
>>Now to your comments.
>>
>>I'll be brief. As a linguist doing linguistics, my interest is in
>>
>>
>solving problems of language not of language teaching.  If my linguistic
>writing and study has direct application to the teaching of language or
>of writing it is purely fortuitous, not by intent.  We work in different
>domains.  I ask and explore questions about linguistic structure and you
>work on questions of rhetoric and teaching.  That said, I'm also
>interested in teaching, and I agree with Bob and Bill and others on this
>list that linguistics offers important insights into how language can be
>taught and what can be taught about it. Bob was entirely right in
>pointing out that it was linguistic work that provided the basis of
>arguments in the 60s and since that non-standard dialects are not
>inferior forms of English but are thoroughly rule-governed systems.
>Even the notion "rule-governed" is a linguistic notion.  The way
>auxiliary verbs are used in discourse to distinguish background
>information from foreground is another insight from linguistics that can
>be turned into a useful teaching module for students of writing.  On the
>other hand, it didn't take a linguist to realize or demonstrate that the
>injunction to avoid passive voice is taken to wrong-headed extremes by a
>lot of teachers.  Good writers and teachers of writing have known that
>for a long time.
>
>
>>There are clearly linguistic insights that have relevance for language
>>
>>
>teachers and writing teachers.  But that is not a function of their
>importance to linguistics.  Rather it's a consequence of the fact
>linguists research the medium that language teachers and writing
>teachers teach.  There is inevitably some transfer.  For most linguists,
>however, once something is know well enough for that transfer to take
>place it's no longer of much interest to linguists and they've gone on
>to something else.  No judgment of relative value here; just recognition
>of the fact that we have very different, but linked, areas of endeavor.
>
>
>>I think this relationship is part of the reason why it's useful to have
>>
>>
>linguists on this list.  Sure, our arguments seem to some to take
>several tours around the barn at times, but you guys tolerate that
>pretty well, usually, just as the linguists sometimes sit back in
>bemusement when pedagogical questions arise.  For example, I don't get
>involved a whole lot in Ed's discussions because I'm not involved in
>grammar teaching to the grade levels he's interested in, and his
>grammar, which I suspect works well for that population, is too blunt an
>instrument for linguistic purposes.  This isn't a criticism of his work.
>We address different problems.
>
>
>>Of course, sometimes people from both groups jump into the other sort
>>
>>
>of discussion.
>
>
>>Herb
>>
>>
>>
>
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>
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>
>
>


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