Judy Diamondstone wrote:

> >> >I wonder how many students want to be told about tendencies.  Exactly,
> >> >what is the percentage of a tendency?  How much deviation must there be
> >> >from a tendency for a text to be "ungrammatical"?
> >>
> >
> >  Judy,
> >    I am not sure I follow you. Could you provide a language example that will
> >make clearer the point of your analogies?  I think that the question is how (or
> >whether)  these "tendencies" can be formalized into a "grammar" or some
> >structure that students can use to guage the well formedness of their texts. I
> >think we all agree that  such tendencies are observable.
> >                                    Jim Kenkel
> >                                    Eastern KY Univ
>
> I'll try. Let's say the curriculum calls for students to learn to write
> exposition of some kind. Wouldn't it be helpful if the teacher could ask, Do
> my students know how to nominalize processes/build up noun phrase subjects?
> -- If the answer is no,  that might be one point of departure for the unit.
> I could propose more examples, but probably you could too. If you need more,
> say so -- Judy
>

I agree that it is a very good thing for students to know how to"build up noun
phrase subjects" and it is certainly the case that topics are often found/embedded
in these structures, and it is a good things to make students conscious of these
tendencies, but we still haven't approached the issue of formalizing these
observations into anything like a grammar or some other structure which students can
use to evaluate strengths and weaknesses of their texts. Given the complexities of
the communicative context of, say, exposition, I can't imagine what such a structure
would look like.
    But perhaps that is not what you are proposing. Are we talking past each other?

                                Jim Kenkel
                                Eastern KY Univ