Asking for objective evidence is sometimes a dodge, even if it is unintentional, as I'm sure it is in this case. Dick wasn't executing a ploy. But what would constitute objective evidence that the language is deteriorating? Would we even be able to recognize it? A related problem is the claim that objective evidence makes it clear that explicit teaching of grammar not only does not good but actually does harm, part of the NCTE opposition to grammar teaching. Unfortunately objective evidence is very difficult to come by in this debate. It would take a multi-year longitudinal study compare the performance, on a variety of scales, of students who have learned and use explicit grammatical knowledge and students who haven't and don't. Such studies are long, comples, and costly, and so they tend not to be done, We are left with traditional liberal arts definitions and values, with historical studies like Mulroy's, and with modern ideas of grammar and pedagogy.
Herb
________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of PAUL E. DONIGER
Richard asks a valid question: Where's the "objective evidence?" I don't know that anyone has done any real research into this, but as a high school English teacher, I think I'm confronting objective evidence regularly. Students are very weak in their reading and writing skills, no doubt in part because many of them never really developed the habits of reading and writing; however, I also think that part of their problems stem from not having studied language closely in the early grades.
It used to be that most writing we did in schools, for example, was objective, academic writing. Today, students are given far more creative writing to do than academic. Also, David Mulroy is absolutely right in bringing up the drop in world language studies. Why is it that in the USA, few if any students learn languages in elementary schools, when the brain is best suited to such studies?
Finally, I would look at the quality of journalism in general, which I think is the issue that started this thread. I listen to public radio and watch public television, which represent about the best journilistic copy available, but I hear "errors" in language constantly, even there. Newspapers as well have become much weaker in the quality of writing ... take a look at the typical "lead" paragraph, for example, and compare it to one written twenty-five years or so ago. I think you'll notice a much lower standard of writing in the average newspaper today.
Our task, it seems to me, is to raise awareness and present some useful ideas and techniques to improve language skills among today's students ... and to give teachers the tools to help their students advance such skills.
Paul E. Doniger
The Gilbert School
"Veit, Richard" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
I would like to know when that wonderful time was when people didn't make grammatical errors, when Americans were routinely literate, when students could write fluently, when no one had problems with the who/whom distinction or used "criteria" as a singular noun. Folk wisdom says it was about a generation ago. Of course, that's what folk wisdom has always said.
A generation ago (as folk wisdom would have it) the English language was just fine and people used it well. Today, however, the language is deteriorating, and people no longer speak or write it properly. That's a common complaint in 2004, and it's easy to find other similar complaints today--just as it was easy to find them in 1975, and in 1950, and in 1925, and in 1800 and 1600 and 1400. People seem always to have believed the language was on the decline and to have expressed that belief in almost identical ter! ms ever since there has been an English language. Harvey Daniels did a nice job of presenting these complaints through the ages in his 1983 book Famous Last Words: The American Language Crisis Reconsidered. The evident conclusion is that such fulminations have their origin in the human psyche far more than in objective reality.
If our language were on a thousand year downward slope, we'd all be muttering gibberish by now. But just because past Jeremiahs were wrong, that doesn't prove that now isn't the one time in our history when our language really is falling apart. The odds are against this hypothesis, however, and before accepting it, we need to see objective evidence and not the glib anecdotes that Charrow presents.
Dick Veit
UNCW English Department
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