Bob, I'd like to get a copy of the talk you and Jim gave at the ATEG
conference. Is it in ERIC?
Or can you e-mail me a copy off-list?
 
You asked how I teach those homophones? I give the usual mini-lecture and then
give them a text containing lots of the particular homophonic words I lectured
on (its/it's; their/there; to, too). The
homophones are sometimes used correctly in the text, sometimes not. The
students demonstrate complete understanding of the lecture by editing the text
perfectly or almost perfectly. Then they
proceed to make homophone errors in their own writings.
 
I don't think that any of this learning, or seeming inability to learn, has
anything to do with method of instruction.
 
Many of the errors students make are what I call "metacognitive errors" or
"attention errors." Besides the word level errors, students make syntactical
attention errors, the
subject-verb agreement error caused by intervening material being one of them,
but not the only one. For example, there is the overlapping sentence, such as:
 
--But I am also saying that a homecoming queen has to be pretty, popular, and
airheaded is not true at all.
 
In which the well-formed sentence:  "But I am also saying that a homecoming
queen has to be pretty, popular, and airheaded"
 
overlaps with the well-formed sentence:
 
"that a homecoming queen has to be pretty, popular, and airheaded is not true
at all."
 
Another kind of common attention error on the syntactical level is the one in
which the subject gets buried in an initial element, such as a prepositional
phrase:
 
"By being only five feet two and weighing less than a hundred and fifty pounds
did not keep Stevenson from being an effective quarterback."
 
Teen-aged beginning writers suffer an Attention Deficit Disorder when it comes
to language. On another list, Pat Balanoff made this comment about theEnglish
education majors in her grammar & usage course:
 
"For the most part the students do not like the course.  They are not
accustomed to looking at language closely and do it very poorly for the most
part."
 
Well, teenaged beginning writers do it even more poorly. And the students in
the "basic
writing" courses do it worse yet.
 
My guess is that time and growing interest in intellectual or professional
matters will result in a young person focusing more consciously and effectively
on the language she uses in her writing. Reading helps too, in unconscious ways
we know little about. And not much else will have any effect.
 
But then, I'm a language deist. I believe in the existence of obscure pressures
that determine our linguistic competence, while we run around uselessly trying
to learn or teach, as if we had some personal control over such matters. And
yet I keep looking for the gimmick that will help my students to spell "alot"
as two words.
 
--Bill Murdick