Craig, Bob, et al.:

I suspect part of the disagreement here is due to a mismatch in focus.
While it's hard to set up criteria that would support a firm measure,
I'd guess at least 95% of English grammar is "shared" by all dialects
commonly met with in the U.S. -- e.g., the habitual placement of the
definite article before the noun, rather than after, or the placement of
subjects before verbs in the majority of sentence types. 

But the shared parts have never been the focus of K-12 English classes.
Traditionally, classroom grammar has concentrated on (1) metalinguistic
descriptive terms (which aren't native to anyone's dialect) and (2) a
set of structural items/rules that are in the 5% *unshared* portion.
Absolute phrases, adjective clauses in which objects of prepositions or
comparatives are relativized, etc. are probably in that unshared 5%, and
in fact, probably aren't native to most *spoken* dialects at all. 

Bob's entirely right that from one perspective, the differences among
English dialects aren't that major; it's not like we get many kids
showing up at school who grew up saying "book the" instead of "the book"
-- but Craig's entirely right that the stuff that we *do* talk about in
grammar classes is material to which dialect is crucial. And the
dialectal differences extend to variation in what the illocutionary
force of particular utterances is. There *are* dialects in which
speakers would routinely say, "Tell me what color that is" instead of
"What color is that?", and it's reasonable to think such differences
will affect students' performance in the classroom (if only because the
child is left wondering why the adult teacher is in charge of the
classroom if s/he doesn't even know basic color terms; why else ask the
kids?). 


We also have to distinguish between any developmental sequence for
metalinguistic understanding and any developmental sequence for
appropriate usage of particular constructions. Knowing when to say
"that's a passive construction" is a very different skill from knowing
when to cast a sentence in such a way that the patient (or insert term
of your choice) is the subject and the agent is omitted or tacked on in
a by-phrase, or how to understand such a sentence when it's encountered.
I'm positive that the students in my classes who don't know "Kangaroos
are found in Australia" is called a passive construction DO know that
the kangaroos aren't finding anything. And I don't think my students
have trouble labeling passives because it's just too cognitively complex
a task; they engage in far, FAR more complex categorization tasks
elsewhere in their lives. We won't know anything about developmental
sequences for metalinguistic understanding until we notice students in
particular age ranges running into a brick wall while trying to handle
otherwise well-scaffolded material. Since the current state of grammar
instruction in most districts has no real scaffolding (I think), we just
don't know much about that side of things. 

Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University

-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Robert Yates
Sent: Wednesday, February 04, 2009 9:30 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Developmental phases of grammar knowledge

Craig,

Here is what I find so frustrating with your claims. 

Here is the initial comment I responded to.  

>>>> Craig Hancock <[log in to unmask]> 2/3/2009 1:38 PM >>>
           
>    Are we to assume that children in an inner city neighborhood will
> develop language in the same way as the suburban kids, even though
it's
> quite apparent that the cultural context and the languages themselves
> might differ remarkably? If we believe there's a "natural order", a
> "universal order", we may end up with deficit models that are
> misleading.

And, I responding with the following:

> ****
> What  is the cultural context and the language that might make them
differ
> in remarkable ways?
>
> I have no idea what cultural context would result in a kind of English
> that would be remarkably different.
>
> Could someone provide examples?

Now you tell us.  

I don't think we should reduce this to a discussion of forms. At what
point does the child learn copula deletion? The same time a suburban kid
is learning something else? At what points is it appropriate and at what
points is it not?  If  we simply code switch (something some kids never
have to learn to do), are they really adequate translations or is
something very different being conveyed? Would code switching get in the
way of other development? Does it take longer to learn the language
patterns in two worlds than it would for one? 

**
If not forms, then what are you writing about?

I find this observation really interesting:

Lisa Delpit gives as an example of miscommunication the suburban teacher
telling a child "Jimmy, would you like to put your crayons away now?"
When the kid goes on using them, the teacher sees him as a discipline
problem. At what point do we learn that a polite request is really an
order? Delpit, by the way, makes a strong case for explicit teaching of
language to inner city children for exactly these reasons, though she
says African-American parents and educators aren't taken seriously when
they try to have a role in these decisions. What seems natural to one
group won't be natural to another. 

****
Is the claim here that ONLY kids from the inner city don't know that a
question can be a polite request?  

Are you sure about that?  I just don't believe it.  Of course, if the
kid didn't put the crayon away, the kid answered the real question: NO,
I would not like to put the crayon away. 

Is Delpit making the claim that from this ONE example that suburban kids
always recognize the question as an indirect request? Are you drawing a
conclusion about a difference between suburban kids and inner city kids
from ONE example?

Wow!

By the way, all of your examples deal with FORMS.  

Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri

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