Johanna,
I want to thank you for a very candid and useful assessment.
If we want to get people to drop the old grill and drill error
focus, we need to make sure we are offerring something far more
satisfying. You're right; it is more challenging, but linguistic
(grammatical) anaylsis of text is immediately rewarding. To do that, we
need strong connections between the form and the meaning. It's an
enormously close reading, and has all those benefits. It seems like a
highly grounded interpretation.
Craig
Johanna Rubba wrote:
> Craig points out an important issue, which I believe rests in part on
> the kind of graduate education linguists get. Many of these linguists
> go on to teach in positions like mine, Herb's, and that of many others
> on this list -- teacher-ed courses (probably just one in the whole
> teacher-ed curriculum, for most).
>
> Many, if not most, linguistics grad programs follow the generative
> tradition, which focuses on how cool theory is. Not much attention is
> paid to meaning or text organization except within generative theories
> such as formal semantics. There is little interest in the practical
> application of linguistics in teacher education; the field as a whole
> does not train, encourage, or reward work that many of the people on
> this list do. Many introductory linguistics textbooks (many students
> take an intro ling or intro to language course for their credential
> requirement) continue to present linguistics as though the students
> are training to be linguists, for instance devoting whole chapters to
> solving phonology problems in other languages. Then you find a few
> paragraphs devoted to discourse analysis in a single chapter devoted
> to "other approaches" to language. Structure-of-English textbooks do a
> much better job, but many of them also devote too much space to
> linguistic argumentation and things like syntactic tree diagrams,
> etc., and little space to how language conveys meaning and how
> structures serve discourse functions.
>
> At the same time, they acquire the typical linguist's attitude towards
> prescriptivism, which is dismissive. Since little attention is paid to
> what is actually happening in schools, such as the standardized tests
> that require knowledge of prescriptive points like who/whom, they have
> little feeling for the problems future teachers face in applying
> linguistic grammar in the classroom. They then have to confront this
> when they get into a job in an English department. Often they simply
> continue to teach according to their graduate training. Not only does
> this not serve the students, it helps preserve the hostility of
> non-ling. faculty towards linguistics, which they view as an arcane
> discipline quite irrelevant to the interests of literature or
> composition. I suspect many of these linguists also do not quite grasp
> the idea that their students and colleagues are not necessarily
> fascinated with grammar for grammar's sake, as they are.
>
> My absolutely most successful course at Cal Poly was a course in which
> I taught linguistic analysis of literature, using the excellent book
> by Mick Short. Students were amazed to see that they could apply
> linguistics in defining authorial style, styles such as
> stream-of-consciousness, or analyze point of view via linguistic
> signals in a text. They welcomed the idea that you can defend an
> interpretation of a text based on the actual linguistic features of
> the text. We looked at minimalism in Raymond Carver's stories, and the
> application of speech act theory in modern plays, among many other
> things. On their course evaluations, students simultaneously said that
> the course was the hardest they had ever taken, but that it had served
> them better than _any_ of their lit. courses, and that such a course
> should be required of every English major (these were grad students,
> by the way).
>
> It's telling that Short's is a British book. How many American ling.
> grad programs offer a course in stylistics?
>
> Now, my training in non-generative linguistics was also focused
> entirely on theory, but because it was a meaning-based approach, I
> found it easier to incorporate its principles into teaching about
> language. Unfortunately, I had little training in functional syntax
> and discourse analysis, and am having to try to educate myself in that
> while I try to handle my heavy workload. Nevertheless, I am
> incorporating applications of ling. to literature, education, and
> everyday language into a ten-week course! Quite a challenge!
>
> Ed is too hard on the linguists on this list. Why do we belong to such
> a list? I believe most of us are here because we have a strong
> interest in improving grammar instruction K-12. Frankly, the problem
> of methodology for these levels has only recently been addressed. And
> we face the problem of trying to formulate this while we teach college
> students. Any of us teaching at non-R1 universities have heavy
> workloads and are hard-pressed to find support to do classroom-based
> work. In order to publish in our field at the level required to get
> tenure, we often have to submit to journals that will not publish such
> practical material as finally creating a linguistics-based grammar
> curriculum. (See above remarks on lack of support for
> education-related work in the linguistics community.)
>
>
> Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
> Linguistics Minor Advisor
> English Department
> California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
> E-mail: [log in to unmask]
> Tel.: 805.756.2184
> Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
> Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
> URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
>
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