Herb,
    When my messages come back to me, they are fine.  I'm not sure why 
they would be different on your computer.  I would be happy to do things 
differently if guided accordingly.  
   I think you are unequivocally one of the good guys and deeply 
interested in teaching applications and teacher training, though I 
remember from a past conversation your thoughts about how difficult it 
is to go from  linguistic grammars to applied grammar within the 
classroom. They are completely different frames of reference, not just a 
more scholarly or watered down version of the other. You seem to be 
implying in your last post that linguists have developed a full 
understanding of grammar, but aren't concerned with how that trickles 
down.  From my perspective, it seems that their understanding of grammar 
is enormously limited, in part because they have never thought it 
important to ask about the role of a conscious understanding of grammar 
in the language uses of normal life.  If I carried through on your 
physics analogy, I'd say it would be like the physics people saying that 
physics has nothing to do with bridges or buildings or airplanes 
crashing or the tensile strength of aluminum, and so on. It would be 
like their saying that none of it is ever meant for application in the 
real world. Teaching a disinterested grammar is not the same thing  as 
evolving a grammar out of the needs of the world.
    Linguists have told us that dialect differences are rule driven (I 
am an enormous fan of Geneva Smitherman), but they haven't been 
successful in  erasing the stigmas associated with those differences. It 
is difficult to help students like that (I do that all the time) because 
they don't have the base understanding they need to negotiate the 
differences in these language worlds. The students who get hurt the 
worst by failure to teach (articulate) clear standards (not just impose 
them) are those on the margins, those supposedly helped by the 
"progressive" attitudes of the middle class.  This same understanding 
has also led to a general sense among the progressives that the learning 
of grammar is natural and inevitable, so that teaching a native speaker 
about his or her own language is unnecessary, even harmful.  The logic 
goes something like this: everything a native speaker says is 
grammatical, by definition.  Learning this is a natural process. 
 Teaching a native speaker to speak grammatically is nonsensical. 
Therefore, we do not need to teach (study) grammar in the schools, 
although we seem to need to correct errors in as unconscious a way as 
possible. (Nowadays, by people who themselves don't know much about 
grammar when they are doing this "correcting.") This way of looking at 
grammar, which has a very uneasy co-existence with prescriptive 
grammars, has given us the choice between bad teaching and no teaching, 
and no teaching has, for the most part, won out. There are certainly 
pockets of traditional grammar teaching still left and pockets of 
minimalist intervention, but we do not have a systematic grammar in the 
public schools that draws at all reasonably on the insights of a 
scholarly discipline.  
   Has anyone done a good study yet on whether students actually do 
learn to write simply by being exposed to good writing? This is one of 
the truisms that seems to have been taken for granted. Certainly one of 
the questions that hasn't been though of as important enough to ask is 
whether conscious understanding of grammar is at all useful in the 
production of meaningful texts and, if so, exactly what is most useful.  
 It is not enough to say that the sentences of the text are grammatical 
or correct,  because that does not allow us to differentiate between the 
nonsensical and the thoughtful, the effective and the ineffective.  The 
answer I get from most American linguists is that this has nothing to do 
with grammar, though I believe that is simply because their study of 
grammar has never concerned itself with such questions.  In other words, 
we don't have the theory at any level; it's not just that we are missing 
pedagogical applications. (A major exception would be functional 
grammar, but that isn't accorded anywhere near the kind of respect it 
needs to have the influence it deserves on this side of the Atlantic.)
    In order to solve our present problem, we need to acknowledge that 
linguists have been an inadvertent part of the problem, that they have 
done much to result in grammar disappearing from the public school 
curriculum. Nothing of consequence will happen if people in each camp 
place the blame elsewhere. As the battle lines are currently drawn, none 
of the sides can win, and our students continue to lose out, the 
neediest losing most of all.
    For change to happen, people in a position to answer these questions 
need to see them as important.  Given the hierarchy of the academy, that 
won't happen easily.  That's why I tried the analogy of a cure for 
cancer.  It's not just "pure biology", but has been worth an enormous 
investment.  It will also be transdisciplinary when it comes, with the 
potential to re-energize a number of disciplines.
   

Craig
     
     
Stahlke, Herbert F.W. wrote:

>Craig,
> 
>Something digitally strange is happening with this thread.  Bob got my posting in scrambled form, and I got yours without any wordwrap.  When I hit reply, what you wrote got formatted with wordwrap, but what Bob and I had written still wasn't.  I don't know how this happens, but Max Morenberg occasionally emails me that a posting of mine has come through scrambled.  But these things are intermittent and probably in the domain of the list manager.
> 
>Now to your comments.
> 
>I'll be brief. As a linguist doing linguistics, my interest is in solving problems of language not of language teaching.  If my linguistic writing and study has direct application to the teaching of language or of writing it is purely fortuitous, not by intent.  We work in different domains.  I ask and explore questions about linguistic structure and you work on questions of rhetoric and teaching.  That said, I'm also interested in teaching, and I agree with Bob and Bill and others on this list that linguistics offers important insights into how language can be taught and what can be taught about it. Bob was entirely right in pointing out that it was linguistic work that provided the basis of arguments in the 60s and since that non-standard dialects are not inferior forms of English but are thoroughly rule-governed systems.  Even the notion "rule-governed" is a linguistic notion.  The way auxiliary verbs are used in discourse to distinguish background information from foreground is another insight from linguistics that can be turned into a useful teaching module for students of writing.  On the other hand, it didn't take a linguist to realize or demonstrate that the injunction to avoid passive voice is taken to wrong-headed extremes by a lot of teachers.  Good writers and teachers of writing have known that for a long time.  
> 
>There are clearly linguistic insights that have relevance for language teachers and writing teachers.  But that is not a function of their importance to linguistics.  Rather it's a consequence of the fact linguists research the medium that language teachers and writing teachers teach.  There is inevitably some transfer.  For most linguists, however, once something is know well enough for that transfer to take place it's no longer of much interest to linguists and they've gone on to something else.  No judgment of relative value here; just recognition of the fact that we have very different, but linked, areas of endeavor.
> 
>I think this relationship is part of the reason why it's useful to have linguists on this list.  Sure, our arguments seem to some to take several tours around the barn at times, but you guys tolerate that pretty well, usually, just as the linguists sometimes sit back in bemusement when pedagogical questions arise.  For example, I don't get involved a whole lot in Ed's discussions because I'm not involved in grammar teaching to the grade levels he's interested in, and his grammar, which I suspect works well for that population, is too blunt an instrument for linguistic purposes.  This isn't a criticism of his work.  We address different problems.  
> 
>Of course, sometimes people from both groups jump into the other sort of discussion.
> 
>Herb
>
>	
>	
>        
>       Bob, Bill, Herb,
>          I have enjoyed the discussion very much, though I'm sure I'm not alone on the list in having the feeling I'm overhearing a conversation by insiders (rather than being included.)  But that's the nature of the beast (ATEG),  both our weakness and our strength.
>            I'm certainly  glad that people feel free to explore the nature of language without having to find direct teaching application, and I'm glad other people are interested in these applications.  Like Bill (I hope I'm not misreading you), I can't help feeling that anyone who looks at language as if it is not interactive will simply misunderstand what they are seeing, much as classical biology would miss so much without an ecological  orientation.  We can look at life in the lab, but it helps to remember that life does not exist in a laboratory, and the forms of life are part of a dynamic world.
>           Since my primary interest has been reading and writing, I am interested in grammar in context (and by that, I don't mean finding student error in their actual work, which is what context has come to mean in my field, but looking at how grammar participates in the making of a public meaning.) To me, a grammar that does not accommodate this is a bit like a human biology that has no connection to medicine or health.  (Grammar, of course, need not be reduced to a theory of disease.)  We need disinterested study, but we also give colossal grants and colossal resources to issues of great public weight, like finding a cure for cancer.  What we have in linguistics seems often to me to be the equivalent of saying that human health has nothing to do with biology.  And the fact that people are sick is not our concern.
>           We do, in fact, have a present day crisis in my field (English) deeply exacerbated because so many specialists are at work asking questions that they themselves say are irrelevant to real world practice. The material I quoted from Diane Hacker on pronouns and antecedents is a case in point.  The deep disconnection between the work of linguistics and public understanding (Hacker's book is generally thought of as among the most current of handbooks) is absolutely staggering. 
>           I'm probably reducing the argument to the absurd, but it's a little like saying that much grammar has nothing to do with what people write, read, say, or hear in their everyday lives.  If you can't bring the knowledge back to that world, what use is it?
>           Using a tag question, I see as a functional test.  It is made possible because a sentence (in traditional practice) requires a grammatical subject and finite verb (though they don't fully understand what they are asking for), and the tag question is a test for those elements.  (The finite verb auxiliary acts almost like a pronoun would, as a stand in for the predicate.)  SFG pays considerable attention to this.  This "mood element" is often what gets bandied about in conversation when we agree or disagree with a statement or even answer a question.  "Did your son ever graduate from college?" "He did."  "He" stands in for "your son" and "did" stands in for the predicate ("graduated from college.") The tag question also has the function within conversation of inviting a response from the listener, perhaps softening a statement from time to time. "You will be on time on Friday, won't you?" We wouldn't be able to use it as a trick for identifying the subject if it weren't already part of our functional repertoire. 
>           Subject and predicate are functional terms, not simply formal ones.  The sense I get of their meaning (again, traditional grammar is not all that reflective about what it is asking for) is that something has been isolated (the subject) and something has been predicated about it.  There are, indeed, formal ways in which this is realized, and I don't know of a functional grammar that would ever imply that function is not realized through forms.  SFG presents this as one of three subject functions, and it gives us the kind of framework that helps us understand why we produce sentences that do not conform to the prescriptive norms. Predicating statements are not the only kind of meaning language allows us, but traditional grammar tends to overemphasize their value by insisting on them in all formal contexts. It's hard to conform to (or amend) a practice without understanding what is being asked for.
>           Rather than seeing the tag question trick as a great boon from linguistics, I would see it as  one more attempt to stave off the real teaching of grammar.  These minimalist approaches (avoiding error in context or what is sometimes called "grammar at the point of need") are simply stopgap solutions for writing teachers who are trying to help students who know little or no grammar to start with.  Since knowledge of grammar is considered either irrelevant (descriptive) or harmful (prescriptive), we use these tricks to get by with as little knowledge as we can.  It seems easier than saying that this isn't an independent clause, or whatever would be relevant, simply because we know that the student doesn't know what a clause is and somewhere along the line we have decided that it is not important or helpful to take the time to teach what a clause is or how subordination contributes to the creation of meaning.    
>           We won't begin to solve this problem until we admit that a deep separation exists and admit that it is not necessarily everyone else's fault.
>	
>       Craig  
>              
>	
>
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>  
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