Herb,
   That's a very thoughtful and useful summary. A recent book that makes
suggestions along those lines is "Reading in Secondary Content Areas: A
Language-Based Pedagogy", co-authored by Zhihui Fang and Mary J.
Schleppegrell. "To succeed in secondary schooling and beyond, students
need to develop specialized literacies relevant to each content area as
well as a critical literacy that they can use across content areas to
engage with, reflect on, and evaluate specialized and advanced
knowledge. Teachers play an important role in apprenticing their
students into disciplinary knowledge and practices." The authors take
an approach out of systemic functional lingusitics for that task.
   In composition, we have long ago recognized that writing competence
differs "across the curriculum." In my school, we farmed out much
writing instruction to the disciplines for exactly that reason, but
have found, in many cases, that those in the disciplines have not been
overly reflective about their own best practices. For someone like
myself--whose job it is to help nonmainstream students be successful in
their fieds of choice, not just as English majors--that has meant going
trying to find my way in largely undeveloped territory.
   I expect Bob will react angrily to the suggestion, but I also recommend
Schleppegrell's "The Language of Schooling." It also grows out of the
beleif that literacy can be disdcipline specific, that it can and
should be made more explicit, and that we have a mentoring role in the
process.

Craig



Craig, Bill, Bob, et al.,
>
> Let me suggest another take on what children know and don't know of the
> grammar of their language.  Douglas Biber has demonstrated very thoroughly
> that genres are defined in part by the grammatical structures they tend
> towards.  That's the point of his Variation in Spoken and Written English,
> where he uses some remarkably sophisticated statistical measures to
> investigate the use of different structures in different genres, drawing
> from a very large corpus.  (My copy is still in a box, so I'm speaking
> generally.)  He and his co-authors continue this approach in their Longman
> Grammar of Spoken and Written English where they present the distribution
> across major classes of genre of many of the structures and phenomena they
> present.  I would suppose that while few school children would be as
> baffled by an English past perfect as they would be by the same form
> presented in Latin, they might not yet have had enough experience of
> different genres, and none of some genres, to know when and how to use the
> construction.  We could be doing a lot more of that sort of teaching,
> which would require recognition of constructions as well, and
> pedagogically such topics would fit nicely into the social settings
> children need to be able to function in.
>
> Herb
>
> Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
> Emeritus Professor of English
> Ball State University
> Muncie, IN  47306
> [log in to unmask]
> ________________________________________
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: February 6, 2009 5:31 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Developmental phases of grammar knowledge
>
> Bill,
>    You and I tend to agree more often than not, so you have plenty of room
> to be cranky or crotchedy. (Does the word itself age us? I'm wondering
> whether my students would recognize it. I suspect it's part of our
> language world, but not theirs.)
>    I guess I'm frustrated with the overall status quo argument that you
> don't have to teach grammar to Native speakers because they already
> know it; you just have to teach the differences between prescriptive
> and non-standard dialect forms. It got us into this current bind. It
> supports the public beleif that grammar is all about correctness and
> about constraints.
>    I think the fact that proper nouns (single entity names) don't need to
> be grounded (are thought of as already grounded) is enormously useful
> and interesting. Maybe it would help to use their current instincts to
> see how far they can go intuitively and then broaden it out from there.
> If someone is famous, we might ask "Are you THE Bill Spruiell?" Or even
> "Are you the Bill Spruiell who once ate three dozen hot dogs at a state
> fair contest?" "Are you THE Joe the plumber?" All this could be a way
> into a much richer understanding of how noun phrases work within
> discourse, a replacement for the rather silly practice of calling
> everything but the head noun an "adjective."
>    Why don't so many students learn to read critically? Certainly the
> language they run into in school, particularly within the technical
> disciplines, is far more heavily nominalized. Will they just learn this
> from exposure or should we mentor them in? Are there systems for
> attribution in the common language? Do all students learn them? Is that
> a baser for expansion?
>    The more we understand the nature of literacy, the more explicit we can
> be about what we are asking for and the more effective we can be as
> mentors for students currently struggling. A mentor certainly pays
> attention to what the student is already doing well.
>    I understand that I am asking people to try out a whole new way of
> viewing grammar. I am also trying to say that it is being developed as
> we speak and seems, at least to me, a far more accurate and useful
> description of language than we get from the older ways.
>
> Craig
>
>  Craig,
>>
>>
>>
>> As you might expect, I will cling tenaciously to the idea that I'm not
>> being reductionist, just misunderstood (unfortunately, I'm far past the
>> age where I can manage brooding angst well; instead, I just look
>> crotchety, and people suggest bran).  I'm not primarily interested in
>> surface correctness - but I do think there are shared elements of
>> English that are basic enough that they only become topics of class
>> conversation for purposes of raising metalinguistic awareness, rather
>> than for encouraging supple, engaging writing, or adapting text to
>> specific genre expectations, etc.
>>
>>
>>
>> Parts of the grounding system are a case in point. Most students
>> certainly don't show up in first grade already accustomed to expressions
>> like "The tamarack is the only deciduous conifer in North America."
>> Everyday language experience would tell them that "the tamarack" should
>> be a particular tree, and that it should have been brought up in the
>> conversation before, and that sentence can violate both those
>> conditions. That kind of sentence is native mainly to scientific
>> writing, and the closest equivalent in normal use would be "Tamaracks
>> are the only deciduous conifers in North America" (ignoring, for the
>> moment, that one normally wouldn't go around saying "deciduous" in most
>> contexts).  But students  do show up in first grade expecting to hear
>> "Ms Smith told us a story" and not "The Ms Smith told us story." That's
>> interesting in its own right, of course, and makes a good example for
>> raising metalinguistic awareness, but - rather crucially - there's no
>> reason to spend much time talking about the contexts in which one would
>> say "The Ms Smith told us story."
>>
>>
>>
>> It's not a situation in which we have multiple options and we're
>> discussing the textual and contextual effects of one choice over another
>> (as with active vs. passive); instead, it's one where a hypothetical
>> option just isn't on the menu to begin with. A course focused entirely
>> on the effects of linguistic choices, would still end up lumping these
>> mainly under a heading like, "You can choose to violate your readers'
>> basic linguistic expectations, but why?"
>>
>>
>>
>> I take (or mistake) Bob's point to be that there is an awful lot in that
>> category (one of the dangers of writing this kind of "in between"
>> response is that I end up trying to portray what I think are other
>> people's positions, which fully admit is rather presumptuous). Although
>> I tend to disagree with him about why students won't expect the
>> "nonEnglishy" stuff, I have to agree that they don't expect it, and that
>> there's an infinitely large bag of non-English-y-ness that they don't
>> expect - and that they validly assume others won't expect as well.
>>
>>
>>
>> Lysincere,
>>
>>
>>
>> Bill Spruiell
>>
>>
>>
>> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
>> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
>> Sent: Friday, February 06, 2009 1:27 PM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: Developmental phases of grammar knowledge
>>
>>
>>
>> Bill,
>>    I still think you are taking a highly reductive view of grammar. If
>> the only thing we are interested in is surface feature correctness, then
>> all the rest can be ignored for pragmatic reasons. We can go on and deal
>> with "higher end" concerns, like reading and writing, treating grammar
>> as if it has no role in all that.
>>    Determiners are only one aspect of the "grounding" system whereby
>> common nouns are brought into discourse focus. "Grounding" also happens
>> through the finite verb system, all of this a way for the language to
>> function in various discourse modes, some of which children have never
>> encountered prior to school. Why do some children never learn those
>> processes effectively? Perhaps because we have been teaching children
>> all along as if all that matters is a superficial correctness along the
>> fault line of dialect differences.
>>    If you think grammar is innate and meaningfully neutral, just a
>> system of forms, then don't teach it. It just happens. If you see it as
>> learned and deeply connected to cognition and discourse, then you ought
>> to attend to it and not just expect it to happen.
>>    There are views of language which support the teaching of grammar and
>> views of language that support our current status quo. Bob and I are on
>> opposite poles of that argument.
>>
>> Craig
>>
>>
>> Spruiell, William C wrote:
>>
>> Craig,
>>
>>
>>
>> I'd agree that there is a danger in the "5%  analogy," but in a sense,
>> it can be taken as a statement about language communities as well. To
>> the extent that we say a language community is "English-speaking," we're
>> saying that about 95% of the time they say generally the same kinds of
>> things we'd expect from other communities of English-speakers, and seem
>> to be doing so for roughly the same reasons. Speaker A puts definite
>> articles before nouns, and so does Speaker B, and they both do so in
>> ways that support the hypothesis that they're viewing the noun as
>> something known or established via discourse. When you refer to
>> "English," Bob, I think, immediately thinks of the myriad ways in which
>> the practices of these language communities are similar, and so
>> statements referring to differences stand out as potentially ignoring
>> the (much, much) greater commonalities.
>>
>>
>>
>> This view does not entail accepting or rejecting any particular claim
>> about how speakers end up sharing those language practices - they could
>> be shared because of the operation of a biological language acquisition
>> device, or instead because historical exigency has produced a situation
>> in which those communities are replicating language practices from an
>> ancestral speech community they all derive from (in the cultural sense,
>> not a biological one).  But I (and I would suspect all of us) still walk
>> into the classroom expecting that English-speakers will not produce a
>> sentence such as "Dog largeness-having with ball-chasing-ness had." We
>> may be much more interested in language practices than in "forms," but
>> there is a sense in which forms are practices.
>>
>>
>>
>> Prescriptive grammar, of course, turns converts 'difference' into
>> 'pathology', hence the typical focus on "unshared" language practices in
>> the K-12 classroom. To the extent that all the students in a class use a
>> language practice that the teacher not only shares, but expects to be
>> the same in written discourse, it doesn't usually make it onto the
>> "teach this" list.  I whole-heartedly agree that we need to
>> fundamentally restructure how we think about "grammar teaching," but I
>> think we will nonetheless end up devoting comparatively little
>> discussion time in classes to a large proportion of the shared-practice
>> set, simply because of pragmatic constraints. To use yet another
>> analogy:  if you're pointing out to a class the differences between a
>> tarantella and a waltz, you probably won't go out of your way to make
>> the point that for both dances, the feet go toward the floor, or that in
>> neither dance should one attempt to injure one's partner - that's
>> information you can assume the class knows, although you might use it to
>> make the point that dances operate within a physical and social
>> envelope.  Downplaying that information does not require you in any
>> sense to assert that tarantellas are better than waltzes.
>>
>>
>>
>> Bill Spruiell
>>
>> Dept. of English
>>
>> Central Michigan University
>>
>>
>>
>> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
>> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
>> Sent: Friday, February 06, 2009 9:18 AM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: Developmental phases of grammar knowledge
>>
>>
>>
>> Bill,
>>    I appreciate your attempt to mediate differences. In doing so,
>> though, I think you fall back on positions that I think are part of the
>> current problem. I think it's more productive to talk about language
>> communities than it is to talk about dialects, since "dialect"
>> predisposes us toward form. If we talk about "language users" also as
>> individuals, it ought to be clear to us that even within the
>> non-mainstream communities, some children become much more adept at
>> language than others, I suspect because of the nature of their
>> interactions. It seems to me a tired old position that children learn
>> the grammar of the language naturally and that all we need to do in
>> school is "correct" them on the 5% or so of the time that their language
>> is non-standard.
>>    We wouldn't make this mistake for vocabulary. (The only thing we need
>> to do is correct the 5% of word meanings that are "incorrect.") Why do
>> we make such a radical distinction between grammar and vocabulary? Only
>> because the dominant theory has been that the two are distinct. Current
>> theory says they are deeply intertwined.
>>    At what point does a child learn a construction like "would you be so
>> kind as to..."? At what point do they learn the grammar of a good story?
>>
>>    You can learn to steal cars without instruction, but I wouldn't
>> recommend it.
>>
>> Craig
>>
>> Spruiell, William C wrote:
>>
>> 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
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