Herb,

I hope you have some luck with your meeting between the linguists and the
English Ed people, but I can see that problems are many. For instance, I
just got a look at the first draft of an "outcomes statements" for a local
college English department. Presumably, these statements were written at
least in part to help the college meet NCATE guidelines. There was not a
single hint that language or composition should be among the necessary
fields within the department.

You at least have linguists to work with. To my knowledge, neither of our
local campuses of the state university has a linguist in the English
department.

And while I'm on the subject of linguists and English, let me offer my
opinion that secondary English majors in college should be offered at least
two courses in language, one on syntax and the other on phonemics and
morphemics/vocabulary. I see my student teachers (and, sometimes, their
mentor teachers) "teaching" vocabulary without doing anything to tell
students that there other other ways to learn vocabulary than to memorize
definitions.

Bill



>Following Tip O'Neill's too-oft quoted advice, I'm going to take
>this local.
>
>We are set up in such a way here at Ball State that the content
>areas for teacher preparation are in the content departments, and
>I have been talking for some time with our English Education
>faculty about the problem of teaching grammar in the schools.
>Given the astonishingly strong standards just set out by the
>Indiana DOE for English language arts in K12, the problem has
>taken on some urgency, or so it seems to me.  However, I can't get
>much interest from our English Ed colleagues, most of whom support
>the NCTE positions.  I've been suggesting for several years that
>we need to coordinate better between the content of our English
>Linguistics course, the grammar course required of language arts
>teaching majors, and the language arts methods courses that EngEd
>teaches, but so far I've gotten little more than a polite nod.
>
>I'm trying again to get us together, the four linguists who share
>the English Linguistics course and the three English Ed faculty
>members, and I think this may happen after the first of the year
>sometime, but my optimism is muted.
>
>I think this is one of the places where the issue needs to be
>addressed, but there seems precious little interest in doing so.
>
>Herb Stahlke
>
>Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
>Professor of English
>Ball State University
>Muncie, IN  47306
>[log in to unmask]
>

William J. McCleary
3247 Bronson Hill Road
Livonia, NY 14487
716-346-6859

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