I actually agree with a good deal of what Bob says below. It's 
certainly good to be reminded that merely correcting the surface errors 
on a text isn't good pedagogical practice. I'm not sure "competence" and 
"performance" are the best terms to account for a connection between 
what a student does and what he/she understands, but it all makes sense. 
This is very much what I meant when I talked about being "mentored" into 
language. Bob is describing a mentoring process that includes 
conversation. There are a number of ways to "correct" the sentence, but 
each would convey a different nuance of meaning. We shouldn't assume we 
know what our students are trying to say and shouldn't assume we know 
the nature of their misunderstanding. I also believe this mentoring can 
go far beyond response to error, but don't want to imply that Bob's 
responses are limited to that.

   I'm not sure how appropriate it is, but I was rereading CC Fries 
"Structure of English" (1952) for another project and came upon the 
following:
"One cannot speak or understand a language without "knowing" its 
grammar--not consciously, of course, but in the sense of making the 
proper responses to the devices that signal structural meanings and also 
of producing the proper signals of his own structural meanings"(57).
 "The ordinary adult speaker of English finds it extremely difficult not 
only to describe what he does in these matters but even to realize that 
there is anything there to describe" (58).

   It's interesting that this was B.C. (before Chomsky). But I think it 
highlights an insight into language that all serious schools of language 
seem to acknowledge. What our students "know" is a great deal more than 
they know that they know. Any approach to grammar and any approach to 
teaching should respect that. In and of itself, it doesn't seem to me a 
distinction between approaches, since all serious approaches acknowledge 
it. It's an insight fully compatible with structural, generative, 
cognitive and functional approaches.

   Traditional school grammar, on the other hand, often seems to 
trivialize the nature of language and seems to trivialize the complexity 
of working with a student as his/her language develops and evolves. If 
our primary concern is with error, then a great deal never surfaces, for 
teacher or student alike.


Craig


   

Robert Yates wrote:
> In the discussion on the theory of language, Bill Spruill (on 2/11)
> wrote:
>
> “It doesn't do the wider public any good, though, *especially* since a
> majority of the differences between the paradigms has no real
> implication for what we need to do in classrooms.”
>
> I want to demonstrate that an important difference between views on
> language makes a very real difference in the disposition we as teachers
> need to have in understanding what our students do and how we respond to
> what they do.  
>
> The difference I consider here is whether we need a
> competence-performance distinction in our understanding of language or
> whether performance is the only way to consider language.  In other
> words, whether there is a difference between our knowledge about what is
> possible in a language (competence) and how that knowledge is used
> (performance) or the distinction doesn’t exist at all.  In an earlier
> post Craig noted: 
>
> “For a formal or structural grammar, you need to theorize ways in which
> knowledge of the underlying forms can be put to work. In a functional
> model, those connections are already there.”
>
> I claim a teacher must theorize about how knowledge of underlying forms
> are put to work by our students. Consider sentence (1) that one of my
> non-native speakers (a graduate students whose first language is
> Chinese) wrote:  
>
> 1) They are not agree with the Input Hypothesis. 
>
> (1) is obviously ungrammatical: ARE should be DO.  I’m interested in
> trying to understand why a non-native speaker would write (1) because,
> if I can figure out why, my correction may prevent the error in future
> writing.  
>
> I can only speculate on how someone who believes language can be
> understood as performance would respond to this sentence.  (I hope I
> will be corrected on the following if it is not correct.)
>
> >From a performance perspective, when to use IS/ARE and DO in making
> sentences negative can appear to be confusing.  Consider 2 and 3.
>
> 2) They do not agree with X.
> 3) They are not agreeing with X.
>
> So, perhaps if we only know performance, the writer of (1) is confused
> about DO or ARE and “agree” just lacks -ing.  And, of course, such
> learners will see sentences like (4).
>
> 4) They are not in agreement with X.
>
> So, from a performance perspective, the number of different forms a
> learner might encounter with “agree” is so variable, the learner has no
> clear indication whether ARE or DO is appropriate.  Moreover, we as
> teachers cannot be sure whether the student should have written
> “agreeing” or “in agreement.” 
>
> On the other hand, if we as teachers understand language to have a
> competence-performance distinction, another explanation for (1) is
> possible.  If the learner’s underlying knowledge about AGREE is that it
> is an adjective and not a verb, then what makes this sentence
> ungrammatical is not with ARE (or missing morphology on “agree”) but
> with what word category the learner has assigned AGREE to. So, because
> AGREE for this student is an adjective, ARE is the only form possible.
> In fact, that is exactly what the student told me.  
>
> Craig, in the passage I cited above, is absolutely correct.  As a
> teacher, I had to theorize on how this writer’s underlying competence
> (agree is an adjective) lead to the ungrammatical sentence.. Such
> theorizing, I believe, is a disposition all teachers need to have to
> respond to their students’ writing.
>
> I hope this example of a real sentence a real student wrote shows that a
> whole lot is at stake in how we understand what it means to know
> language.
>
> Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri
>
> (By the way, if we as teachers had done the obvious surface correction
> of sentence (1)– cross-out the ARE and insert DO, we really haven’t
> provided much help to the student. The student has to figure out why the
> ARE was crossed out and DO was inserted.  That would require the student
> to realize that only verbs require do-support when made negative and BE
> is used for adjectives. A student who could arrive at such a conclusby just crossing out ARE and replacing it with DO probably wouldn’t
> write (1) in the first place.)
>
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