Bob,
   You and I share a great respect for Mina Shaughnessy and certainly the
notion that non-standard practices are often very sensible is at the
heart of it. In some of her articles, she talked about the kinds of
changes that teachers need to undergo before they can be helpful to
students who seem very much different from ourselves. (See for example
"Open Admissions and the Disadvantaqed Teacher" (College composition
and communication, dec. 73) or "Diving In, An Introduction to Basic
Writing (CCC October '76.) The seminal text, of course, is Errors and
Expectations (Oxford, '77.) I know you know her work, so this is mostly
a heads-up to anyone unfamiliar with it. I'm happy we share an
appreciation for her work and that you are doing your best to extend
it.  >
    I'm a little baffled by your other comments. I don't think the
intonation system is innate. Halliday has written a great deal about
intonation, and his book, Intonation in the Grammar of English, is due
out shortly from Equinox. (I'm told it is getting "finishing
touches.") Much of the exposure from language is from speech rather
than writing, and it should certainly come as no surprise that
patterns from speech should find their way into writing, whether
innate or acquired or both.
   We don't acquire language simply from exposure. The mechanisms are more
complex than that.

Craig


It is nice to know that work that  Jim Kenkel and I have been doing over
> the past ten years might turn out to be valuable.
>
>>>> Craig Hancock <[log in to unmask]> 01/11/08 8:47 AM >>>
>  . . . our students are often making sensible errors,
> and it's hard to "correct" them if we don't respect their mindset. That
> also means respecting the underlying systems of the language that they
> are bringing into play.
>
> *************
> If you are interested in one proposal on what these "underlying systems of
> the language" that students bring to their writing, you might want to
> consult the following paper:
>
> Kenkel, J. &  Yates, R. (2003). A developmental perspective on the
> relationship between grammar and text.  Journal of Basic Writing, 22,
> 35-49.
>
> We have another paper that deals with L2 writers.  In that paper, we try
> to show how not respecting the "underlying systems of the language" leads
> to error corrections that will not help such students improve.
>
> Yates, R. & Kenkel, J.(2002). Responding to sentence-level errors.
> Journal of Second Language Writing. 11, 29-47.
>
> At the moment, we are finishing a paper that looks at a number of
> non-target-like structures in ninety essays written by both native and
> non-native speakers.  We suggest that these non-target-like structures (we
> don't like the term "error" either) are principled.
>
> Over the past several years I have tried to bring to the attention of the
> list our work.  Craig has said on several occasions he has read it.
>
> There is something right about the following by Craig:
>
>    The most common run-on sentence, usually a commas splice, in my
> experience, is the one in which the second clause reasserts the first
> in some way, as in "My father was a popular man, everyone seemed to
> love him."  I usually suggest the semi-colon for that pattern, which I
> would describe as two intonation groups (two clauses), but only one
> idea asserted. It's easiest to teach when there is a pattern, maybe a
> half dozen or so in fairly close proximity.
>
> Of course, in most of the reading our students do, they rarely see such
> punctuation.  This raises a question about where these non-standard
> practices come from.
>
> A theory of language which claims our knowledge of  language is based only
> on input (specifically, language is a series of constructions based on the
> frequency of those constructions in the input) has a problem accounting
> for these non-standard punctuation practices.  After all, if language is a
> series of constructions, why are students punctuation practices so deviant
> from most of the input they have received?
>
> In the papers I cited above, Jim Kenkel and I propose what those
> principles might be.  I think Craig's supposition is mostly right.   This
> is interesting because the theory of language that Craig claims is most
> insightful to understanding writing is Systemic Functional Linguistics.
> Halliday is quite explicit that SFL is not a theory of the mind.  It is
> puzzling that Craig proposes we need to respect the underlying system of
> language our students bring to writing but he has a commitment to a view
> of language that cannot address what those underlying principles are.
>
> To be specific, I know of no paper, grounded in SFL, that attempts to
> explain run-ons or comma splices from SFL principles.  Craig's supposition
> above is not grounded in any SFL principles that I know.
>
> Bob Yates
>
>
>
>
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