My thanks go out to Siobhan Casson and Jeff Glauner for such
thoughtful and balanced assessments of the "contextual versus
traditional" debate.  Same with Paul Doniger.  In these cases, the
commentaries are more weighty and substantial than the original
debate.

My thanks go out to Gretchen and Nancy for informing us so well
on the ideas behind contextual teaching.  There's a lot to learn in
their postings.

It's usually about this time of year that I have occasion to post the
thought, "what a substantial and thoughtful listserve this is."

That's really all I have to say.  I'm going to take the six or seven
postings on this and make a little book out of them.  You could say
the same thing about so many interchanges on this list.

Good summer, all!

Date sent:              Fri, 22 Jun 2001 10:50:10 +0100
Send reply to:          Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar              <[log in to unmask]>
From:                   hendrix <[log in to unmask]>
Subject:                Re: ATEG Digest - 20 Jun 2001 to 21 Jun 2001 (#2001-105)
To:                     [log in to unmask]

> I am finding the debate on 'context' very interesting, since whatever you
> do with learners (my 'grammar' learning groups are primary teacher
> education students) there is still an underlying system that the teacher
> believes is relevant for the learners to acquire.Gretchen Lee has given
> some excellent examples of pedagogical content knowledge and methodology
> being used to help learners acquire a system. Her students will not have
> developed new statistical techniques, but have been taught some exisiting
> rules.
>
> As far as grammar knowledge in primary classrooms here in England is
> concerned, there are teachers who are not at all confident about even the
> lowest level of any language 'system' - e.g. how to identify a noun and
> explicitly explain what it is (in any theoretical framework). I do not
> believe that is is adequate for them to work on the same level as what
> they teach children, but this is what happens, since they learn from the
> children's text books too.
>
> In my own context, teacher education students are also lacking in any
> understanding of a language system. While we could get into a functional
> language theory debate about the role of a system of _grammar_ in language
> (generative linguists will say it can be autonomous, functional linguists
> probably not), when it comes down to it, teachers need some kind of
> subject knowledge which equates to Gretchen Lee's maths knowledge that
> enabled her to work with her students towards a less 'frustrating' and
> 'boring' way of learning statistical methods.
>
> Her students learnt statistics - i.e. a procedural knowledge about a
> system which can be reapplied in different situations. Yet people are
> happy to suggest that pupils in schools do not need to have knowledge in
> any way equivalent about how their and other languages are patterned. They
> don't know how to talk about language - and unfortunately at present we
> are trying to rectify a decades long problem, since many teachers and
> future teachers don't either.
>
> Siobhan Casson
> Durham
> UK
>
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-----------------------------------------------------
Sincerely, Robert Einarsson
please visit me at
http://www.artsci.gmcc.ab.ca/people/einarssonb

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