This is a forwarded message from Johanna. My apologies for the delay; I
mangaged to take two days away.

Crtaig

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Re: Traditional Grammar
From:    "Johanna Rubba" <[log in to unmask]>
Date:    Fri, July 21, 2006 8:22 pm
To:      "Craig Hancock" <[log in to unmask]>
         "Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar"
<[log in to unmask]>
Cc:      "Johanna Rubba" <[log in to unmask]>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Craig,

I'm sorry to ask again, but please post this for me.

Phil Bralich writes:

"It would seem much more important to address and remove the complaint
about prescriptivism rather than pander to it.  It is an important
distinction in theoretical syntax but virtually meaningless in
traditional grammar.  The few rules that are generally prescriptivist
are not that hard to learn, have the job of regulating some gray areas
and in the long run conform to what is expected by major publishing
houses.
The vast majority of grammar is the result of good intutions making
very good discoveries about very regular properties of language.  The
prescriptivist rules generally exist to add a bit of regularity.  They
do NOT represent a coterier of fascist leaning grammar-obsessives.  The
charge is just far too overblown. The number of prescriptivist rules
that need to be taught are few and don't take much time to include.
The better choice in the matter is to address the issue of
prescriptivism rather than buying into it.  Not the smallest reason
being that is simply sounds like a fourth grader grousing about his
homework.  In theoretical syntax it is reasonable in traditional
grammar it is childish.  The issue must be addressed but it must be
addressed in a manner that preserves and supports those few rules that
are genuinely prescriptivist."

It would seem that Phil either didn't read my recent post or doesn't
believe what is said there. The prescriptivist mindset is, indeed, very
harmful. And if the rules are so few and so easy to learn, why do so
many people who have had some grammar fail to use them? Also, it is not
so much a matter of how many rules there are to learn or whether or not
publishing houses require them to be followed. These can both be true,
and standard grammar can still be taught, without the prescriptivist
attitude.

To make sure we are on the same page, I want to explain what I mean by
'prescriptivist'. It is not the same as saying that if I, as an English
speaker, wish to write a letter in French, I have to follow the rules
of French grammar -- that is, that every language rule is
'prescriptivist'. It is certainly true that, to speak language X
correctly, you have to follow its rules. 'Prescriptivism' as understood
by most linguists is a quite different matter: it is the notion that
there is only one correct kind of English, and all other kinds are
erroneous departures from it, or are in some way inferior to it, and
hence worthy of being called 'wrong'. The current teaching materials do
not say that, for instance, double negatives are 'wrong by the rules of
standard English, but right in other dialects'. They say, 'double
negatives are wrong.' Period. From this can only be inferred that there
is only one 'English' and there is only one correct way to do negatives
in it. The further implication is that people who use double negatives
have somehow failed to learn "language" and are less intelligent than
others. This is manifestly false, but teachers, kids themselves, and
the general public have bought it.

Also closely tied to 'prescriptivism', and inherent in it, from the
point of view of many linguists, is social prejudice: discrimination
against a particular group for reasons which are not a valid basis for
discrimination. The citations in my last post from Puttenham and Samuel
Johnson make this pretty clear. That these attitudes are still with us
is demonstrated over and over and over again, in classrooms, in the
fiasco of the Ebonics "debate", in hiring and firing, and so on and on.
As I also said in that post, changing the mindset to one that values
the child's home dialect and takes a comparative, rather than
"correctionist" approach, is more successful than the usual implicit
statements that there is only one right way to do grammar. Wheeler and
Swords cite an experiment in which minority-dialect students were
separated into three groups: one that got little grammar instruction,
and were just corrected when their work was 'wrong'; one which had
explicit, but "correctionist" teaching, and one that was taught by the
comparative method. At the end of the experimental period, the number
of minority dialect features in the children's writing was measured. I
don't recall the exact outcome for the first group, but there was no
improvement. The second group, which got the traditional methodology,
showed an _increase_ in minority dialect features (i.e., 'mistakes') in
their writing. The third group showed a 59% _decrease_ in the number of
minority-dialect features in their writing. The _mindset_ is as
important as, if not more important than, the content of the class! We
now know very well how affective factors and teacher expectation affect
student performance.

The intolerant mindset of prescriptivist teaching is an apparently
large factor in the achievement gap between minority students and white
students (I believe that study was carried out in a school in which the
black children came from middle-class, not underlcass, families). That
is, it is far from harmless. These kids are doomed to school failure
and all that that entails, including costs to the whole community of
drugs, crime, prison, and lack of a well-trained work force. Now they
face the additional threat of their school losing funding, and an
outside agency coming in and restructuring the school -- thanks to "No
Child Left Behind". I find it extremely surprising that such a small
change in the teaching of one subject can make such a dramatic
difference, but initial study results show that it does. It's the
mindset change.

I have also mentioned before on this list an experiment from the late
1970's in which black children who learned to read through a program of
transitional readers from African American to standard English made six
months gain in proficiency in four months of instruction, while a
control group made 1.6 mos. gain in the same time period. The test used
to measure progress was a national standard test. The publisher
abandoned the marketing of the program; it was too controversial to
have textbooks in "slang" in the classroom. How many children have
failed to learn to read in the intervening decades, for no good reason?
Where are those kids now? What are we supposed to say to them? The
Michigan Supreme Court prescribed early literacy training in the
students' home dialect. What happened to that?

The vast majority of the grammar in today's books is, not, I'm afraid,
"the result of good intutions [sic] making very good discoveries about
very regular properties of language.  The prescriptivist rules
generally exist to add a bit of regularity." This is not how language
works at all. One doesn't add "bits of regularity", and, in any case,
many of the prescriptivist rules have to do with _irregularity_:
preferring one set of irregular verb forms over another, insisting on
inconsistent paradigms such as "I eat, you eat, she eat_s_, we eat,
they eat" and "myself, yourself, _him_self" instead of "hisself", which
is _regular_; insisting that some adverbs require -ly, while others
don't ('fast' vs. 'slowly'). There is irregularity and inconsistency at
every turn. In fact, many of the stigmatizing 'errors' are steps
further towards making English grammar more regular and consistent. It
is only conservatism -- resistance to language change -- combined with
social stigmatization of the language user that makes standard grammar
seem "regular".

Several people on the list have already pointed out several ways in
which traditional grammar (I mean as currently taught) is wrong --
about pronouns, about subjects (not 'the doer of the action' a large
part of the time), about 'two negatives making a positive' (no honest
speaker of English understands "I don't want none" to mean "I want
some"). It is also very impoverished (my college students come in never
having heard of tag questions, echo questions, cleft sentences,
pseudo-cleft sentences, dislocation sentences, etc., and believing that
there are eight parts of speech in English).

The current teaching materials arbitrarily deem one form correct over
an equally expressive form: "real good", "really good", and "very good"
all express the same idea perfectly well. The last wears the crown of
the "King's English". I have seen a grammar lesson which literally
tells students "never use 'really' when you need an adverb". Since when
do students stop and think "oh, I am about to need an adverb ... better
not use 'really'"?

I would genuinely like Phil to respond to this message. Maybe he means
"traditional grammar" before it was boiled down to what we find in the
texts today. Fine; that grammar does have a lot to contribute. But I'd
like to know his response to the study results, the notion of harm from
prescriptivism as described here, and the analysis of standard English
I have presented here.

I am not trying to be inflammatory. My posts are dramatic, but having
vast numbers of minority kids in special ed, failing standardized
tests, hating school, valuing entertainment and, often, drugs, crime
and sex over learning is pretty dramatic. Education is a high-stakes
game for children. Our government has decreed equal educational
opportunity to all. We have to get serious about delivering that. We
also have to stop blaming the kids themselves, or even their
environments. Several of the above-mentioned studies changed only one
thing in the children's lives: How they were taught reading or grammar,
including the teacher's mindset. Zlata Filipovic ("The Freedom Writers
Diary") single-handedly transformed worst-case ninth-graders into
talented writers and future college students (those who survived
inner-city life) with one year of English. We can do better than we're
doing.

Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
Linguistics Minor Advisor
English Department
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel.: 805.756.2184
Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba

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