On Sat, 14 Mar 1998, SAC wrote:
> What do people think of a grammar course that would use Latin as a basis for
> teaching. The idea is that an inflected language would make concrete some
> abstract concepts much in the same way that algebra teachers uses blocks.
> What concepts would you consider essential to an elementary school grammar
> curriculum? How might those concepts be taught using an inflected language as
> a starting point?
>
It's hard to believe I'm seeing a suggestion like this at the end of the
20th century. We have learned some things about language teaching in the
field of second-language acquisition and teaching that could be very
profitably transferred to primary-language-awareness instruction.
(1) Communicative authenticity: relate all topics taught and concepts
within them as directly as possible to real communicative tasks the
students engage in daily and will have to engage in in higher education
and the 'real world'.
(2) Establish as many links as possible between the subject matter being
taught and students' personal lives.
(3) Put the concepts taught into the background by making them into needed
tools for some real communicative activity that the students are engaged
in: creating a school magazine, reporting on pollution in their community,
the history of their community/state/nation or another culture, etc.
How does Latin fit into this picture? Would students write letters to the
Pope? It seems to me that using Latin as a
basis for teaching grammar would, first of all, divorce the notion of
grammar from any language used by the students -- repeating one of the
main errors of traditional grammar instruction, that is, decontextualizing
it from the language students use on a daily basis. If we want students to
be able to use concepts from grammar in their own language use, we had
better have them work on languages that they know. A lot of my students
tell me they were disappointed to have to wait until they learned Spanish
or German to learn grammatical terminology; and, having taught German to
Americans for five years, I can attest to the difficulty of teaching a
foreign language to students who have had no grammar instruction in their
native language. Let's not dump learning grammar terms/concepts AND a
second language on them at the same time. It's not necessary, and not
fair.
Latin and English are very different languages. Case is hardly a concept
for English speakers, but is extremely important in Latin. Latin is a
highly inflected language, but English is moving inexorably towards an
analytic type, expressing most grammatical concepts through collocations
of words, not affixes. Traditional grammar has correctly been criticized
for forcing English into categories that suit Latin well but do not suit
English at all. It's hard to see how using Latin as a basis for teaching
English grammar, or grammar in general, would avoid this pitfall.
Latin grammar has little to do with the Latinate vocabulary that has been
borrowed into English. One can teach the Latinate, French, Greek, and
other-source loan lexicons without reference to grammar.
Both the USA and Canada are very diverse societies with many languages
represented by contemporary immigrants as well as the ancestors of
locally-born inhabitants. Why use a dead language for comparison when you
have so many living languages handy, which can simultaneously teach
respect and appreciation for diversity, while acquainting students with
the world beyond western Europe?
Lastly, we have a fine substitute for Latin as a vehicle for introducing
language structure: linguistics. Linguistics provides a set of universal
terms such as noun phrase, subject, etc. that can be illustrated from
any language on earth. Linguistics can be adapted to any language, so we
don't have to force any language into another's mold. And we don't have to
use terminology that is any harder than what is found in traditional
grammar books.
Here are some things that should be part of any grammar curriculum:
- what grammar is used for: putting words together to make coherent
messages that express the melding of the concepts the words stand for.
Grammar is also used to organize information in a text so that the
audience's (lack of) prior knowledge and the text creator's desired
foregrounding/backgrouding of information is achieved. And it is used to
negotiate the social relationship between creator and audience.
- language varies for good reasons across social situations, communicative
purposes, and modes of delivery (speech vs. writing). It is inappropriate
to elevate one kind of language structure (e.g. that found in formal
written language) as 'better' or 'correct' and others as 'wrong'. Each is
appropriate to given situations and purposes. Formal written language has
to be learned, but we shouldn't punish students if they don't learn it
because their schooling has not fed them plentiful amounts of reading and
writing work from an early age, and if parents didn't have the wherewithal
to cultivate reading as a pastime over TV watching.
-language also varies across time, space, and social boundaries such as
gender, ethnicity, and class lines. In this case it is also inappropriate
to elevate one group's language as the 'best'. Standard dialects should be
negotiable instruments that serve a practical purpose of mass
communication, not gatekeepers as to who has access to upward mobility.
- language occurs in texts, not sentences. Most sentence-level choices of
structure are dictated by text-level needs. Staying at the sentence level
will never illuminate how grammar really works in language.
Some more-specific items:
- Genres of text and their different structures.
- Theme, rheme, and focus and how these are expressed in sentences; how
they create coherence in a text.
- What sentences really are (not 'complete thoughts') and what we use them
for.
- What parts of speech are and what we use them for.
- The elements that phrases, sentences, and texts consist of.
- THe roles that these can play in phrases, sentences, and texts.
- The relation between all of the above and meaning/function. For example,
only prototypical nouns 'name persons, places, or things'; lots of other
nouns name other kinds of stuff, such as events ('flash') and qualities
(solidity). The reason we have nouns in language is not that we need
them as names for concepts (all parts of speech name concepts), but that
we need them to head noun phrases. We need noun phrases to refer to
things that we are talking or writing about. Traditional grammar books
mislead the reader into thinking that a noun is the subject of a sentence.
Nouns are not subjects of sentences; they are heads of noun phrases. Noun
phrases can be subjects of sentences (but so can other kinds of phrases,
and so can clauses).
Anyone out there who teaches English or grammar has to learn to stop
trusting traditional grammar books. They are full of outright
misinformation. Here's one more example: grammar books often include a
lesson or two on 'confusing verbs' such as sit/set, or 'confusing' tense
forms such as come/came, break/broke/broken. They do this because some
children come into the classroom saying things like 'My bike got broke' or
'My uncle come home last night'. This is viewed as a problem that needs to
be fixed; to make the students feel better (!), they are told that they
are 'confused'. They aren't confused; they are using the verb forms native
to the dialects they have learned in their home communities. They might
well become confused when they learn that language forms that have worked
for them up to now are suddenly being rejected (even though the
teacher did,in fact, understand their meaning, which can only confuse them
even more). There's no reason not to be honest with kids about dialect
variation, and let them know that one dialect has come into traditional
use in formal, written English, and that they can learn that dialect if
they read a lot, write a lot, and pay attention.
Some students and adults may already be aware of the stigma attached to
nonstandard uses of 'broke' or 'come', and they will genuinely feel
confused, because they have not had the opportunity or motivation to learn
the standard forms well. So these do not come naturally to them, and they
become unsure of which form is 'correct'. Having teachers or others make
them feel stupid because they speak 'bad English' will not help them sort
things out.
I'm developing a grammar curriculum that works from the principles and
elements outlined above. I'll be speaking at the summer ATEG conference if
you're interested in more.
In the meantime, I'd recommend that people interested in this kind of
approach should read some books in the area of 'functional grammar', for
example: Functional English Grammar, an Introduction for Second Language
Teachers, 1996, Cambridge U Press. I fyou know Egnlish grammatical
terminology, the book should be accessible.
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Johanna Rubba Assistant Professor, Linguistics ~
English Department, California Polytechnic State University ~
San Luis Obispo, CA 93407 ~
Tel. (805)-756-2184 E-mail: [log in to unmask] ~
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