Now, let's be fair.  Chomsky was not responsible for what fad-enthralled educators did with his work almost half a century ago.  He said publicly that he saw no place for his theories in K12 language teaching.  For linguists, Chomsky single-handedly turned syntax into a productive area of research with powerful theoretical constructs, after structuralists had struggled with it for decades and not gotten far.  He also completely revamped other areas of linguistics, including approaches to semantics and phonology.  While I disagree fundamentally with him on a number of important areas of syntax and of broader language theory, probably three quarters of my refereed publications would have been impossible without the seminal work he did.

Educators have some good reasons for their disdain of, sometimes even hostility towards linguistics because what was presented to them was watered down and reshaped to the point of being worse than useless--it was misleading and counterproductive.  But by and large, educators can't blame linguists for that; they have to blame their own adapters and popularizers.  I've learned long since that when I consult with teachers on matters of grammar I don't give them linguistic theory; I give them concepts and techniques they can use.  These are informed by linguistic theory, but you don't have to master the linguistics behind them to use them.

The problems of teaching language arts effectively to developing minds is every bit as challenging as doing linguistic theory, and it does no one a service to assume that either field should be a reduction of the other.

Herb

-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of DD Farms
Sent: 2008-12-13 00:58
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Chomping on Noam

At 09:58 PM 12/12/2008, Dee Allen-Kirkhouse wrote: . . .Those of us 
who grew up in
>the pre-Chomsky era learned how to diagram a sentence.  It opened our eyes
>to the various ways we could arrange words for greater effect. . . .

DD: Noam is two years older than I. Fortunately I graduated from High 
School about four years before he formed his ideas about grammar, 
foisted them off to be abused, misused, and confused. Sigh, I am off 
to reread, "Rex Barks, Diagramming Sentences Made Easy," Phyllis 
Davenport's entertaining, edifying, and educating pamphlet. Wait, 
there's the Henle Latin Grammar text. ISBN 0829401121, paragraphs 
1005 -1017 for diagramming. 

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