Following Tip O'Neill's too-oft quoted advice, I'm going to take
this local.
We are set up in such a way here at Ball State that the content
areas for teacher preparation are in the content departments, and
I have been talking for some time with our English Education
faculty about the problem of teaching grammar in the schools.
Given the astonishingly strong standards just set out by the
Indiana DOE for English language arts in K12, the problem has
taken on some urgency, or so it seems to me. However, I can't get
much interest from our English Ed colleagues, most of whom support
the NCTE positions. I've been suggesting for several years that
we need to coordinate better between the content of our English
Linguistics course, the grammar course required of language arts
teaching majors, and the language arts methods courses that EngEd
teaches, but so far I've gotten little more than a polite nod.
I'm trying again to get us together, the four linguists who share
the English Linguistics course and the three English Ed faculty
members, and I think this may happen after the first of the year
sometime, but my optimism is muted.
I think this is one of the places where the issue needs to be
addressed, but there seems precious little interest in doing so.
Herb Stahlke
Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47306
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>>> [log in to unmask] 11/30/00 06:44PM >>>
Maureen,
You're on the right track now. We need to develop our
pedagogical grammar
using the best parts of contemporary learning theory (including
multiple
intelligences). That's one reason I want us to try to recruit
elementary
teachers to ATEG. They study pedagogy. They can shed light on
why grammar
teaching doesn't stick. We know it would be good for every
student to have
a grasp on the metalanguage of grammar. Elementary teachers,
whose job it
is to covey this metalanguage to children, might be able to help
us find out
how to do it. So how do we recruit them?
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