Ed,

Once again, I think you're riding this horse too far.  It's not just
that terminology varies, as it does in a lot of disciplines.  It's that
there is also a general opposition to technical terminology in the
performance based testing ethos that's taking us all over.

Herb

Johanna,

   Isn't it the case that the standardized testers cannot test terms
because there is no agreement on what the terms should be?

Ed

>>> [log in to unmask] 9/30/2005 12:53:14 AM >>>

Speaking of standardized tests, I have made an interesting discovery. 
It is preliminary, but I will learn more as I look at more of the 
teaching materials being used in CA.

In looking at a 9th-grade pedagogical grammar, I have found a 
difference between unit exercises/reviews and standardized test 
practice: The test practices rarely focused on terminology except in 
the instructions, and even there it was often lacking. Typically, I 
found instructions along the lines of "choose the letter of the word or 
group of words that belongs in each space". Then there is a paragraph 
with blanks requiring correct word forms, e.g., forms of "who/whom", 
irregular verbs, etc.

So what? Well, students who have the advantage of having grown up in a 
standard-English environment will make fewer mistakes on such tests. In 
a test on irregular verb forms, for instance, my students made 
virtually no mistakes, while on a test requiring identification of 
roles like direct object, they did poorly (in a very brief in-class 
trial). Students from nonstandard-English environments are as doomed on 
those types of items (irregular verbs) as are the standard-speaking 
kids on "who/whom". In other words, the tests give an advantage to 
students who can choose the correct form from their native-speaker 
knowledge, without doing any grammatical analysis.

I found it interesting that the unit exercises had a lot of focus on 
grammar terms, but the standardized-test practice did not (I'm 
assuming, of course, that these practices are based on actual test 
items).

I'll be very interested to see if this is characteristic of most of the 
CA materials.

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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