I'm trying to understand why the book Rebecca Watson refers to would
"jangle my nerves". I don't know what IEP stands for; that might help
me understand.
Anyone who has read my posts on this list knows that I advocate
teaching grammar in effective ways. For beginning students (for all
students, really), visuals are great. I believe in nouns, verbs,
capitalization, and punctuation. How they're defined and how and when
they're taught is what concerns me. I use my own manuscript in my
structure-of-English classes, and most of my students consistently rate
it between 8 and 10 (10-high) on two criteria: (1) clarity and
accessibility of the information and (2) usefulness of the information
for their future careers as teachers.
I don't recall anyone posting to this list who doesn't want
schoolchildren to come out of K-12 fluent in standard English. It's the
HOW and the WHAT and the WHEN that are at issue.
As to The ESL Grammar Book, I stated clearly in my post that I was
referring to teacher trainees, not ESL students. Maybe it's better as a
reference book than a textbook. I haven't taught from it myself; I'm
just familiar with its contents. Students apparently find it
accessible, since it was in use at MT and Herb has testified to that
effect, and I imagine it is in use elsewhere, or else it wouldn't be on
the market anymore. I do believe that ESL teachers should have Master's
degrees, and that they should have a full year of linguistics, from
phonetics to discourse. If you're going to teach language, you'd better
know your subject.
As to learning linguistic theories when preparing to teach ESL, I don't
see what's wrong with it. Much of teacher education is _background
knowledge_, not necessarily stuff that you will translate directly into
classroom lessons. Teachers need good classroom materials that are
informed by linguistics, too, but those materials will not be theory
books. Such materials aren't widely available right now; that's one
thing some of us are working on. Teachers have also been known to
design their own teaching materials. Understanding how language works
is very useful for that endeavor.
History majors who go on to be high school or middle school history
teachers learn more history in college than they ever teach, I assume.
I know much, much, much more about language than I ever teach, because
all of my classes are introductory, and I have no linguistics MA or PhD
students. A good number of students in our elementary-school teacher ed
program seem to believe that they don't need to know more about the
subjects they will teach than what is in the teaching materials they
will use for their students. This isn't good.
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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