Johanna,
   I don't have time for a full response and I'll be away from the 
computer (by design) for about ten days, but I like the way you wrestle 
with enormously important issues. Here's a few quick observations.
    As a writing teacher, I know the first step toward success is to get 
a student writing something that he/she believes and feels is important. 
 When that happens, they are more than happy to get help with bringing 
it into fruition, and in that process, they learn some things that can 
carry over into other contexts.  It's not just acquisition of language, 
but an understanding of how to put their own language "to work".
    Writing doesn't follow formulas, but it is inherently "formal."  It 
has parts.  It is, in fact, a unity of parts when successful. Most 
beginning writers abandon a text long before the thought process is 
completed and  harmony is established. The nature of its form may differ 
widely (news report, fiction story, poem, argument, job letter, and so 
on), but recognition of the contribution of form is very important. 
Journalists don't simply internalize the ability to write good leads 
from being exposed to them. Beginning fiction writers seem to think that 
stories have temporal beginnings and middles and ends and hardly seem to 
notice on their own how often good writers break through that. What we 
are told first is not what happened first.  Students, it seems, don't 
just soak that up.
    One problem with grammar is that it is thought of as neutral 
conveyor of meaning, tied into a correct/incorrect decision mechanism, 
not into an effective/ineffective one. But if a text is an effective 
unity of parts, this carries down, certainly, to the level of the 
sentence.  Students come to hate grammar because it is where they always 
fail, not where they find reward. Sentences can sing, and much can be 
gained by looking closely at sentences that do.
    I think you're absolutely right.  Whole language advocates are right 
to advocate exciting reading and meaningful writing.  They are wrong to 
think that simple exposure is enough. We can do an awful lot better at 
examining texts.  I wish students coming into college were free to 
interact with texts beyond finding the "literary techniques" and "deep 
hidden meanings."   They  have been told that they don't read 
"correctly," and this makes reading painful as well. Reading is some 
sort of empty game that they are not very good at. Someone else has 
already decided what the great works are, and they are lesser people 
when they don't like them or understand them.  
     Someone should do a study of  what successful writers "know" about 
grammar (conscious knowledge, not just "internalized")  and how that 
enters into their writing and reading.  What you would find, I think, is 
that some writers are fairly successful with little conscious knowledge, 
but that everyone VALUES their conscious knowledge very much.  Because a 
case can be made that rare human beings function very well, thank you, 
without knowing what they are doing, we forget that those who DO know 
what they are doing find that knowledge enormously helpful and useful.  
   I did very well as a writer without the concept given/new, without 
the notion of end focus or marked theme, but I am very grateful  for  
these understandings.  I got A's in papers as an undergraduate, but I am 
very grateful for the grad school teacher/mentor who showed me how a 
page of my writing could be cut almost in half by "cutting through the 
static", which is largely a matter of searching for lexical terms 
carrying the bulk of the meaning. It is hugely useful to be able to 
denominalize a clause. And so on.  
     We need to work in harmony with whole language approaches, not 
against them.  But those who object to those approaches as too touchy 
feely, not technical enough or accountable enough, have valid objections.
    I'll be away from the list for a  week or so, so I wish everyone a 
very safe and happy holiday season.  Maybe 2005 will be a great year for 
grammarians and grammar.

Craig
Johanna Rubba wrote:

> Theoretical linguists use the term "grammar" to refer to a person's 
> entire language competence, including not just sentence structure but 
> pronunciation and word formation. Whether pragmatics and discourse are 
> included depends on your theoretical affiliations. This is obviously 
> different from the layperson's use of the term. I was using it in this 
> technical sense, so I apologize if that wasn't clear.
>
> As to learning by internalizing, second-language research shows that 
> people do acquire a second language (or dialect) by immersion; that 
> is, they _subconsciously_ construct an internal grammar as they learn. 
> Whether they ever perfect that new language/dialect or not has to do 
> with amount of exposure, motivation, and various other internal and 
> external factors. In this sense, the whole-language people are right. 
> If children of normal intelligence are interested in reading and 
> writing and if they do a lot of both, they will indeed internalize 
> much of the grammar (including rhetorical structure) of whatever they 
> are reading. If this starts early and continues through K-12, we will 
> have much better writers. Not all will be talented, but most will be 
> competent.
>
> That doesn't mean that people can't learn about _style_ and points of 
> prescriptive grammar via instruction. My point is that they can't 
> learn much, especially in a short time, by being taught. The way I 
> envision grammar teaching working well is as (a) an opportunity to 
> learn grammatical terminology and analysis in order to be able to talk 
> about and learn about language; (b) an opportunity to understand 
> consciously how language works; (c) studying language as a medium of 
> expression--similar to studying color theory, design theory, music 
> theory, kinesiology and physics for athletes, etc. Part of 
> understanding consciously how language works is understanding how 
> grammar shapes our meaning and information flow. These are the goals 
> Craig calls for.
> (c) is what I think Craig meant in his post. Taking an explicit look 
> at fine writing and analyzing it is a great idea! But doing that 
> _alone_ will not internalize the structure of that kind of writing and 
> make it a natural skill. Only if this kind of study is very consistent 
> and very long-lasting, with lots of practice of writing as well as 
> analysis, and, once again, lots of reading of the target 
> language/dialect.
>
>
> Take vocabulary, for example. During the school years, it has been 
> estimated, children learn about 5,000 words per year. How many of 
> these words are they taught through the (largely poorly-designed) 
> vocabulary curriculum? At most a hundred? Two hundred? I doubt that 
> it's that much. They learn the rest by reading and hearing the word in 
> context, and searching the context for clues to the word's meaning. 
> The more exposures they have to the word in more contexts, the more 
> refined their  meaning of the word will become. And they do this 
> mostly subconsciously. The same thing happens with grammar rules. The 
> reader subconsciously notices structures that fit certain rhetorical 
> and social contexts, and builds a grammar to suit. Everybody learns at 
> least a few different spoken styles of their dialect; nobody teaches 
> them those styles. If young people of today are learning a narrower 
> range of styles, maybe it's because they are not motivated to learn 
> different ones--people around them demand less; they accept the 
> narrower range of styles. I'm sure you'd find that many young sci-fi 
> and fantasy fanatics internalize the rather stilted language of that 
> genre and are able to reproduce it. Yet they can't identify a noun if 
> their lives depend on it.
>
> Many students get the five-paragraph essay formula dinned into their 
> heads in high school, but they don't write good essays when they come 
> to college--not even good five-paragraph essays. And as we know, good 
> writing often does not follow a formula. A good writer creates a 
> pattern that works, often subconsciously, including revision.
>
> People who want to learn a second language do best by living in the 
> country where that language is spoken and using it every day. Once 
> again, not everyone has the same talent for language, but anyone who 
> does this will internalize far more grammar rules than they are ever 
> taught or even think about. I have experienced this myself several 
> times. Granted, I'm a talented language learner, but I've noticed that 
> anyone who lives for a long time in another country learns it better 
> than those who study grammar rules and vocab. lists. I imagine there 
> is research to support this.
>
> I'm not trying to support the whole-language people in abandoning 
> grammar teaching altogether. But we must acknowledge the realities of 
> language acquisition and use them to our advantage by incorporating 
> massive amounts of reading and writing in the language arts 
> curriculum. Grammar is only to serve the points I outlined above. My 
> MAJOR goal is to disabuse everyone of the notion that the preferred 
> dialect can be taught through a grammar curriculum, especially a very 
> short one. We do not produce good writing by thinking consciously 
> about the structure of the upcoming sentence before we write it. We do 
> a lot of editing to perfect our writing, true, but that is the 
> conscious part. And often we use little explicit grammatical knowledge 
> to do so. When I revise a sentence, I rarely speak to myself in 
> grammatical terms. I try different options, moving things around and 
> changing words, until it sounds right in context. Once in a while I 
> rely on explicit knowledge of grammar, for instance once in a while I 
> notice that I'm changing a passive verb to an active one or vice 
> versa. In most cases, I only use conscious knowledge of grammar when I 
> need to reduce the word count. Then I go on a preposition hunt and a 
> nominalization hunt and a "schematic verb" hunt ('make', 'do', 'take', 
> 'have', etc.).
>
> I believe one of the greatest contributions linguists can make to 
> grammar teaching is pointing out that there is a natural acquisition 
> process; the learner can be trusted to absorb things on her own. Along 
> with this goes the fact that children come to school with a large 
> grammatical knowledge base, whatever dialect or language they speak, 
> and that can be used in grammar teaching (for instance, in learning 
> the names of parts of speech and classifying words they encounter).
>
> This will be my last post for a while. I'll be away until the first of 
> the new year.
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Johanna Rubba   Associate Professor, Linguistics
> English Department, California Polytechnic State University
> One Grand Avenue  • San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
> Tel. (805)-756-2184  •  Fax: (805)-756-6374 • Dept. Phone.  756-2596
> • E-mail: [log in to unmask] •      Home page: 
> http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
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