Craig,
I agree with almost all of what you said. In defense of Hunt and company, however, I would suggest that Hunt in particular was looking for a way of measuring and discussing natural language development--what makes the sentences of seventh graders different from those of fourth graders. Another distinction I would make is a difference between language development and learning to discuss grammar. Personally, I see no reason for teaching students to use passive voice. The problem, from my perspective, is that students are not even taught to identify verbs, and thus can't even begin a serious discussion of passive voice. In KISS, the identification of passive voice is introduced in fifth grade, and it seems that you would agree that by the time they get to fifth grade, most students can use passive voice. That is much different, for example, than appositives and what KISS calls gerundives. Many of my college students have problems with appositives, most notably when we get into introducing the qualifications of people who are being quoted. A sentence such as "George Will, a well-known columnist, claims that . . ." gives some of my students problems. It shouldn't, but it does. I'd suggest that the reason for their problems is that, as Hunt suggested, the appositive and the gerundive are "late-blooming." Certainly many students, particularly those who read a lot, can use appositives and gerundives. I would argue, however, that these constructions should be taught after students have learned to identify and discuss subordinate clauses.
One of my major problems with much of the work that has been done on natural language development is that it focuses on development that occurs pre-school, or, without any instruction, in the elementary grades. If that is the case, do we really need to debate how to teach it?
Ed
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2009 2:38 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Developmental phases of grammar knowledge
Ed,
It certainly does make sense to expect that some constructions must
precede others just as a reflection of the nature of language. Dancing
probably follows walking. I'm just a little skeptical of "natural
development" if it leaves out the complexities of social interaction.
I was reading up on passives because of Bill's comment. Tomasello
points out that full passive utterances for English speakers generally
come around 4 or 5. However, "in just two 30 minute sessions, 90
percent of the children 3-3 1/2 years of age learned to produce a full
passive utterance with a nonce verb." Tomasello also points out that
children learning some non Indo-European languages pick up passives
quite early in development (2003, pp156-7). So the ability is there,
but the context for learning it (and the impetus for learning it) might
not be there. When we learn the forms, we also learn their meanings and
functions.
Are we to assume that children in an inner city neighborhood will
develop language in the same way as the suburban kids, even though it's
quite apparent that the cultural context and the languages themselves
might differ remarkably? If we believe there's a "natural order", a
"universal order", we may end up with deficit models that are
misleading.
I do think that we need a systematic approach to a second goal, which
would be acquisition of knowledge about language. We can and should
scaffold an understanding in a reasonable way, and your KISS program
does exactly that. I think you and I both agree that schools fail to
build a solid understanding over time, despite having the children for
twelve or thirteen years of instruction. I find it shameful.
One quarrel I have with Hunt and company is that they seem to accept
acquisition as the primary goal. "Syntactic maturity" is measured by
the acquisition of forms. They oversimplify the nature of grammar and
discount the value of conscious understanding.
Craig
Craig and Scott,
>
> That Hunt and Loban were in the generative tradition does not mean
> that their work is not relevant. The cognitivists, especially
> Vygotsky and Piaget, definitely recognized stages of development, and
> Hunt and Loban may well have laid out the basic framework of natural
> syntactic development. As a simple example embedding of clauses,
> especially subordinate clauses within subordinate clauses, almost has
> to follow the initial development of subordinate clauses. Appositives
> and gerundives are probably developed as reductions of subordinate
> clauses. Such development is complex and is certainly affected by
> what O'Donnell referred to as "formulas"--constructions picked up by
> the child as a string. Subordinate clauses probably originate as
> formulas. The young child hears "When ___ get home, ....." I don't
> have the time to develop all of this here, but I will note that one
> of my projects is to collect writing samples from state assessment
> documents, put them on the web, and analyze them, in part for
> questions related to natural syntactic development. See, for example,
> http://home.pct.edu/~evavra/kiss/wb/State_Standards.htm
>
> And
> http://home.pct.edu/~evavra/ED498/R/StateStand/G08/G08Stats_TOC.htm
>
> It takes forever to get these samples, transcribe them, analyze the
> syntax, and then analyze the statistics. It takes even longer to put the
> results on the web. I do have someone helping me by transcribing a ninth
> grade set, but still, it will take forever. I'd suggest that just
> obtaining and transcribing such samples might be an interesting and
> important project for someone in ATEG. Most of the studies, including
> those by Hunt, O'Donnell, and Loban, are highly flawed in that the
> originals are not available. If you read the studies you will find major
> differences in how they handled transcription, etc. In addition, in most
> studies, the writing was edited before being analyzed. Then too, there are
> the major problems of definition. What is, and what is not, a "T-unit"?
> Ed
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
> Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2009 9:15 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Developmental phases of grammar knowledge
>
> Hunt and Loban were working within the generative tradition, which
> means they were predisposed to think of language as evolving in a
> somewhat biologically pre-determined way. In other words, we would be
> likely to pick up a construction in the same way a woman grows
> breasts, because it is time. Interaction, of course, is part of that
> (just as proper nutrition would be for biological development.)
> Very different sorts of approaches are being developed from the
> cognitive side. I don't want to claim to be an expert, but the sense I
> get is that a child learns the language appropriate to the world into
> which he/she is being socialized. The child does so using normal
> cognitive processes, not processes special to language.
> Children learn very complicated grammar early on for the concepts that
> matter most to their world. "He made me." (causative). "Give me that
> one." (di-transitive)>The theory now is that these start out as "island
> constructions", that the child learns the grammar that goes with
> "giving" and "making" and only later does that become more generalized
> (schematic).
> Absolutes are very rare outside of writing and probably not within the
> repertoire of most writers. You can certainly make a case that
> exposure, for most children, is limited.
> Cognitive models emphasize that language is learned and that learning
> the grammar is not different/separate from learning the vocabulary and
> that all this is mentored in some way. They actually reinforce some
> aspects of our older "common sense" view of language. It doesn't just
> happen.
> I would recommend Michael Tomasello's "Constructing a Language: A
> Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition" (2003). For an argument
> that the "arguments" of grammar are built from bottom up, see the work
> of Adele Goldberg, including "Constructions at Work: the Nature of
> Generalizations in Language" (2006).
>
>
> Craig
>
>
>
> Scott,
>> See my bibliography on natural language development at:
>> http://home.pct.edu/~evavra/Bib/DevLang.htm
>> The work by Hunt is particularly important. If students do not develop
>> gerundives (participles that function as adjectives) until late middle
>> or
>> high school, it is unlikely that they will cognitively master noun
>> absolutes. That does not mean that such phrases do not show up in any
>> students writing. I haven't had as much time as I would like to devote
>> to
>> this research, but it would not surprise me to see noun absolutes in the
>> writing of fifth or sixth graders. But it would almost certainly be in
>> the
>> writing of students who are habitual readers.
>> It's an interesting question, and I hope you enjoy exploring it.
>> Best wishes,
>> Ed
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Dear List,
>>
>> I have read that some constructions do not appear in student writing
>> until
>> they are at the right age. I do not recall where I read this, but it
>> seems to go against my experience, specifically, as I recall, the claim
>> that absolute phrases do not show up until students are around 16. Has
>> anyone else read anything like this? Does anyone have any references
>> for
>> this? Is this a widespread idea?
>>
>> Scott Woods
>>
>
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