Herb and Craig:

I sure hope both of you are planning to come to ATEG 2004 Seattle this July and that we might hear from both of you on the conference program. 

Craig, you looked like an East Coast baseball fan to me when we met last July.  There's a Mariner's game at our beautiful Safeco Field the Friday night of the conference.

MK

----------
From:   Craig Hancock
Reply To:       Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
Sent:   Friday, February 27, 2004 6:07 AM
To:     [log in to unmask]
Subject:        Re: Rigid Theories

Herb,
    When messages leave my server, they go out as both plain text and html, a default selection.  I don't know how the listserv filters that out or if your own default reading is influenced by that.  Stuff happens.

   Our talks are always a pleasure to me, not least of all because you are such a good listener. Even when you disagree, you flatter me by  respectful attention.  I aspire to this as a teacher and want to commend you for helping me remember why.

  One way to discover problems in a system (even a system of knowledge) is to find where the system breaks down or fails to deliver. If, in fact, the physicist were unable to help us make a building safe from earthquakes, one could see that as a problem in the system of knowledge. If the physicist turns around and says "that's an engineering problem, very much beneath me," we have pretty much the situation before us now. It's not just a pedagogical gap (a failure to communicate the necessary physics), but a gap of the other kind, a failure to build the necessary knowledge in the first place, perhaps because applications have been thought of as unworthy.  With you, I feel I'm preaching to the converted, and those linguists who join us on this list are to be deeply commended for joining the public enterprise.  But someone should point out to those people in your field that they may not have a viable field for long if they  believe that real world uses for language are unimportant. Or perhaps we should say it the other way:  Applications of theoretical linguistics into the public world are now at the cutting edge. That may be wishful thinking, but why not?  Someone who finds a cure for cancer may win great acclaim and great prizes.  Can the same be true for the key to universal literacy (at least as a goal)?

    My own sense is that Chomsky was so concerned with establishing the biological basis for language (the complexity of our unconscious understanding) and so successful in doing that, that we then were in a position to disdain direct instruction, especially since grammar has been thought of as a set of forms, not as a set of interactions or of meanings. We experimented with approaches like sentence combining because they were attempts to develop a fluency of forms, not a base of knowledge.  The emphasis has been on behavior, with knowledge the exclusive province of the specialist.  The two primary unanswered questions (at least from within that tradition) are how those forms enter into the  production of meaningful text AND how a conscious understanding of those interactions might be useful to the non specialist.

    Certainly, a deep knowledge of grammar can inoculate us against the worst aspects of traditional grammar, but traditional grammar still exists primarily because it has not been replaced and because it is the only metalanguage most people have. The notion that we don't need a metalanguage, that conscious understanding of language is intrusive or unimportant (our short-term experiment) seems a colossal failure at this stage.      

    We need to get on with the business of  building a new paradigm and hope the rest of the world comes along. The struggle is made more difficult because a generation of English teachers were told that knowledge of grammar is  irrelevant or harmful. We deal now with a mix of  misunderstanding and (in the classical sense, lack of knowledge) ignorance.

Craig

Stahlke, Herbert F.W. wrote:




Craig,

I suspect the odd appearance is some epiphenomenon of the chain of
servers and browsers and the mysterious ways in which they interact.  Is
the internet sufficiently complex a system now to produce classic chaos?

You wrote:

 

You seem to be implying in your last post that linguists have developed
   

a >full understanding of grammar, but aren't concerned with how that
trickles
 

down.
   




I'm not sure how I gave the impression that linguists have developed a
full understanding of grammar.  I've certainly seen nothing in the field
that I would recognized at that.  Rather, what I was saying was that
what we're occupied with is theory and structure of utterances,
discourses, discourse interactions, and other sorts of linguistic
objects.  Just what qualifies as a linguistic object is difficult to tie
down, especially at the edges, and I wouldn't try to limit that domain a
whole lot.  When I said that the relevance of linguistic insights for
language teachers and writing teachers is not a function of their
importance to linguistics, I was defining domain, though.  I'd be
interested in how obstruents behave in English, how tonal systems act,
and how serial verb systems work whether they had application to
language teaching or not, because those are the sorts of things I do as
a linguist.

I've often told classes of non-linguists that one of the important
reasons they take linguistics courses is to immunize themselves
intellectually against some of the more pernicious linguistic myths
society is prey to. This is a sort of passive relevance.  But making
linguistic findings make sense and have active pedagogical relevance to
teachers requires a certain kind of thinking that not all linguists do
well, including a lot of very good ones.  It is a very different
endeavor from the sort they normally undertake.  That such a goal can be
achieved and is thoroughly desirable is certainly true, but achieving it
calls on the talent of those academics who cross easily between fields.
The divide is great.  I've been in linguistics departments where
publishing in a pedagogical journal was considered a career-threatening
waste of time.  I don't happen to agree, but I do understand the point
of view.

There is something of a continuum from the theoretical to the
pedagogical, rather than a deep divide between them.  The sense of
division is more a matter of personal traits than of content, I think.
The kind of grammar you talk about evolving out of the needs of the
world is an important goal too, and one that linguists can contribute
to, but the problem is finding linguists who are interested in doing so.
Fortunately, there are several on this list.

I don't like analogies, even though I've indulged in a few, but to pick
up your physics/bridge analogy, I think the relationship between the
physicist and the engineer is similar to that between the linguist and
the writer/writing/language arts teacher.  Once the physicist has worked
out the physics of interacting forces and masses, the bridge problem is
solved.  This doesn't put a bridge across the Straits of Mackinac,
though, and that is an engineering problem.  The physicist may marvel at
the beauty and ingenuity of the achievement, but the physics isn't all
that interesting.  As a linguist, I marvel at what writers, language
arts teachers, and writing teachers achieve.  The linguistics that they
employ is selected by how well it supports what they're doing, but their
responsibility is not to evaluate the validity of that linguistics as
linguistics but to see how they can teach and perform as well as
possible.  And using good linguistics is an element of that, but,
perhaps, less of an element than some of us linguists might delude
ourselves into thinking it is.

Herb

Herb,
    When my messages come back to me, they are fine.  I'm not sure why
they would be different on your computer.  I would be happy to do things

differently if guided accordingly.
   I think you are unequivocally one of the good guys and deeply
interested in teaching applications and teacher training, though I
remember from a past conversation your thoughts about how difficult it
is to go from  linguistic grammars to applied grammar within the
classroom. They are completely different frames of reference, not just a

more scholarly or watered down version of the other. You seem to be
implying in your last post that linguists have developed a full
understanding of grammar, but aren't concerned with how that trickles
down.  From my perspective, it seems that their understanding of grammar

is enormously limited, in part because they have never thought it
important to ask about the role of a conscious understanding of grammar
in the language uses of normal life.  If I carried through on your
physics analogy, I'd say it would be like the physics people saying that

physics has nothing to do with bridges or buildings or airplanes
crashing or the tensile strength of aluminum, and so on. It would be
like their saying that none of it is ever meant for application in the
real world. Teaching a disinterested grammar is not the same thing  as
evolving a grammar out of the needs of the world.
    Linguists have told us that dialect differences are rule driven (I
am an enormous fan of Geneva Smitherman), but they haven't been
successful in  erasing the stigmas associated with those differences. It

is difficult to help students like that (I do that all the time) because

they don't have the base understanding they need to negotiate the
differences in these language worlds. The students who get hurt the
worst by failure to teach (articulate) clear standards (not just impose
them) are those on the margins, those supposedly helped by the
"progressive" attitudes of the middle class.  This same understanding
has also led to a general sense among the progressives that the learning

of grammar is natural and inevitable, so that teaching a native speaker
about his or her own language is unnecessary, even harmful.  The logic
goes something like this: everything a native speaker says is
grammatical, by definition.  Learning this is a natural process.
 Teaching a native speaker to speak grammatically is nonsensical.
Therefore, we do not need to teach (study) grammar in the schools,
although we seem to need to correct errors in as unconscious a way as
possible. (Nowadays, by people who themselves don't know much about
grammar when they are doing this "correcting.") This way of looking at
grammar, which has a very uneasy co-existence with prescriptive
grammars, has given us the choice between bad teaching and no teaching,
and no teaching has, for the most part, won out. There are certainly
pockets of traditional grammar teaching still left and pockets of
minimalist intervention, but we do not have a systematic grammar in the
public schools that draws at all reasonably on the insights of a
scholarly discipline.
   Has anyone done a good study yet on whether students actually do
learn to write simply by being exposed to good writing? This is one of
the truisms that seems to have been taken for granted. Certainly one of
the questions that hasn't been though of as important enough to ask is
whether conscious understanding of grammar is at all useful in the
production of meaningful texts and, if so, exactly what is most useful.

 It is not enough to say that the sentences of the text are grammatical
or correct,  because that does not allow us to differentiate between the

nonsensical and the thoughtful, the effective and the ineffective.  The
answer I get from most American linguists is that this has nothing to do

with grammar, though I believe that is simply because their study of
grammar has never concerned itself with such questions.  In other words,

we don't have the theory at any level; it's not just that we are missing

pedagogical applications. (A major exception would be functional
grammar, but that isn't accorded anywhere near the kind of respect it
needs to have the influence it deserves on this side of the Atlantic.)
    In order to solve our present problem, we need to acknowledge that
linguists have been an inadvertent part of the problem, that they have
done much to result in grammar disappearing from the public school
curriculum. Nothing of consequence will happen if people in each camp
place the blame elsewhere. As the battle lines are currently drawn, none

of the sides can win, and our students continue to lose out, the
neediest losing most of all.
    For change to happen, people in a position to answer these questions

need to see them as important.  Given the hierarchy of the academy, that

won't happen easily.  That's why I tried the analogy of a cure for
cancer.  It's not just "pure biology", but has been worth an enormous
investment.  It will also be transdisciplinary when it comes, with the
potential to re-energize a number of disciplines.




Craig




Stahlke, Herbert F.W. wrote:

 

Craig,

Something digitally strange is happening with this thread.  Bob got my
   

posting in scrambled form, and I got yours without any wordwrap.  When I
hit reply, what you wrote got formatted with wordwrap, but what Bob and
I had written still wasn't.  I don't know how this happens, but Max
Morenberg occasionally emails me that a posting of mine has come through
scrambled.  But these things are intermittent and probably in the domain
of the list manager.
 

Now to your comments.

I'll be brief. As a linguist doing linguistics, my interest is in
   

solving problems of language not of language teaching.  If my linguistic
writing and study has direct application to the teaching of language or
of writing it is purely fortuitous, not by intent.  We work in different
domains.  I ask and explore questions about linguistic structure and you
work on questions of rhetoric and teaching.  That said, I'm also
interested in teaching, and I agree with Bob and Bill and others on this
list that linguistics offers important insights into how language can be
taught and what can be taught about it. Bob was entirely right in
pointing out that it was linguistic work that provided the basis of
arguments in the 60s and since that non-standard dialects are not
inferior forms of English but are thoroughly rule-governed systems.
Even the notion "rule-governed" is a linguistic notion.  The way
auxiliary verbs are used in discourse to distinguish background
information from foreground is another insight from linguistics that can
be turned into a useful teaching module for students of writing.  On the
other hand, it didn't take a linguist to realize or demonstrate that the
injunction to avoid passive voice is taken to wrong-headed extremes by a
lot of teachers.  Good writers and teachers of writing have known that
for a long time.
 

There are clearly linguistic insights that have relevance for language
   

teachers and writing teachers.  But that is not a function of their
importance to linguistics.  Rather it's a consequence of the fact
linguists research the medium that language teachers and writing
teachers teach.  There is inevitably some transfer.  For most linguists,
however, once something is know well enough for that transfer to take
place it's no longer of much interest to linguists and they've gone on
to something else.  No judgment of relative value here; just recognition
of the fact that we have very different, but linked, areas of endeavor.
 

I think this relationship is part of the reason why it's useful to have
   

linguists on this list.  Sure, our arguments seem to some to take
several tours around the barn at times, but you guys tolerate that
pretty well, usually, just as the linguists sometimes sit back in
bemusement when pedagogical questions arise.  For example, I don't get
involved a whole lot in Ed's discussions because I'm not involved in
grammar teaching to the grade levels he's interested in, and his
grammar, which I suspect works well for that population, is too blunt an
instrument for linguistic purposes.  This isn't a criticism of his work.
We address different problems.
 

Of course, sometimes people from both groups jump into the other sort
   

of discussion.
 

Herb

   




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