I strongly support Bill’s concerns over the application of linguistic theories to teaching.  We’ve seen this trend in motion from the days of Charles Fries’ structural grammar back in the 50s, and it flourished like poison ivy with the Paul Roberts’ reduction of early transformational grammar in the 60s.  People gave linguistically based grammar a serious try back then, and it simply didn’t work pedagogically, resulting in an anti-linguistic backlash that lasted a generation, linguistics being identified with Roberts types of pedagogical approach and not with systematic inquiry.  I work in an English department that has an MA program in TESOL and a doctoral program in Applied Linguistics.  When I compare our program to those at other universities, what I find generally is that all of us focus on some kind of functional grammar, not much on formal theoretical linguistics, because functional grammars yield much more that is of interest to pedagogy.  I’m not against formal theory, even though I stopped doing it a long time ago.  We need people to ask and explore those questions, and, while I disagree with some of the a prioris of Chomsky or Sag or other formalists, I have also gained important insights from their work.  But formal theories of language are about language and formal theory, not about pedagogy and praxis. 

 

One of the most serious and consistent mistakes people make with formal theories, whether they are language teachers or theoretical linguists, is to assume that a theoretical construct, like rule, trace, or module, is somehow psychologically real.  These are theory-internal constructs, not real-time phenomena that can be observed empirically.  They are devices we use to explain and describe the data we observe, and they are very useful for this.  But it’s usually a mistake to assume that, because Chomsky described a certain passive transformation in 1957 or 1965, one or both of these represents some actual mental process, or that speakers produce or process sentences by grinding them through some grammatical sausage mill.  Chomsky’s passive transformation made some interesting claims that theoreticians have investigated thoroughly and learned much from, but it wasn’t something speakers and hearers do.

 

I think the contemporary model theoretic concept that most influences the non-linguistic world is modularity, the idea that different areas of syntax, as well as phonology and different areas of semantics, represent separate mental modules that communicate with each other rather like functions in a computer program.  Some persuasive popular writing has been done on this subject, Pinker’s books especially.  But this is simply another case of seeking psychological reality for a theoretical construct, and that path doesn’t help pedagogy. 

 

Herb

 

 

[More theory, but with some connection to pedagogy]

 

There’s a fundamental question behind some of this discussion that has to do with the extent to which there is a *necessary* connection between a linguistic theory a language pedagogy – there are some hot-button questions that can be justifiably begged in an English-teaching context.  While I’m by no means a fan of American Formalism (I think it’s founded on highly questionable assumptions about human cognition and about simplicity metrics), I don’t think it can be “internally” criticized for failing to have much pedagogic application. Most of its foremost practitioners, including Chomsky, have never claimed that it should be applied to teaching. From their standpoint, asking whether or not a theory makes a good teaching framework makes as much sense as asking whether we should dump a physics theory if it’s hard to teach, or doesn’t provide a good framework for coaching in physical education. That is, there could be a set of true statements about how language works in human cognition, but those statements could have no application to anything that people could consciously affect. Knowing the structure of my nose doesn’t let me control whether it runs or not. 

 

The problem for educators lies not in the theory, but in trying to apply the theory to things its practitioners never designed it to work with – and in thinking that teachers are *supposed to* do that. Theories that do assume a direct connection between meaning and language use, like some of the functionalist approaches discussed here, are more easily applicable to teaching, which is a strong bonus in using them in educational settings. However, there is no necessary connection between whether a “God’s Truth” linguistic theory is correct or not and whether it’s useful for teaching or not. I think that functionalist approaches have a stronger chance of being correct on a range of grounds separate from pedagogy, but those grounds are where the linguistics turf wars lie. Teachers can stay fairly agnostic about the turf wars, but still use analytic frameworks drawn from linguistics in classrooms. I don’t think any theorists working in Minimalism or Optimality Theory will expect K-12 teachers to use those frameworks to improve the ways students consciously manipulate language for effect; that lies beyond the scope that the theorists themselves claim their theory addresses.

 

Bill Spruiell

 

Dept. of English

Central Michigan University