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Ed,

You make a lot of the right moves and promote the teaching of useful grammar in worthwhile ways, and then you make obscure charges that would be worth a bit more explanation. Addressing the general public through newspapers and, I would suggest, blogs is very important to changing attitudes towards grammar. But then you refer to sociolinguistics for language arts teachers as “silly” and “misguided”. I would argue that much of the content of a sociolinguistics course, as it deals with dialect variation, standard language, language attitudes, and national language policy, is critical content for teachers. However, it should be in addition to relevant grammar instruction, not in place of it. I’m not sure if you’re being critical of Bill O’Rourke or complementing him. Certainly the content he includes is worthwhile, again, as long as relevant grammar and grammar methods are taught. The appreciation we want teachers to have of language includes history, variation, policy, as well as grammar. A focus on linguistic analysis for linguistic purposes is pretty clearly inappropriate to such a context, although it’s also clear that such discussion is useful to language teachers, as we have found on this list. But grammar that isn’t based on sound linguistics is also inappropriate. We shouldn’t be making teachers into theoretical linguists or manipulators of formalism, but we need to give them vocabulary to talk about what’s going on in language, and concepts like morpheme, affix, derivation, and inflection are part of that, even if the wide range of theories called up by the terms aren’t.

I suspect we disagree on scope more than on substance. As a linguistic researcher and college teacher I’ll defer in most cases to your experience and judgment as to what works pedagogically in the K12 classroom, but I think those of us from the linguistic ivory tower have something to contribute in the area of content.

Herb

From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Edward Vavra
Sent: Monday, October 17, 2005 2:55 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Grassroots efforts

Christine and Amanda,

As usual, the topics under discussion are extremely complex, and I do not have the time (or energy) to respond completely and clearly here. I would suggest that many teachers label students' dialects as "bad, wrong, stupid and defective" primarily because they are required to teach grammar and have little idea of what else to teach. I'm aware of all the obstacles that Amanda lists. (I've been at this for 25 years.) I do not, however, see "research" as being the best way to overcome the obstacles. It was, after all, officially sanctioned "research" that led to the conclusion that teaching grammar is harmful.

My own efforts are heading in the direction of writing for the general public. The KISS site, which is still not complete, is primarily an attempt to demonstrate what could/should be done. Over the years my explanations of KISS have been criticized as nothing different from traditional grammar, idealistic, etc. There will, of course, still be such criticism, but the sequence, instructional materials, and hundreds of exercises on the KISS site do illustrate a scope and sequence of instruction. Home schoolers have a distinct advantage with KISS — they can control the sequence of instruction. But there are more and more classroom teachers who are joining the list, and I expect some of them to start to implement some across grade-level instruction.

I've started writing a monthly column for a small local publication that is distributed in the local newspaper. In essence, I'm trying to use the column to practice writing for the general public. The essence of my argument is that students are not being taught to identify subjects and verbs — and they should be. I'm hoping that I can get members of the public not only to see that, but also to start asking why the students in their schools are not being taught this.

To address the general public, I will be describing the silly things that are going on in the profession — such as the misguided focus on teaching teachers sociolinguistics. This will, I'm sure, not sit well with many members of this list, but most members of this list have shown little, if any interest in helping teachers in K-12. I'll note, by the way, Bill O'Rourke's "'Lion Tamers and Baby Sitters': First-Year English Teachers' Perceptions of Their Undergraduate Teacher Preparation" (English Education, Feb. 83: 17-24) He wrote:

"Should an English education staff be proud or ashamed of the fact that fifteen out of seventeen graduates, after one semester of teaching, tell us that the one thing they wish the university would have offered them is a course in how to teach grammar? If it was a goal to purely reflect the public schools in our teaching, this evidence would tell us to be ashamed. If our goal was to reform the English curiculum in secondary schools, then maybe we should be proud. I taught the linguistics methods course at UNL and I taught it with one overall goal: to make language instruction in our secondary schools more than grammar. We covered history of the language, lexicography, dialect, semantics, usage, public doublespeak, and grammar. But we talked about grammar in terms of what is the purpose for teaching grammar, what does research tell us about its relationship to writing and speaking, what is the thinking behind the different types of grammar? It seems to me that this type of approach, this questioning beyond just the methodology, is precisely what English education should be concerned with." (21-22)

Members of this list, of course, want to teach grammar, but a focus on linguistics (morphology, sociolinguistics, etc.) is not going to help teachers who themselves cannot identify subjects and verbs. I haven't been able to get much support for this idea from this group, but perhaps I can get the parents and the business world to put pressure on the schools to make a change. The obstacles that Amanda lists are actually not that serious, at least from the perspective of the KISS Approach. If it is spread over a number of grades, KISS does not require much time in class, or from the teachers.

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