Johanna, An IEP is an "Individualized Education Plan" that is developed for students with special education needs during a planning meeting (called a PPT) among the student, his councillor, administrators, teachers, and sometimes psychologists and other aids. There very common in public schools. Sometimes there also very successful in helping students improve in their schoolwork (and sometimes not -- usually because of what the student does). Paul D. ----- Original Message ---- From: Johanna Rubba <[log in to unmask]> To: [log in to unmask] Sent: Thursday, August 31, 2006 6:04:09 PM Subject: Re: Grammar Certification I'm trying to understand why the book Rebecca Watson refers to would "jangle my nerves". I don't know what IEP stands for; that might help me understand. Anyone who has read my posts on this list knows that I advocate teaching grammar in effective ways. For beginning students (for all students, really), visuals are great. I believe in nouns, verbs, capitalization, and punctuation. How they're defined and how and when they're taught is what concerns me. I use my own manuscript in my structure-of-English classes, and most of my students consistently rate it between 8 and 10 (10-high) on two criteria: (1) clarity and accessibility of the information and (2) usefulness of the information for their future careers as teachers. I don't recall anyone posting to this list who doesn't want schoolchildren to come out of K-12 fluent in standard English. It's the HOW and the WHAT and the WHEN that are at issue. As to The ESL Grammar Book, I stated clearly in my post that I was referring to teacher trainees, not ESL students. Maybe it's better as a reference book than a textbook. I haven't taught from it myself; I'm just familiar with its contents. Students apparently find it accessible, since it was in use at MT and Herb has testified to that effect, and I imagine it is in use elsewhere, or else it wouldn't be on the market anymore. I do believe that ESL teachers should have Master's degrees, and that they should have a full year of linguistics, from phonetics to discourse. If you're going to teach language, you'd better know your subject. As to learning linguistic theories when preparing to teach ESL, I don't see what's wrong with it. Much of teacher education is _background knowledge_, not necessarily stuff that you will translate directly into classroom lessons. Teachers need good classroom materials that are informed by linguistics, too, but those materials will not be theory books. Such materials aren't widely available right now; that's one thing some of us are working on. Teachers have also been known to design their own teaching materials. Understanding how language works is very useful for that endeavor. History majors who go on to be high school or middle school history teachers learn more history in college than they ever teach, I assume. I know much, much, much more about language than I ever teach, because all of my classes are introductory, and I have no linguistics MA or PhD students. A good number of students in our elementary-school teacher ed program seem to believe that they don't need to know more about the subjects they will teach than what is in the teaching materials they will use for their students. This isn't good. Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics Linguistics Minor Advisor English Department California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo E-mail: [log in to unmask] Tel.: 805.756.2184 Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596 Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374 URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/ To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/