Ron,

You’ve recently joined a list that has a lot of history, a lot of participants who have been talking, sharing, arguing for years about matters of grammatical theory and description, composition pedagogy, approaches to language arts, etc. These are a group with years of experience in their fields and they use this list as a way to bounce ideas off other specialists as well as to share their successes and failures. One of the group’s longer range goals is to reinvigorate and reestablish the teaching of grammar, that is, knowledge about language, in the nation’s schools, a position that has not been shared widely by other members of the NCTE, of which ATEG is a part. Sometimes these discussions are carefully argued and sometimes they’re informal discussions, depending on what the topic and discussants require.

In your postings on ATEG discourse, you have divided discourse into two genres: rigorous, research and literature based, empirically designed studies of specific topics and informal coffee break bull sessions. This is a serious reduction of discourse genres as this list has employed them, and there is room for many in between the two extremes you describe. My guess is that if you insist on your discourse dichotomy you will ultimately be ignored because those extremes, while occasionally represented on this list, simply don’t meet the needs of most of us or of most of the questions we ask and topics we discuss.

Personally, I have appreciated deeply the wisdom and experience of many of my colleagues, and that’s why I participate. There are a lot of people here who know things, can do things, have had experiences that aren’t part of my expertise or experience, and I find that such wisdom tends not to be in the form of empirical design. Empirical design is a powerful tool for testing hypotheses. Unfortunately, it’s not capable of telling us whether the hypothesis we’re testing is worth the effort. After serving on or chairing upwards of a couple of dozen dissertation committees in SLA, I have found consistently that this judgment of whether a question is worth exploring is the hardest one for doctoral students to get a grasp of. That judgment requires some wisdom.

Herb

Johanna Rubba writes

> Giving students inductive means for doing things like finding the
> subject of a sentence or deciding which case is required for a
> pronoun can have long-term utility.
>
> Discovering a rule yourself is more likely to result in remembering
> that rule later. No, I don't have studies handy to cite to prove
> this, but I have learned it along the way in the course of studying
> about learning and teaching.

This is the problem with 'kicking ideas around' and refraining from getting into rigorous discussion requiring accountability to the available literature.

There is a vast literature from fields related to psychology on implicit (inductive) and explicit (deductive) learning from which it is clear that it is advisable NOT to make claims for the advantages of either approach without specifying the details of the learning situation.

Now, Johanna does this to some degree and implies that she could cite the necessary support had she the time. One example she cites is 'finding the subject of a sentence'..

Now. if she has the time I'd appreciate it were she prepared to describe what she considers to be inductive and deductive approaches to this problem..

By the way, I have already identified a serious problem with inductive approaches ie the problem related to vast differences in problem-solving abilities which have very serious consequences for what students actually do. Unfortunately, those members who advocate inductive approaches have not addressed this problem.

On a personal note and referring to Johanna's 'Discovering a rule yourself is more likely to result in remembering that rule later' sounds seductive but I wonder how many members have found this to be case. My learning experience is that of guitar chords for songs. I've learned them both ways and find there to be no difference. I've also carried out limited research in language learning (Sheen, 1992) related to learning adjectival position in French. Once again, I found there to be no significant difference in degree of retentivity.

Ron Sheen

Sheen, R. (1992) 'Problem-solving brought to task' RELC Journal 23/2. 44-59.

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