Bill,
   I appreciate your attempt to mediate differences. In doing so, though, I think you fall back on positions that I think are part of the current problem. I think it's more productive to talk about language communities than it is to talk about dialects, since "dialect" predisposes us toward form. If we talk about "language users" also as individuals, it ought to be clear to us that even within the non-mainstream communities, some children become much more adept at language than others, I suspect because of the nature of their interactions. It seems to me a tired old position that children learn the grammar of the language naturally and that all we need to do in school is "correct" them on the 5% or so of the time that their language is non-standard.
   We wouldn't make this mistake for vocabulary. (The only thing we need to do is correct the 5% of word meanings that are "incorrect.") Why do we make such a radical distinction between grammar and vocabulary? Only because the dominant theory has been that the two are distinct. Current theory says they are deeply intertwined.
   At what point does a child learn a construction like "would you be so kind as to..."? At what point do they learn the grammar of a good story?
   You can learn to steal cars without instruction, but I wouldn't recommend it.

Craig

Spruiell, William C wrote:

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Craig, Bob, et al.: I suspect part of the disagreement here is due to a mismatch in focus. While it's hard to set up criteria that would support a firm measure, I'd guess at least 95% of English grammar is "shared" by all dialects commonly met with in the U.S. -- e.g., the habitual placement of the definite article before the noun, rather than after, or the placement of subjects before verbs in the majority of sentence types. But the shared parts have never been the focus of K-12 English classes. Traditionally, classroom grammar has concentrated on (1) metalinguistic descriptive terms (which aren't native to anyone's dialect) and (2) a set of structural items/rules that are in the 5% *unshared* portion. Absolute phrases, adjective clauses in which objects of prepositions or comparatives are relativized, etc. are probably in that unshared 5%, and in fact, probably aren't native to most *spoken* dialects at all. Bob's entirely right that from one perspective, the differences among English dialects aren't that major; it's not like we get many kids showing up at school who grew up saying "book the" instead of "the book" -- but Craig's entirely right that the stuff that we *do* talk about in grammar classes is material to which dialect is crucial. And the dialectal differences extend to variation in what the illocutionary force of particular utterances is. There *are* dialects in which speakers would routinely say, "Tell me what color that is" instead of "What color is that?", and it's reasonable to think such differences will affect students' performance in the classroom (if only because the child is left wondering why the adult teacher is in charge of the classroom if s/he doesn't even know basic color terms; why else ask the kids?). We also have to distinguish between any developmental sequence for metalinguistic understanding and any developmental sequence for appropriate usage of particular constructions. Knowing when to say "that's a passive construction" is a very different skill from knowing when to cast a sentence in such a way that the patient (or insert term of your choice) is the subject and the agent is omitted or tacked on in a by-phrase, or how to understand such a sentence when it's encountered. I'm positive that the students in my classes who don't know "Kangaroos are found in Australia" is called a passive construction DO know that the kangaroos aren't finding anything. And I don't think my students have trouble labeling passives because it's just too cognitively complex a task; they engage in far, FAR more complex categorization tasks elsewhere in their lives. We won't know anything about developmental sequences for metalinguistic understanding until we notice students in particular age ranges running into a brick wall while trying to handle otherwise well-scaffolded material. Since the current state of grammar instruction in most districts has no real scaffolding (I think), we just don't know much about that side of things. Bill Spruiell Dept. of English Central Michigan University -----Original Message----- From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar 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"

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