In the discussion on the theory of language, Bill Spruill (on 2/11) wrote: “It doesn't do the wider public any good, though, *especially* since a majority of the differences between the paradigms has no real implication for what we need to do in classrooms.” I want to demonstrate that an important difference between views on language makes a very real difference in the disposition we as teachers need to have in understanding what our students do and how we respond to what they do. The difference I consider here is whether we need a competence-performance distinction in our understanding of language or whether performance is the only way to consider language. In other words, whether there is a difference between our knowledge about what is possible in a language (competence) and how that knowledge is used (performance) or the distinction doesn’t exist at all. In an earlier post Craig noted: “For a formal or structural grammar, you need to theorize ways in which knowledge of the underlying forms can be put to work. In a functional model, those connections are already there.” I claim a teacher must theorize about how knowledge of underlying forms are put to work by our students. Consider sentence (1) that one of my non-native speakers (a graduate students whose first language is Chinese) wrote: 1) They are not agree with the Input Hypothesis. (1) is obviously ungrammatical: ARE should be DO. I’m interested in trying to understand why a non-native speaker would write (1) because, if I can figure out why, my correction may prevent the error in future writing. I can only speculate on how someone who believes language can be understood as performance would respond to this sentence. (I hope I will be corrected on the following if it is not correct.) From a performance perspective, when to use IS/ARE and DO in making sentences negative can appear to be confusing. Consider 2 and 3. 2) They do not agree with X. 3) They are not agreeing with X. So, perhaps if we only know performance, the writer of (1) is confused about DO or ARE and “agree” just lacks -ing. And, of course, such learners will see sentences like (4). 4) They are not in agreement with X. So, from a performance perspective, the number of different forms a learner might encounter with “agree” is so variable, the learner has no clear indication whether ARE or DO is appropriate. Moreover, we as teachers cannot be sure whether the student should have written “agreeing” or “in agreement.” On the other hand, if we as teachers understand language to have a competence-performance distinction, another explanation for (1) is possible. If the learner’s underlying knowledge about AGREE is that it is an adjective and not a verb, then what makes this sentence ungrammatical is not with ARE (or missing morphology on “agree”) but with what word category the learner has assigned AGREE to. So, because AGREE for this student is an adjective, ARE is the only form possible. In fact, that is exactly what the student told me. Craig, in the passage I cited above, is absolutely correct. As a teacher, I had to theorize on how this writer’s underlying competence (agree is an adjective) lead to the ungrammatical sentence.. Such theorizing, I believe, is a disposition all teachers need to have to respond to their students’ writing. I hope this example of a real sentence a real student wrote shows that a whole lot is at stake in how we understand what it means to know language. Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri (By the way, if we as teachers had done the obvious surface correction of sentence (1)– cross-out the ARE and insert DO, we really haven’t provided much help to the student. The student has to figure out why the ARE was crossed out and DO was inserted. That would require the student to realize that only verbs require do-support when made negative and BE is used for adjectives. A student who could arrive at such a conclusby just crossing out ARE and replacing it with DO probably wouldn’t write (1) in the first place.) 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/