Craig,
As you might expect, I will cling tenaciously to the idea that I'm not
being reductionist, just misunderstood (unfortunately, I'm far past the
age where I can manage brooding angst well; instead, I just look
crotchety, and people suggest bran). I'm not primarily interested in
surface correctness - but I do think there are shared elements of
English that are basic enough that they only become topics of class
conversation for purposes of raising metalinguistic awareness, rather
than for encouraging supple, engaging writing, or adapting text to
specific genre expectations, etc.
Parts of the grounding system are a case in point. Most students
certainly don't show up in first grade already accustomed to expressions
like "The tamarack is the only deciduous conifer in North America."
Everyday language experience would tell them that "the tamarack" should
be a particular tree, and that it should have been brought up in the
conversation before, and that sentence can violate both those
conditions. That kind of sentence is native mainly to scientific
writing, and the closest equivalent in normal use would be "Tamaracks
are the only deciduous conifers in North America" (ignoring, for the
moment, that one normally wouldn't go around saying "deciduous" in most
contexts). But students do show up in first grade expecting to hear
"Ms Smith told us a story" and not "The Ms Smith told us story." That's
interesting in its own right, of course, and makes a good example for
raising metalinguistic awareness, but - rather crucially - there's no
reason to spend much time talking about the contexts in which one would
say "The Ms Smith told us story."
It's not a situation in which we have multiple options and we're
discussing the textual and contextual effects of one choice over another
(as with active vs. passive); instead, it's one where a hypothetical
option just isn't on the menu to begin with. A course focused entirely
on the effects of linguistic choices, would still end up lumping these
mainly under a heading like, "You can choose to violate your readers'
basic linguistic expectations, but why?"
I take (or mistake) Bob's point to be that there is an awful lot in that
category (one of the dangers of writing this kind of "in between"
response is that I end up trying to portray what I think are other
people's positions, which fully admit is rather presumptuous). Although
I tend to disagree with him about why students won't expect the
"nonEnglishy" stuff, I have to agree that they don't expect it, and that
there's an infinitely large bag of non-English-y-ness that they don't
expect - and that they validly assume others won't expect as well.
Lysincere,
Bill Spruiell
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
Sent: Friday, February 06, 2009 1:27 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Developmental phases of grammar knowledge
Bill,
I still think you are taking a highly reductive view of grammar. If
the only thing we are interested in is surface feature correctness, then
all the rest can be ignored for pragmatic reasons. We can go on and deal
with "higher end" concerns, like reading and writing, treating grammar
as if it has no role in all that.
Determiners are only one aspect of the "grounding" system whereby
common nouns are brought into discourse focus. "Grounding" also happens
through the finite verb system, all of this a way for the language to
function in various discourse modes, some of which children have never
encountered prior to school. Why do some children never learn those
processes effectively? Perhaps because we have been teaching children
all along as if all that matters is a superficial correctness along the
fault line of dialect differences.
If you think grammar is innate and meaningfully neutral, just a
system of forms, then don't teach it. It just happens. If you see it as
learned and deeply connected to cognition and discourse, then you ought
to attend to it and not just expect it to happen.
There are views of language which support the teaching of grammar and
views of language that support our current status quo. Bob and I are on
opposite poles of that argument.
Craig
Spruiell, William C wrote:
Craig,
I'd agree that there is a danger in the "5% analogy," but in a sense,
it can be taken as a statement about language communities as well. To
the extent that we say a language community is "English-speaking," we're
saying that about 95% of the time they say generally the same kinds of
things we'd expect from other communities of English-speakers, and seem
to be doing so for roughly the same reasons. Speaker A puts definite
articles before nouns, and so does Speaker B, and they both do so in
ways that support the hypothesis that they're viewing the noun as
something known or established via discourse. When you refer to
"English," Bob, I think, immediately thinks of the myriad ways in which
the practices of these language communities are similar, and so
statements referring to differences stand out as potentially ignoring
the (much, much) greater commonalities.
This view does not entail accepting or rejecting any particular claim
about how speakers end up sharing those language practices - they could
be shared because of the operation of a biological language acquisition
device, or instead because historical exigency has produced a situation
in which those communities are replicating language practices from an
ancestral speech community they all derive from (in the cultural sense,
not a biological one). But I (and I would suspect all of us) still walk
into the classroom expecting that English-speakers will not produce a
sentence such as "Dog largeness-having with ball-chasing-ness had." We
may be much more interested in language practices than in "forms," but
there is a sense in which forms are practices.
Prescriptive grammar, of course, turns converts 'difference' into
'pathology', hence the typical focus on "unshared" language practices in
the K-12 classroom. To the extent that all the students in a class use a
language practice that the teacher not only shares, but expects to be
the same in written discourse, it doesn't usually make it onto the
"teach this" list. I whole-heartedly agree that we need to
fundamentally restructure how we think about "grammar teaching," but I
think we will nonetheless end up devoting comparatively little
discussion time in classes to a large proportion of the shared-practice
set, simply because of pragmatic constraints. To use yet another
analogy: if you're pointing out to a class the differences between a
tarantella and a waltz, you probably won't go out of your way to make
the point that for both dances, the feet go toward the floor, or that in
neither dance should one attempt to injure one's partner - that's
information you can assume the class knows, although you might use it to
make the point that dances operate within a physical and social
envelope. Downplaying that information does not require you in any
sense to assert that tarantellas are better than waltzes.
Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
Sent: Friday, February 06, 2009 9:18 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Developmental phases of grammar knowledge
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:
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
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