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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