Bill,
   As a heartfelt amen to that, I would point out that students who come
to college, in New York state at least, seem to have had no exposure to
the term "Standard English." Writing patterns are "correct" or
"incorrect," "proper" or "improper," not standard or non-standard. It
is fairly common for a student to say "My problem is that I write the
way I talk, and the way I talk isn't proper."
   If Standard English is a goal--and I wouldn't argue with that--we
should at least be clear about what it is.
    I'm reminded of the student in my grammar class who, after ten weeks
of "meaning-centered" attention to grammar, got my approval for a
project for an optional paper examining the language of his five year
old son.  After the weekend, he came back and said he would have to
change the topic; he had listened to his son, and "there wasn't any
grammar there," by which he meant that the child wasn't making errors.
I'm not sure why it's so hard to get these perspectives across. I told
him "just transcribe what you hear, and we can look at what he is
doing right," which turned into a fine project.
   In a real sense, I think NCTE opposses direct grammar instruction
because they equate grammar with prescriptive and regressive practices.
In opposition, people have argued that students will learn language if
you just let them express themselves and "correct" them in context.
Neither approach is effective, but they end up owning the conversation.
It's hard to convince them that progress will require different
thinking from both sides, in part because both sides have a good deal
invested in their positions.

Craig

I teach courses to future English teachers, and yes, they do include the
> kind of material Baron focuses on. But prescriptive views of grammar are
> deeply entrenched; a good number of those blatantly false propositions
> about language (i.e. "there are exactly eight parts of speech," or the
> much, much more damaging "non-standard dialects lack rules and are
> simply wrong") have been presented to students implicitly, as "givens,"
> for so long that it's not reasonable to expect them to shift their
> thinking rapidly. They do want prescriptive rules, although I think it's
> important to keep in mind that they've *learned* to want them. I hope,
> of course, that six or nine hours of college classes will catalyze a
> fundamental shift in my students' views, but I also remember at least
> dimly what I was like at their age.
>
> I'm nervous about the term "hegemony," mainly because it tends to occur
> in texts that say something basic for as long as possible in the most
> obscure possible way, but it's appropriate here. It's hard to shift a
> viewpoint that has been established as a default; it's constantly
> reinforced in day-to-day interactions. And it's also frequently
> reinforced by K-12 textbooks -- things have gotten slightly better on
> the dialect awareness front, but not many others; there may be fewer
> "wrong propositions" in the texts, but that's largely because there are
> simply fewer statements about language structure, period.
>
> Baron's statement that teachers "reject such knowledge in favor of the
> simplistic language model they absorbed when they were in school"
> strikes me as true in one sense -- minus any implication that the
> rejection is a conscious act; it's simply a recognition that even if we
> teach this stuff, it doesn't seem to be showing up in the schools. But
> we also have to acknowledge that many teachers will see no point in
> adopting a viewpoint that appears to be held only by some college
> instructors and (possibly) whoever wrote the state standards matrix, but
> that is rejected by their communities, the course materials they have
> been asked to use, and (in many cases) whoever writes the standardized
> tests used in their district. There are enormous social pressures
> encouraging inertia in language education, and teachers are human.
> Overcoming that inertia takes sustained, aggressive effort (the kind it
> has been hard to talk NCTE into, but we can hope....).
>
>
>
> Bill Spruiell
> Dept. of English
> Central Michigan University
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of O'Sullivan, Brian P
> Sent: Friday, December 04, 2009 9:13 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Dennis Baron's article
>
> Herb,
>
> I think that what you're saying is more empathetic, and therefore more
> persuasive, than what Baron says. You say that prospective teachers are
> nominally supposed to learn about langauge but "still are not taught"
> about important aspects of language; he says that students are actually
> "given a healthy dose" of language education. You say that new teachers
> are not encouraged to develop and use their knowledge of language; he
> says that new teachers actively "reject such knowledge."
>
> What I most like about his article, on the other hand, is the
> introduction. By quoting a student's "intelligent design" theory of
> language, Baron illustrates an important reason for the persistence of
> prescriptivism: a felt need on the part of students. I think there are
> many students who--for developmental, cultural or other reasons--feel a
> strong need to be told the "right answers" to questions of grammar and
> writing. How, and at what developmental stages, can teachers lead
> students from a craving for rules to an interest in choices?
>
> Brian
> ________________________________________
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of STAHLKE, HERBERT F
> [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Friday, December 04, 2009 7:33 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Dennis Baron's article
>
> All of the topics Baron would like to see taught are specified in the
> Indiana Language Arts Standards, but teachers still are not taught them,
> and for all the reasons we're familiar with:  teacher training
> curriculum that leaves no room to teach them, English Education programs
> that accept the common wisdom that knowledge about language and how it
> works is irrelevant and perhaps harmful, arrogant irrelevance on the
> part of linguists who teach the few language-related courses teacher
> prep students take, political pressures in school corporations to
> maintain prescriptive shibboleths, the absence in the schools of role
> models for teachers who would like to do something with language, and
> I'm sure many on the list could add other factors.  The fact that our
> state standards require considerable linguistic content in the language
> arts curriculum and in the training of language arts teachers strikes
> me, somewhat cynically, as a nod to what the authors knew should be
> done, hoped would be done, but had no power to bring about.
>
> The problem isn't that we've had thirty million theories of language,
> all of them, as scientific theories must be, inadequate.  The problem is
> that there is much that we know that should be taught:  sentence and
> discourse level structures, dialect variation, register and
> appropriateness, as well as all of the skills or literacy and orality
> including the love of using language well.
>
> This group has never, in spite of serious efforts, agreed on an approach
> to teaching grammar, but we for the most part agree that it needs to be
> done.  There are plenty of ways to do it well and also a fair number of
> ways to do it badly, and insisting on teaching as fact propositions that
> we know to be false, which is what Baron inveighs against, is probably
> the most common of the ways of doing it badly.
>
> Herb
>
> Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
> Emeritus Professor of English
> Ball State University
> Muncie, IN  47306
> [log in to unmask]
> ________________________________________
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bruce Despain
> [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: December 4, 2009 3:53 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Dennis Baron's article
>
> My take is that he muddied the waters so badly that it is much easier to
> throw it all out.  I hope I didn't throw any baby out with it. I have
> entered a subscription and plan to look at some of his other essays.  My
> jury is still out.  Society has done quite well with whatever standard
> was set up whether it was a foot or a meter.  He seems to think that
> language itself is the measure, but it is the linguistic theory that
> measures language.  I don't think the issue is with there being a single
> standard.  As of 1979 linguists had proposed over 30 major theoretical
> frameworks (models) for grammar (syntax).  I think the point can be made
> that all of them eventually led to contradictions, not really much
> better than traditional grammar.  The models have become 20th century
> prescriptions based on what linguists took as important in language
> study.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
> Sent: Friday, December 04, 2009 10:20 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Dennis Baron's article
>
> Herb,
>    This is a very rich and interesting article, though it seems a bit
> disingenuous to me that he characterizes linguists as doing everything
> right and English teachers as getting it all wrong. I'm not saying he's
> wrong, just that he fails to look sympathetically at the other side or
> second guess his own certainty.
>    Here are two key paragraphs that set up that contrast.
>
> "It's not that English teachers don't know that linguistic knowledge has
> progressed over the past 250 years. Prospective teachers get a healthy
> dose of sociolinguistics, transformational grammar, and the history of
> English. They study the emergence of dialects and the social contexts
> from which language standards grow. And they learn that unlike the
> standard meter or kilogram, which can be measured with scientific
> precision, there is no single, objective standard language which
> everybody speaks. They study language contact, assimilation, and
> heritage language loss, and they learn that when schools abandon
> bilingual education and leave non-English-speaking students to sink or
> swim in English-only classes, most sink. And last but not least, they're
> taught to regard their students' language not as something to be
> constantly graded and corrected, but as an energetic, highly-competent,
> continually-evolving form of language, complete with its own standards
> and variants.
>
> But when they get their own classrooms, many of these same teachers
> reject such knowledge in favor of the simplistic language model they
> absorbed when they were in school, a model that ignores the complexities
> of the language people use every day in favor of a few prescriptive
> rules that can be memorized and tested, but that have little connection
> with what really happens when we talk or write."
>
>    First of all, prospective teachers may only have a single semester of
> exposure to linguistics, which is hardly enough to bring those concepts
> home in any kind of compelling way. And they are also faced with
> students who do not seem to be reading and writing with any kind of
> facility and need some kind of intervention, perhaps intervention in
> ways that their language study hasn't suggested.
>
> Here's Baron again, at article's end:
>
> "Perhaps the most important grammar lesson to learn, then, is to trust
> our language instincts instead of mimicking some ideal which turns out
> to be a moving target. We need to finally leave the eighteenth-century
> prescriptions behind and aim for language that is simply good enough to
> do the job of expressing whatever it is we need to say. And when we
> study language, we should study what it is, not what someone thinks it
> should be."
>
>    Once again, the prime advice is to "trust our language instincts."
> Everything is still focused on 'correctness", though Baron calls it a
> "sliding scale." There seems to be no connection between effective
> "expression" and language choice, no hint at how a study of language
> might help us become better readers or writers.
>
>    You could easily turn the criticism around. Linguists want us to use
> knowledge about language in our teaching of reading and writing, but
> have failed to show us how. Teachers revert to prescriptive rules by
> default.
>
> Craig
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> STAHLKE, HERBERT F wrote:
>> As it happens, Dennis Baron (Illinois) has just posted an article on
> his Web of Language site
>> at http://illinois.edu/db/view/25/17976?count=1&ACTION=DIALOG dealing
> with what it means to teach Standard English.
>> As we have come to expect from Baron, it's a good read.
>>
>> Herb
>>
>> Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
>> Emeritus Professor of English
>> Ball State University
>> Muncie, IN  47306
>> [log in to unmask]
>> ________________________________________
>> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Brad Johnston
> [[log in to unmask]]
>> Sent: December 3, 2009 10:02 PM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: making the past paster
>>
>> Someone wrote: Many varieties of non-standard English do make the
> distinction grammatically, and for these speakers the second example
> would have to be
>>
>> I had left last year.
>>
>> because the time of the action is remote.  This is not a standard use
> of the past perfect and is, in the varieties that use it, not a past
> perfect but a remote past.
>>
>> Brad now: Here's an item from my archives.
>>
>> It doesn't matter how long ago it was. The past is past. The Battle of
> Hastings was fought in 1066, however remote that year may seem. 'Had
> been' won't help the Anglo-Saxons a whit, even now.
>>
>> Note also that ATEG stands for the Teaching of English Grammar. There
> is no place for the "remote past" or the "paster past" in the teaching
> of English grammar. It may be interesting that the "remote past" is
> sometimes heard in waterfront bars in Houston or San Diego, but that
> doesn't help a grammar teacher accomplish the task at hand.
>>
>> .osistm.brad.03dec09.
>>
>>
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