Herb,
    I agree. But the question is "What do teachers (and students) need to know first?" My point is simply that the lists that you and Johanna sent (of what you would want students to know) was heavily weighted with things such as morphology, phonology, etc. If the group intends to propose a set of standards to NCTE * for adoption as English grammar standards, I'm suggesting that such a list will not be supported even by the teachers of English comp at the college level. (And, if we cannot get their support, it is unlikely that we can get national support.)

   Johanna suggests that it will be easy to teach students to identify subjects, verbs, and clauses in their own writing. I find her suggestion fascinating, but from what I can tell, few people on this list have ever really tried to accomplish that goal. It is not nearly as easy as Johanna thinks, even if one uses a coherent set of definitions. Again I would suggest that the group select a few sample essays * they could be posted on the ATEG web site * and first try to analyze them. These analyses could be discussed on this list. Let's see if people agree on what is, and what is not, a "subordinate" (Or is it a "dependent"?) clause. Let's see what happens when there are six subordinate clauses within one main clause. I think you will find that it is not all that easy to help students untangle such sentences.

Ed

P.S. I'm happy that Jeff is on your side and not mine.



>>> [log in to unmask] 04/18/05 2:31 PM >>>
Ed,

I'll go ahead and be shamelessly arrogant.  Yes, linguists are a
definite minority in the world of high school and college English and
writing, but we are a minority in the same sense that lawyers, skilled
mechanics, and structural engineers are minorities.  We know what things
to name, how to name them coherently, and how the things we name
interact with each other.  

The current debate easily slides over to the position that it isn't
worth bothering to know these names and interactions.  That tendency is
a by-product of having a generation of writing and language arts
teachers who haven't been trained in that part of the disciplines of
language.  In short, while it's appropriate to tell high school teachers
what we college grammar teachers want our students to know on entry,
it's asking more than most of those teachers can deliver because they
too do not know those things and therefore much of what we're asking
doesn't even make sense to them.

But what makes even less sense is any lowering of the standards of what
we are asking for, because that lowering is a concession to ignorance,
when what we have to be doing is training a generation of teachers who
do know the content of language so that they can understand and provide
what students need to know to manipulate their own language with skill.


We are awash in a sea of ignorance that is of our own making.  The
importance of the initiative that Craig started a couple of years ago,
the New Public Grammar, is that it is a reasonable and serious program
(well, not yet, but it's getting there) to address this ignorance.

Herb

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