>Peter,
   You are describing a very thoughtful writing class. Like all of us, I'm
sure it's a work in progress. You are a dedicated and caring teacher,
and that comes through. By all means, follow your current line of
thinking and see where it leads you. Keep us posted.
   The authors of the Longman grammar are Douglas Biber, Susan Conrad, and
Geoffrey Leach. 2002. The publisher, of course, is Longman.
   Direct objects do become relevant when we talk about making something
passive. Transitivity is also very important in ESL because a person
new to the language might say "she looked the bird" or "She needed
badly".  You'd be surprised at how useful a term like "mental process"
can be, but I'll leave it at that. I would make a great case for
subordinating conjunction as a very easy term to teach. (More than half
of our graduates are going on to professional careers. They will have
technical terminology in every course they take. If they do heart
surgery, I hope they know "aorta").  The problem is they have been
taught writing by many teachers who avoided the term, and they still
don't seem to know the concept. Make it easy on the next teacher. If
they don't have a working knowledge of the term, do they really know
it? The language theory I am reading now says no.
   I agree that we need a much better handbook. Let me know if you want
any advice on what you are doing along the way. It's on my to do list
as well, but I keep getting sidetracked into other projects. I think we
are better off with more than one alternative handbook. I think we may
tip the scales with a few thoughtful versions.
   The Scope and Sequence project will lay out knowledge about language in
relation to different goals. One is Standard English. One is the
conventions that come with putting language into a written form
(punctuation being the most important.) The third would be rhetorical
choice. And the fourth would be meeting the special demands of the
technical disciplines. Our postion, I guess, is that these are not just
BEHAVIORS. We are not just trying to correct how they act, but trying
to deepen their understanding to the point where they can do what we
do, which is to make careful and productive and thoughtful choices in a
wide range of contexts. So correctness is very much within our sights.
We simply want to know what knowledge about language will bring it
about. It certainly doesn't have to be either/or.
   I believe Rei Noguchi would embrace our knowledge based project, though
that's on the basis of a very interesting talk I had with him a few
years back. It was his feeling at the time that English teachers would
never embrace a full knowledge based approach to grammar. He developed
a few ways in which we can tap into the unconscious knowledge already
there. But I don't think that is a final solution to anything, and it
may even make the problem worse because it suggests that minimalist
approaches are enough for the great majority of our students. It more
or less enables our current teachers to avoid accountabilty on this
issue. It doesn't get to a deeper solution of our current problems,
among them a crisis of ignorance (lack of knowledge) among our English
teachers.
   I share the goals of progressive educators, but I think I would accept
your judgement that they are not accomplishing what a progressive
educator should accomplish, opening the doors of access (and power) to
many who have not succeeded in the past. That's my job, and I am doing
it well (though not well enough yet) and doing it well has involved a
lot more attention to language than I was trained for. I have had to go
against the grain of my profession to help the students I am helping.
And now I am trying to use that hard earned wisdom to change the
thinking in my field.
   Our most needy students, by the way, will take a non-credit course in
the fall centered on a language awareness curriculum. They will explore
their own language worlds,and will read and write about bilingualism,
English only, Black English, and so on. The teacher currently teaching
the course will retire after this fall, so I will get to teach it again
next year, and I am looking forward to that. We do quite a bit of
grammar along with this language exploration. Students coming out of
that course know an awful lot more than the average college student.

Craig

Craig

> In a message dated 6/25/07 5:35:37 PM, [log in to unmask] writes:
>
> "The point could be better stated. If ALL you want to do is avoid error
> and you want to do that largely by correcting the error when it occurs,
> students will not learn to write and will not to any great extent stop
> making errors. If you try, on the other hand, to engage them in
> meaningful writing (and reading) and deepen their understanding of
> language, then you have a chance to do wonderful things, diminishing
> error among them. The point of scope and sequence is that it would be
> so much easier to weave a base of understanding into the public school
> curriculum."
>
> I couldn't agree more.   It would be much more efficient and effective to
> "weave that base" gradually over 12 years.   In the meantime, however, I
> (and
> apparently you too) have to do something with the students we have (ugh,
> I'm
> sounding like Rumsfeld).   For me, that does mean teaching a scaled down
> version
> of the grammar focusing primarily on the concepts necessary to talk about
> the
> most common errors.   That certainly includes subjects and verbs,
> sentences and
> independent clauses, prepositional phrases and the grammatical concept of
> possession.   But, for example, I don't distinguish between direct and
> indirect
> objects, since no errors occur because of confusing these two.   This may
> horrify some people, but I don't see any reason to teach the names of all
> the
> "things" that can come before an independent clause and, therefore, have
> to be
> followed by a comma; I simply teach students to make sure that "thing" is
> not an
> independent clause.   I could go on, but I think that captures the spirit.
>
> Craig: "A typical handbook doesn't describe the language well enough to be
> of
> use. But if students are to use one and use one well, then we owe it to
> them to give them the metalanguage they need. Students who finish my
> grammar course can read (and critique)a handbook. I try to do the same
> for my writing classes."
>
> I really agree with this, and also with your point further down that most
> handbooks are based on other handbooks.   However, I am still naive enough
> to
> think a handbook can be written that will define terms and explain
> concepts in a
> way that will be useful.   I'm working on one now.
>
> Craig: "When I talk about the current progressive position, I mean the
> position
> espoused by Constance Weaver, Erica Lindemann (A Rhetoric for Writing
> Teachers), and the like--Weaver, I think, tries to reduce the
> terminology down to a few terms. Erica Lindemann says quite often that
> students don't need to have an active understanding of the terminology.
> The whole focus is on reduction of error without the burden of a deeper
> understanding. Grammar is thought of as a behavior. They believe the
> problem of grammar can be finessed with minimalist attention. They are
> wrong."
>
> I agree with your diagnosis of this approach, but I would not call them
> progressive.   I would refer to Noguchi as progressive and the book I'm
> working on,
> I certainly hope qualifies.
>
> Craig: "You may want to take a look at the Longman Grammar of Spoken and
> Written English. I can't afford the big version, but I have the student
> version, and it draws from a corpus of speaking and writing (and often
> makes observations about preferences in each.) In writing, it draws
> from three different registers: fiction, newswriting, and academic
> writing. It adds "conversation" as a fourth register. These sorts of
> distinctions are fairly common, by the way, in ESL grammar books
> because someone learning a language needs to function within mainstream
> life of the culture, not just avoid errors of the handbooks. Typically,
> they will say that a pattern is more common in speech than in writing.
> They use a term like "preferences" over "correctness." These are
> practices sanctioned by the group, not by rule makers."
>
> Is this the Greenbaum and Quirk Student's Grammar of the English Language?
> I do have that but couldn't find anywhere that they discuss the corpus it
> is
> based on.
>
> Craig: "I don't think the handbooks necessarily describe the usage of a
> privileged group. It might be more accurate to say that they follow the
> rules of other handbooks, some of them "logical" prescriptions that
> have never taken hold.   I like Ed Schuster's favorite writer rule (by
> way of Joseph Williams, I think.) Before you follow a rule, check to
> make sure your favorite writer follows it."
>
> very true
>
> Craig: "Our ultimate goal should be effective writing, and, to the
> mainstream
> person, that has little or nothing to do with grammar. So our goal has
> to be to widen their understanding out.
>     It is not really a choice as to whether or not to address error, but
> whether or not to teach a deeper understanding and whether or not to
> help your students achieve a far higher goal than mere correctness.
> Correctness comes, but you have to aim much higher than that.
>     You can trivialize language, but no good will come of it."
>
> Here's where I'm not sure how close we are to agreement.   When I teach
> about
> grammar it is 90% focused on reduction of error (unabashedly).   The other
> 10% or so, toward the end of the semester, is using sentence combining to
> reinforce what they've learned about punctuation, but mainly to awaken
> them to the
> many options for structuring a sentence and the different effects of
> different
> options.
>
> But all of that attention to grammar is, as you say, only part of what we
> do
> in writing courses--varying from around 50% of the time in my lower-level
> basic writing course to maybe 25% of the time in my fy comp courses.   The
> rest of
> the time is devoted to all those writing concepts of focus, organizations,
> development, coherence and the like.   And, most important, I urge them to
> see
> that effective writing is unlikely to occur unless the writer has
> something
> thoughtful to say.   Especially in fy comp, I find myself spending a lot
> of time
> on this, trying to get them to see that writing an effective argument
> means
> thinking first, not just lining up three worn-out points that everyone
> already
> has heard a thousand times.
>
> So I'm wondering, when you write that the issue is "whether or not to
> teach a
> deeper understanding and whether or not to help your students achieve a
> far
> higher goal than mere correctness," I'm wondering what you mean by "deeper
> understanding" and "far higher goal."   If you mean getting students to
> understand
> concepts like the distinctions among material processes, behavioral
> processes, and mental processes or to understand why certain clauses are
> appositional
> and others are relative, then we're not as close as it appears.   But if
> you
> mean by "deeper" and "higher" goals teaching how to write a convincing
> argument
> that has something fresh and thoughtful to say, then we are, indeed, in
> agreement.
>
> And either way, I do agree, even if I would teach less grammatical
> terminology than you, that "we are allies in a joint cause."
>
> Peter Adams
>
>
>
> **************************************
>  See what's free at http://www.aol.com.
>
> 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/
>

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/