I agree on the importance of general, broad education, but we're in a culture that wants to assess, by quantitative means, everything schools do, and it's difficult to make the case to assessment-bound sorts that knowledge is in itself good, that it doesn't have to have immediate, quantifiable benefits.
We had a long argument about that on our campus at Ball State over a state-driven, Teachers College supported unit assessment plan. How does one quantify the learning gained from and the benefits derived from reading Jane Eyre or Lord of the Flies? Are students better off or not for having read and struggled with Catcher in the Rye or The Wasteland?
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Spruiell, William C
Sent: 2009-09-01 14:29
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: knowledge vs. skill
If students' implicit knowledge of dependent clauses were readily accessible, they wouldn't have nearly as many problems with the punctuation rules that are keyed to dependent clauses. But they do have problems with punctuation, and I've found that I can't address some of those unless I define dependent clauses in some way.
There's an additional issue involved here, of course. How much of what we view as standard curriculum in a K-12 environment has practical application to *every* student's daily life? Should we stop teaching chemistry in K-12 because it doesn't help you cook? Viewing grammar only in the context of composition is, in many ways, analogous to viewing chemistry only in the context of cooking. Our school system -- all our school systems -- have as a founding assumption that knowing how the world works is a good thing, and language is part of that world.
Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of STAHLKE, HERBERT F
Sent: Tue 9/1/2009 1:52 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: knowledge vs. skill
I agree that students, and all speakers, know their languages and therefore their grammar. But much of that is not knowledge they can make explicit, and unfortunately a statement like students don't "need to be taught what a dependent clause" is confuses these two types of knowledge. Our question is how much of the knowledge that native speakers have of their language needs to be made explicit so they can use it to explore options for constructing meaning and for revising their sentences.
In today's New York Times Online, Stanley Fish has the second of two articles dealing with this question of what students need to know. He starts, in the first article, with a broader curricular question, but in the second he focuses directly on what student writers need to know. You can find the second article, with a link to the first, at http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/what-should-colleges-teach-part-2/. The comments on the two articles carry on an interesting debate about the teaching of writing much like debates we've had here.
Herb
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Geoffrey Layton
Sent: 2009-09-01 13:06
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: knowledge vs. skill
A subject dear to my heart. An example - students don't have to be taught what a preposition is (or, for that matter, its object); they don't even need to be taught what a dependent clause it - THEY ALREADY KNOW! There are few students who would create a sentence that read: "I put the pencil the table" or "I put the pencil on." Very early on, students learn how to stick a "because" between "I don't have my homework" and "the dog ate it (or now, the computer crashed)." The key to learning grammar is usage based on the creation of meaning, not the naming of things. So instead of the fairly useless excercise of meditating on the definition of a phrase or a clause (it always amazes me how much time this list can spend on issues that we expect our students to be able to resolve effortlessly), students can struggle with how to use clauses, phrases, appositives and even modals (whatever they are!), to create meaning intentionally.
Geoff Layton
Scott wrote:
Obviously, I can write correct English without knowing what a modal is. We should aim for competence - not mere knowledge.
N. Scott Catledge, PhD/STD
Professor Emeritus
history & languages
Craig Hancock wrote:
Should a student know what a "phrase" is, for example? Or is it enough for them to use phrases? Modals? And so on?
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