Bob,

 

Thanks for a thoughtful response.  As I wrote I wondered how you would respond.  And I certainly have forgotten more than I care to consider.  But, let's look at your comments.



	I am confident that Herb Stahlke has forgotten more linguistics than I

	will ever know.  So, at the risk of being shown

	to be wrong, I am still going to take issue in some of his observations

	about linguistic theories and pedagogy.

	

	Stahlke, Herbert F.W. wrote:

	

	>I strongly support Bill's concerns over the application of linguistic

	>theories to teaching.  We've seen this trend in motion from the days of

	>Charles Fries' structural grammar back in the 50s, and it flourished

	>like poison ivy with the Paul Roberts' reduction of early

	>transformational grammar in the 60s.

	>

	I have read some of the papers on the debate that took place in College

	English and College Composition and Communication

	in the 1950s and 1960s on the role of linguistics and pedagogy.

	

	First, linguistic theories were absolutely crucial in challenging the

	privileged position of Standard English.  I recommend a reading of

	Geneva Smitherman's 1999 paper in College Composition and Communication

	for a review of this debate.  The use of linguistic

	theory lead directly to the NCTE's resolution on a Students' Right to

	their Own Language.

	

	To give a very simple example, without a theory of language I think it

	is impossible to show that no dialect is superior to another.



(Herb writes)



I suspect that we are talking about two different kinds of theory.  What I addressed throughout my discussion was formal theoretical linguistics of the sort done, in the 60s, by Chomsky, Bach, Lees, Postal, Perlmutter, McCawley, Lakoff, Ross, Partee, etc.  Looking into the 70s I'd add people like Jackendoff, Lasnik, Culicover, Goldsmith and obviously I'm leaving out a number very important figures, but I'm not trying to build a catalog.  People I wouldn't include in this list include the later Lakoff work, Langacker, much of McCawley, Chafe, Fillmore, Shuy, Wolfram, Fasold, and Green, and many others, all of whom have produced high quality theoretical work that is also accessible and useful to teachers, although too often teachers haven't been trained in or directed to such work.  What distinguishes the two groups is that the former are interested in formal characterization of an idealized native speaker's knowledge, or, what amounts to much the same thing, Universal Grammar.  This is important and interesting work, but not generally to teachers.  The latter deal with topics that teachers also deal with:  Pear stories, dialect variation, metaphor, the semantics and pragmatics of sentence types, etc.  The kinds of research that Smitherman and others depended on in their invaluable syntheses and arguments on the nature of dialect were largely not of the formal theoretical type but of the variationist, more broadly dialectological, and functionalist sorts.  That kind of theory has had more immediate application to pedagogy and teacher education, but it wasn't the kind I was unashamedly pillorying.



Second, if there has been any advance in how to teach certain

grammatical structures, it has been by work of DeBeaugrande and

Noguichi.  In noting that a yes-no question provides a way of

determining whether a string of works is an independent clause, both are

using a FORMAL property of English to identify an important structure

for students to understand what a "complete" sentence is.



Now, perhaps, there is a "functional" explanation for this fact about

English, but I don't know what it is.



(Herb writes)

What helps the yes/no question methodology is that it has a pragmatic function that students recognized readily.  That's what makes it work so well as a formal manipulation.  WH-movement out of bounded vs. unbounded structures would also do the job, but it's much more difficult to get students to understand what's going on in such cases.  The pragmatics is far less clear.  The y/n test has both functional and formal characteristics that are important.





The following statement is absolutely right.



> But formal theories of language are about

>language and formal theory, not about pedagogy and praxis.

>

One of the jobs of applied linguists is to figure out how such formal

theories applicable to pedagogy.



(Herb writes)



I have to agree with Bill on this one.  I helped found a doctoral program in applied linguistics, and we ended up calling it applied linguistics because the academic politics of higher education in the state of Indiana wouldn't allow us to call it linguistics.  But it's very difficult to distinguish between applied and theoretical linguistics.  Carol Chomsky's dissertation on child language draws on some pretty good theory but looked at an empirical, behavioral problem.  Applied or theoretical?  I don't really like to make the distinction because too often it's artificial and misleading.  Margaret Steffensen's dissertation critiquing the Bereiter and Engleman work on language deficit in African-American early elementary school children draws importantly on dialectology and ethnolinguistic methodology to discredit the claims of language deficit in ways that are readily accessible.  But, like Bill, I don't see figuring out how to apply formal theory to pedagogy as a major goal of what our doctoral students occupy themselves with.



>

>I think the contemporary model theoretic concept that most influences

>the non-linguistic world is modularity, the idea that different areas of

>syntax, as well as phonology and different areas of semantics, represent

>separate mental modules that communicate with each other rather like

>functions in a computer program.  Some persuasive popular writing has

>been done on this subject, Pinker's books especially.  But this is

>simply another case of seeking psychological reality for a theoretical

>construct, and that path doesn't help pedagogy.

>

Let me suggest there is value to these theoretical constructs.  If all

dialects of English share a lot of fundamental principles in common and

the differences we

notice are based on how some of these fundamental principles are

realized,  it is pedagogically useful for teachers to know how they can

describe those differences

to instruct their students.



(Herb writes)



Let's say there was dialect of English with PRO-drop.  It would be important to explain to teachers that the grammar of this dialect produced good sentences that lacked subject pronouns and perhaps had some related properties.  It would not be important to explain to them the nature of PRO-drop as a formal construct.  But this reflects a perhaps fundamental difference of approach.  I just finished revisions of a paper to appear in Word later this year on the phonetics and phonology of English obstruents.  It's a paper that draws heavily on the fundamental linguistic notions of contrast, variation, and distribution, the basic facts that we train linguists to observe, analyze, and describe.  I could have expressed my findings with Optimality Theory combined with some Autosegmental Phonology, but that would have turned the paper into an application of those theoretical frameworks, and perhaps a testing and extension of them, the latter being rather more interesting than the former.  But that wasn't my goal.  There is a large body of basic fact that had to be drawn together to make it clear how the English obstruent system and things like voicing interact.  If someone wants to cast my arguments in some framework for theoretical phonology, I'd be interested in seeing the results, but I needed to be able to explain, for example, to MATESOL students, how the obstruent system and the accentual system are related to each other, and how voicing, vowel length, schwa devoicing, etc. are related to obstruent behavior.  The theoretical overhead for casting this, say, in OT, yields no significant benefit to MATESOL students and instead simply takes time away from covering material they really do need.  (I'm starting to sound scarily someone arguing for teaching grammar only in context, shudder.)



Herb Stahlke, Ball State University