Craig,
     I admire your post about working at the conference to address the scope, sequence, and assessment problems, and I wish you well. It will be interesting to see how you address the questions. My sense is that current assessment addresses errors because it cannot address anything else. The terminology in the textbooks is not standard, so assessment tests cannot, for example, ask students to identify clauses, participles, or even parallel constructions. And, as much as they will not like it, I would suggest that you take care in considering the desires of people like Bill and Herb. They are, after all, linguists * a definite minority in the educational world as a whole. Most of the college English professors I know would seriously disagree with what they have proposed. Most of the professors (of composition) that have discussed the question with me have said that they would be pleased if students could simply identify the subjects, verbs, and clauses in their own writing.
Ed



    The conversation is becoming enormously rich and productive.
      I have worked out a fairly firm plan with Amy Benjamin to devote
half of  a full day of the ATEG conference (Friday afternoon, July 15,
prime conference time) for a working group to address these issues and
make at least draft proposals.  (A working group on scope, sequence,
standards, and assessment.) As part of that, certainly, we can encourage
people like Bill and Herb to tell us what they would like incoming
students to know.  It would be interesting to ask the same question of
writing teachers; what  should students know on entrance to college that
would make your job easier.  I would love to see a presentation or two
on language acquisition, though I think we can do a better job than most
at keeping clear the difference from having the language and being aware
of the language and how that awareness might be put into practice. I
think we shouldn't limit ourselves to formal views of the sentence, but
should encourage a functional perspective as well (rhetorical and
functional approaches), and it would be interesting to think about how
that might be integrated into a K-12 curriculum.  Ultimately, I think we
need to address head-on the failure of the current NCTE policy and the
dire need for quick and radical replacement.  We should make sure we
find approaches compatible with writing as process pedagogy and with
egalitarian (democratizing) social practices.  We should take a position
on standardized, error focused testing, which demeans both writing and
grammar. If anyone knows of ideal articulations of any of this or model
programs currently in place, we should hear about that as well.  If
someone was interested, they could trace down what's happening in
England or Australia or New Zealand, where reform seems to be much
further along.
    In short, there's a whole lot of work to do, and everyone is welcome
to come and/or make proposals.

Craig

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/