Peter,
 I have no problem with agreeing to disagree. And I believe your students
are gaining a great deal from their time with you. But just to clarify;
like you, I have to make compromises with the students who show up in my
classes. (They are, by the way, Educational Opportunity Program students,
many reading at grade school levels, many of them fairly new to this
country. And "error" is something I don't ignore by any means.)
   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 enage 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 undersrtanding into the public school
curriculum.
   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.
   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.
   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.
   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.
   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.
   But I suspect we are allies in a joint cause with good natured
disagreements along the way.
   I enjoy helping students with grad school applications and the like
because they always say they want them to be perfect. (Often, these are
students I had four years earlier as freshmen.) It is not a trivial
concern, and I am happy to use an occassion like that to help them
understand what the situation calls for. More than anything, it calls
for a thoughtful, well developed letter. They need to use the
conventions of written discourse effectively.

Craig




Craig Hancock writes:
>
> "The current progressive position is that the few rules that differ
> from this unconscious system can be "corrected" in context, with little
> need to study (consciously understand) the unconscious system. "
>
> I'm curious about this.   I count myself as endorsing a "progressive"
> approach to grammar, but I do not agree with this position.   I'm
> wondering whom you
> are thinking of when you say this is the current progressive position.
>
> Craig continues:
>
> "I believe this is wrong for a number of reasons. The punctuation system,
> as
> one
> case in point, is based on syntactic rules (for the most part.)   When
> students don't intuit them (as most students don't) we have no way to
> talk about them. We also can't help them appreciate the complexity of
> their own language if we simply correct it when it differs from the
> standard. Current biases and prejudices are reified under those
> conditions. "
>
> You and I agree here.   Where we have slightly different positions is in
> the
> solution to this problem.   I think, along the lines of Noguchi, that
> students
> can gain enough syntactic knowledge to master the punctuation system
> without
> mastering all the intricacies of the English language system.  However, I
> agree with you that, had I time enough, I would love to see them gain a
> true
> mastery of the grammar of the language.   Hence my support for ATEG's
> scope and
> sequence project.   However, thousands of students currently in colleges
> and
> universities did not benefit from enlightened grammar instruction of this
> kind.
> They simply don't have time in the semester or two or three that they will
> be
> in writing courses at the college level to master the grammar envisioned
> in
> the scope and sequence project.
>
> Craig again:
>     "It's ironic, I guess, but I don't think you can get to "correctness"
> directly. It is not and should not be the main goal, but it also remains
> a stubborn problem if it's all you mean by "grammar." That may be what
> the anti-grammar studies can tell us; if correctness is all you are
> after, you are pretty much bound to fail. If an understanding of
> language is what you are after, then correctness will fall into its
> proper place."
>
> And here's where we truly part ways.   I do not accept the premise that we
> "are bound to fail."   I do agree that much of what we have tried in the
> past,
> as the anti-grammar studies have repeatedly pointed out, has not been
> successful.   But I do believe that we can (and are) developing approaches
> to helping
> students improve their ability to reduce error in their writing.   I don't
> see
> this goal as inimical to ATEG's goal as represented by the scope and
> sequence
> project; in fact, when that project has succeeded and generations of
> students
> arrive in higher education with an understanding of how their language
> works,
> the job of those of us trying to help college-level writers reduce error
> in
> their writing will be much easier.   Perhaps, in fact, we won't have a
> job.
> That would be fine with me.   But in the meantime, I am not willing to
> write off
> one or two generations of college students whose writing is seriously
> marred
> by sentence-level error.   I plan to continue working to find ways to help
> them remedy this situation in the 14 or 28 weeks I have with them.
>
> It seems to me that many ATEGers do not see reducing the frequency and
> severity of error in student writing as an important goal.   I wonder why
> this is.
> In the meantime, I wish you well with your much larger scope and sequence
> goals, as I continue slogging away at the more limited goal of assisting
> today's
> college-level writers who are struggling to make fewer errors at the
> sentence
> level.
>
> [Craig, I think this is the second time you and I have arrived at this
> point
> in our discussions.   Does that mean we're going in circles, or merely
> that we
> are consistent in our views?]
>
>
> Peter Adams
>
>
>
>
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