Not only is grammar and language study handled more formally and in greater depth in countries like Sweden, France, Spain, Germany, Lithuania, Finland, and Russia, but even in our fellow-English-speaking country Great Britain grammar has been brought back into the curriculum in a formal and rigorous way, and the grammar that is being taught is influenced strongly by linguistics. Dick Hudson has had some interesting comments on this, since he was also involved in it. You might check his web site at
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of kmward
Sent: Friday, April 01, 2005 2:49 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Washington
I agree wholeheartedly with Craig on this. I really WANT kids who have
studied language in some sort of systematic way.
I was wondering--most people know more about the situation in other
countries than I do. Is there any non-anglophone country in the world
that does not teach elementary and secondary students about their
language in a thorough, incremental, and non-error-focused way?
KMW
On Apr 1, 2005, at 10:34 AM, Craig Hancock wrote:
> I'm going to be a little bit of a gadfly on this one, not quite
> ready to fall into the lets blame everyone but ourselves mentality.
> (Not that the blame isn't telling.)
> First of all, I am surprised at how comprehensive the Washington
> list is. The students who arrive at my college don't routinely use
> commas for nonrestrictive modifiers or use the passive in effective
> ways. The unanswered question is how much students need to KNOW in
> order to do that, or in order to talk about it meaningfully when they
> don't, and that's left off the list entirely. Presumably, some people
> will grill and drill and others will hope that it rubs off in a whole
> language environment; we have no consensus on how to get from point a
> to point b in our current climate, so how can we expect the schools to
> be clear about that?
> Most people, including, I think, the majority on ATEG, think of
> grammar as learning the parts of speech and avoiding error. We
> simply differ on how to go about that. Progressive educators think it
> will happen naturally if students are allowed to read and write, and
> thus seem to be avoiding accountability in this test happy time.
> Conservative educators worry that students will be allowed to get
> away with things if we aren't careful to penalize their mistakes. At
> the moment, they seem to hold court, though teachers happily ignore
> this in the kingdom of their own classes, especially in the blue
> states. How can we expect to make a difference if the only
> disagreement is in how to get there or in what order?
> We don't have a consensus, even on our own list, in favor of
> wide scale exploration of language in the public schools. We think
> behavior is important, not knowledge. We still seem to hold to the
> untested assumption that kids learn their native language naturally,
> so there's no benefit in paying attention to it except to correct
> mistakes. We seem divided primarily between grill and drill exercises
> and minimalist grammar at the point of need, with no clear, consistent
> voice calling for a rich exploration of language. If we did, we could
> devise tests on what students actually know, not on how they behave,
> and the whole enterprise could be raised to a much more sophisticated
> level. Give me a kid who knows what a clause is or what is meant by
> "nonrestrictive modification", and I can talk to her about choices in
> her writing. At the moment, I'm not getting that.
> What does a student need to know to negotiate nonrestrictive
> modification? Does that mean a noun is no longer a thing, but a
> category being reduced? Shouldn't any kid coming out of a public
> school know about that?
> If we took a vote on the statement that "students don't need to
> know about grammar; they just need to use it correctly," wouldn't most
> of us say "true"?
> We have met the enemy, and the enemy includes us.
>
> Craig
>
>
> Stahlke, Herbert F.W. wrote:
>
>
> To add to Ed's concern, let me note that even when reasonable
> linguistic content has been written into language arts standards, as
> it has in Indiana, it can be socially constructed out of existence,
> which has also pretty much happened. Standards mean nothing without
> the will and understanding on the part of educators to implement them
> even in the fact of public, school board, and PTA incomprehension.
>
>
>
> Herb
>
>
>
>
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Edgar Schuster
> Sent: Friday, April 01, 2005 8:31 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Washington
>
>
>
> Johanna's message about how standards get adopted is on the money, but
> I wanted to add that sometimes the will of the English teachers on the
> committes is subverted by political forces over which the teachers
> have no control. That is how the Pennsylvania standards came to
> include the crowning absurdity that "students [by eleventh grade]
> spell all words correctly"; that is how diagramming became mandatory
> in Virginia; and, I'm told, that is how some of the specific
> "masteries" came into the California standards.
> When I was on the PA committee, forty-plus English teachers on the
> Writing Assessment Advisory Committee sent a petition to the five top
> education officials in the state, including the Sec of Ed himself. It
> was TOTALLY ignored.
>
> Ed Schuster
>
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