> Bill, Herb, David,
   I think David's program goes nicely beyond the status quo, and he does
so by evoking NCTE's own statement of goals, so there is much hope for
wide acceptance.
   NCTE has officially stated that students "have a right to their own
language" and most people would agree that they have a right to be
given access to Standard English. David's program sounds like it would
address both goals. I would go even further than that in saying that it
sets up the goals as complementary--"contrastive analysis" being one
way in which students can gain a solid understanding of the standard
while exploring the rule-based nature of non-mainstream dialects. It is
not an either/or choice, as it is sometimes understood to be.
   Here's one way I see the solution as going beyond anything like a
consensus from linguistics. What English teachers need to do is help
students read critically and write effectively. The whole issue of
dialect versus Standard, as important as it is, doesn't touch that
issue if language is thought of PRIMARILY as a set of forms that may or
may not be acceptable in various contexts.
   I don't think linguistics as generally taught has given us a way of
understanding the nature of effective texts. The fact that dialects are
rule-based, in other words, doesn't give us a way of dealing with the
fact that our students need to write narratives and arguments and so
on, that they need to read complex texts by dealing, not just with some
sort of loosely connected CONTENT, but with words and an arrangement of
words. If knowledge about language cannot be brought to bear on these
larger questions of literacy, then the two disciplines will continue to
be at odds.
   Some more recent approaches to language emphasize that grammar is
inherently discourse oriented, inherently tied to cognition. What we
know and the words we learn as we come to know it are theorized in
dynamic relation to each other. Students may have problems learning
science, for example, in part because the disciplines of science are
giving us new kinds of texts, new ways of using language. These are
extraordinarily important areas of inquiry, but people teaching English
are not trained enough in language to carry it out and most American
linguists, to this point at least, haven't taken an interest.
   We need a way to look at grammar when grammar is working well. Whether
it is "correct" or "standard" or "non-mainstream" or the like is only
indirectly related to effectiveness. If a study of language doesn't
help with reading and writing on a level beyond correctness, there's
not much to say in its favor. We will continue with the status quo,
expecting students' language to develop naturally (while our attention
is on other things) and correcting it at point of need with as little
meta-language as possible.
   Why do so many of our students fail? Can we demystify literacy for
ourselves and for them in such a way that we can turn some of those
failures around?

Craig


David,
>
> I'm going to quibble a bit (I'm set on auto-quibble, rather obviously),
> and kvetch a bit about standards documents (I'm working on program
> review for my dept., so there's some bleed-over), but I'd agree with
> much of what you said. To its great credit, NCTE has been fairly dynamic
> in what it has said about valuing students' language; the standard you
> quote is tied directly to that, and the organization has done a good job
> over the years at sustaining pressure for change. While people can still
> be quite bigoted about nonstandard dialects -- note that we're still
> *having* to make the point about nonstandard dialects being systematic
> -- I don't think the bigotry is of same degree as it was thirty years
> ago, and I think NCTE has contributed to that shift.
>
> It's in the area of encouraging knowledge about language structure more
> *generally* that I think the organization falls short (I'm using
> "language structure" instead of "grammar" partly because I'm trying to
> avoid automatically invoking the kinds of limits that most people attach
> to the latter). One can, for example, know an awful lot of separate
> facts about how and why language varies without necessarily having any
> kind of systematic basis for relating those facts together, or have a
> framework for discussing how English works. The standard stipulates
> "extensive knowledge," but without details, "extensive" is a weasel
> word.
>
> I'd love for NCTE to be more proactive about fighting language myths,
> and combating bad textbook content. You can get a surprising amount of
> mileage out PR events, and having -- for example -- the Board publicly
> present a list of "textbook wannas" to all the book reps at the yearly
> meeting would make an impression (I know the book reps aren't editors --
> that's not the point).
>
> Standards follow that kind of thing up with real content, but it's
> amazing how many methods exist for meeting the letter of a standard
> without coming remotely close to its spirit. Unless the interested
> parties involved want to achieve what the standard's aiming for,
> progress can be illusory. And including "wants to achieve standards" as
> one of the standards never solves that problem.
>
> A side note: It's important to keep in mind, I think, that despite all
> of our disagreements about theory, the great majority of linguists agree
> about an awful lot of things -- we just don't focus on the agreements
> when we talk to each other. We're academics, for heaven's sake; arguing
> is what we *do*. We may be having a lively ("lively" is a technical term
> for "heated, but not quite violent" here) discussion about whether or
> not there's a "universal grammar" encoded by DNA, but we all think
> speakers divide sentences into chunks of different types, and make
> bigger chunks out of smaller chunks, and use particular kinds of
> chunking patterns, etc. And we all think having names for those chunks
> and patterns is useful, as long as we don't confuse names with reality.
> It's entirely possible to keep schools well away from the front lines of
> the theory wars and still teach an awful lot of things about language
> structure.
>
>
> Bill Spruiell
> Dept. of English
> Central Michigan University
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of MARLOW, DAVID
> Sent: Saturday, December 05, 2009 11:04 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Dennis Baron's article
>
> Although this topic & this ListServ deserves more time than I can afford
> to invest tonight, I'm excited about this topic & can't resist joining
> the conversation <for the first time... please be gentle>
>
> First, in response to Bill's message, NCATE/NCTE should be excited
> teaching about langauge...
>
> I quote their (2003) Standard 3.1.4:
> "Teacher candidates should have extensive knowledge of how and why
> language varies and change in different regions, across different
> cultural groups and across different time periods and should incorporate
> that that knowledge into instruction and assessment that acknowledge and
> show respect for language."
>
> Incidently, the first NCTE President (Newton Scott) said something
> similar back in 1916...
>
> Yet, I know it's not as simple as quoting policy... Walt Wolfram, Jeff
> Reaser & others at North Carolina State have created some really great
> materials discussing the logic and regularity of non-standard English -
> and are making progress in not only getting them used in schools, but
> also gaining access to the committees creating state curriculm
> standards... <See
> http://www.ncsu.edu/linguistics/research_dialecteducation.php>
>
> Following their lead, I'm working on materials tailored for South
> Carolina... The key concept is to encourage students to feel comfortable
> in their home/heritage dialect & then (via contrastive analysis & other
> techniques) to bridge them into bidialectalism (the use of SAE on
> demand)... & also coordinating a series of community discussions in
> various venues around our state....
>
> I'd be delighted to hear about any other projects addressing these
> issues at any level of education.
>
> <BTW, I'll be talking about this at AACTE (American Association of
> Colleges for Teacher Education - Feb, Atlanta) & would be delighted to
> meet any ATEG members there...>
>
> Dave
>
>
>
> ________________________________________
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of O'Sullivan, Brian P
> [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Saturday, December 05, 2009 8:49 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Dennis Baron's article
>
> Bill said
>
> "They do want prescriptive rules, although I think it's important to
> keep in mind that they've *learned* to want them"
>
> This is true, but mustn't the development of the brain also play a role
> in determining when students are ready to think about choices on a
> "meta" level and not depend so much on the concreteness provided by
> prescriptive rules?
>
> And also (though this may already be implicit in Bill's point about
> hegemony), to the extent that students' felt need for rules is learned,
> it seems likely that is is learned in many contexts beyond English
> classes. This is what I thought was interesting about Baron's "grammar
> fundamentalist" example; that student seemed to be taking a
> prescriptivist orientation learned in another context (in her case, a
> religious context) and transferring it to her thinking about language.
>
> If new teachers are meeting students who have cultural and possibly
> neurological reasons to feel a real need for prescriptions, it's not
> surprising that those teachers are trying to meet that need, even if
> they they have learned that descriptivist grammar ultimately makes more
> sense. They're trying to "meet students where they are," as teachers are
> taught to do.
>
> I wonder if some teachers are resorting to "false propositions" because
> they never learned enough "true propositions" (in the form of
> well-grounded but more-or-less prescriptive rules) from English
> education and linguistics professors who were understandably eager to
> teach more mature and sophisticated approaches to language. I think
> Craig's point about explicitly teaching "standard English" as such is
> helpful here; if we can ask students to distinguish standard English
> from other registers, maybe we can give them something like the rules
> they want without falsely teaching them that these rules are universal.
>
> Brian
> ________________________________________
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Spruiell, William C
> [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Saturday, December 05, 2009 4:15 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Dennis Baron's article
>
> I teach courses to future English teachers, and yes, they do include the
> kind of material Baron focuses on. But prescriptive views of grammar are
> deeply entrenched; a good number of those blatantly false propositions
> about language (i.e. "there are exactly eight parts of speech," or the
> much, much more damaging "non-standard dialects lack rules and are
> simply wrong") have been presented to students implicitly, as "givens,"
> for so long that it's not reasonable to expect them to shift their
> thinking rapidly. They do want prescriptive rules, although I think it's
> important to keep in mind that they've *learned* to want them. I hope,
> of course, that six or nine hours of college classes will catalyze a
> fundamental shift in my students' views, but I also remember at least
> dimly what I was like at their age.
>
> I'm nervous about the term "hegemony," mainly because it tends to occur
> in texts that say something basic for as long as possible in the most
> obscure possible way, but it's appropriate here. It's hard to shift a
> viewpoint that has been established as a default; it's constantly
> reinforced in day-to-day interactions. And it's also frequently
> reinforced by K-12 textbooks -- things have gotten slightly better on
> the dialect awareness front, but not many others; there may be fewer
> "wrong propositions" in the texts, but that's largely because there are
> simply fewer statements about language structure, period.
>
> Baron's statement that teachers "reject such knowledge in favor of the
> simplistic language model they absorbed when they were in school"
> strikes me as true in one sense -- minus any implication that the
> rejection is a conscious act; it's simply a recognition that even if we
> teach this stuff, it doesn't seem to be showing up in the schools. But
> we also have to acknowledge that many teachers will see no point in
> adopting a viewpoint that appears to be held only by some college
> instructors and (possibly) whoever wrote the state standards matrix, but
> that is rejected by their communities, the course materials they have
> been asked to use, and (in many cases) whoever writes the standardized
> tests used in their district. There are enormous social pressures
> encouraging inertia in language education, and teachers are human.
> Overcoming that inertia takes sustained, aggressive effort (the kind it
> has been hard to talk NCTE into, but we can hope....).
>
>
>
> Bill Spruiell
> Dept. of English
> Central Michigan University
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of O'Sullivan, Brian P
> Sent: Friday, December 04, 2009 9:13 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Dennis Baron's article
>
> Herb,
>
> I think that what you're saying is more empathetic, and therefore more
> persuasive, than what Baron says. You say that prospective teachers are
> nominally supposed to learn about langauge but "still are not taught"
> about important aspects of language; he says that students are actually
> "given a healthy dose" of language education. You say that new teachers
> are not encouraged to develop and use their knowledge of language; he
> says that new teachers actively "reject such knowledge."
>
> What I most like about his article, on the other hand, is the
> introduction. By quoting a student's "intelligent design" theory of
> language, Baron illustrates an important reason for the persistence of
> prescriptivism: a felt need on the part of students. I think there are
> many students who--for developmental, cultural or other reasons--feel a
> strong need to be told the "right answers" to questions of grammar and
> writing. How, and at what developmental stages, can teachers lead
> students from a craving for rules to an interest in choices?
>
> Brian
> ________________________________________
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of STAHLKE, HERBERT F
> [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Friday, December 04, 2009 7:33 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Dennis Baron's article
>
> All of the topics Baron would like to see taught are specified in the
> Indiana Language Arts Standards, but teachers still are not taught them,
> and for all the reasons we're familiar with:  teacher training
> curriculum that leaves no room to teach them, English Education programs
> that accept the common wisdom that knowledge about language and how it
> works is irrelevant and perhaps harmful, arrogant irrelevance on the
> part of linguists who teach the few language-related courses teacher
> prep students take, political pressures in school corporations to
> maintain prescriptive shibboleths, the absence in the schools of role
> models for teachers who would like to do something with language, and
> I'm sure many on the list could add other factors.  The fact that our
> state standards require considerable linguistic content in the language
> arts curriculum and in the training of language arts teachers strikes
> me, somewhat cynically, as a nod to what the authors knew should be
> done, hoped would be done, but had no power to bring about.
>
> The problem isn't that we've had thirty million theories of language,
> all of them, as scientific theories must be, inadequate.  The problem is
> that there is much that we know that should be taught:  sentence and
> discourse level structures, dialect variation, register and
> appropriateness, as well as all of the skills or literacy and orality
> including the love of using language well.
>
> This group has never, in spite of serious efforts, agreed on an approach
> to teaching grammar, but we for the most part agree that it needs to be
> done.  There are plenty of ways to do it well and also a fair number of
> ways to do it badly, and insisting on teaching as fact propositions that
> we know to be false, which is what Baron inveighs against, is probably
> the most common of the ways of doing it badly.
>
> Herb
>
> Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
> Emeritus Professor of English
> Ball State University
> Muncie, IN  47306
> [log in to unmask]
> ________________________________________
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bruce Despain
> [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: December 4, 2009 3:53 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Dennis Baron's article
>
> My take is that he muddied the waters so badly that it is much easier to
> throw it all out.  I hope I didn't throw any baby out with it. I have
> entered a subscription and plan to look at some of his other essays.  My
> jury is still out.  Society has done quite well with whatever standard
> was set up whether it was a foot or a meter.  He seems to think that
> language itself is the measure, but it is the linguistic theory that
> measures language.  I don't think the issue is with there being a single
> standard.  As of 1979 linguists had proposed over 30 major theoretical
> frameworks (models) for grammar (syntax).  I think the point can be made
> that all of them eventually led to contradictions, not really much
> better than traditional grammar.  The models have become 20th century
> prescriptions based on what linguists took as important in language
> study.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
> Sent: Friday, December 04, 2009 10:20 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Dennis Baron's article
>
> Herb,
>    This is a very rich and interesting article, though it seems a bit
> disingenuous to me that he characterizes linguists as doing everything
> right and English teachers as getting it all wrong. I'm not saying he's
> wrong, just that he fails to look sympathetically at the other side or
> second guess his own certainty.
>    Here are two key paragraphs that set up that contrast.
>
> "It's not that English teachers don't know that linguistic knowledge has
> progressed over the past 250 years. Prospective teachers get a healthy
> dose of sociolinguistics, transformational grammar, and the history of
> English. They study the emergence of dialects and the social contexts
> from which language standards grow. And they learn that unlike the
> standard meter or kilogram, which can be measured with scientific
> precision, there is no single, objective standard language which
> everybody speaks. They study language contact, assimilation, and
> heritage language loss, and they learn that when schools abandon
> bilingual education and leave non-English-speaking students to sink or
> swim in English-only classes, most sink. And last but not least, they're
> taught to regard their students' language not as something to be
> constantly graded and corrected, but as an energetic, highly-competent,
> continually-evolving form of language, complete with its own standards
> and variants.
>
> But when they get their own classrooms, many of these same teachers
> reject such knowledge in favor of the simplistic language model they
> absorbed when they were in school, a model that ignores the complexities
> of the language people use every day in favor of a few prescriptive
> rules that can be memorized and tested, but that have little connection
> with what really happens when we talk or write."
>
>    First of all, prospective teachers may only have a single semester of
> exposure to linguistics, which is hardly enough to bring those concepts
> home in any kind of compelling way. And they are also faced with
> students who do not seem to be reading and writing with any kind of
> facility and need some kind of intervention, perhaps intervention in
> ways that their language study hasn't suggested.
>
> Here's Baron again, at article's end:
>
> "Perhaps the most important grammar lesson to learn, then, is to trust
> our language instincts instead of mimicking some ideal which turns out
> to be a moving target. We need to finally leave the eighteenth-century
> prescriptions behind and aim for language that is simply good enough to
> do the job of expressing whatever it is we need to say. And when we
> study language, we should study what it is, not what someone thinks it
> should be."
>
>    Once again, the prime advice is to "trust our language instincts."
> Everything is still focused on 'correctness", though Baron calls it a
> "sliding scale." There seems to be no connection between effective
> "expression" and language choice, no hint at how a study of language
> might help us become better readers or writers.
>
>    You could easily turn the criticism around. Linguists want us to use
> knowledge about language in our teaching of reading and writing, but
> have failed to show us how. Teachers revert to prescriptive rules by
> default.
>
> Craig
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> STAHLKE, HERBERT F wrote:
>> As it happens, Dennis Baron (Illinois) has just posted an article on
> his Web of Language site
>> at http://illinois.edu/db/view/25/17976?count=1&ACTION=DIALOG dealing
> with what it means to teach Standard English.
>> As we have come to expect from Baron, it's a good read.
>>
>> Herb
>>
>> Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
>> Emeritus Professor of English
>> Ball State University
>> Muncie, IN  47306
>> [log in to unmask]
>> ________________________________________
>> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Brad Johnston
> [[log in to unmask]]
>> Sent: December 3, 2009 10:02 PM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: making the past paster
>>
>> Someone wrote: Many varieties of non-standard English do make the
> distinction grammatically, and for these speakers the second example
> would have to be
>>
>> I had left last year.
>>
>> because the time of the action is remote.  This is not a standard use
> of the past perfect and is, in the varieties that use it, not a past
> perfect but a remote past.
>>
>> Brad now: Here's an item from my archives.
>>
>> It doesn't matter how long ago it was. The past is past. The Battle of
> Hastings was fought in 1066, however remote that year may seem. 'Had
> been' won't help the Anglo-Saxons a whit, even now.
>>
>> Note also that ATEG stands for the Teaching of English Grammar. There
> is no place for the "remote past" or the "paster past" in the teaching
> of English grammar. It may be interesting that the "remote past" is
> sometimes heard in waterfront bars in Houston or San Diego, but that
> doesn't help a grammar teacher accomplish the task at hand.
>>
>> .osistm.brad.03dec09.
>>
>>
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