Message from Johanna.
-----Original Message-----
From: Johanna Rubba [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Sat 5/13/2006 4:23 PM
To: Stahlke, Herbert F.W.
Cc: Johanna Rubba
Subject: Re: to HERBQuestion re: introducing grammar
Herb,
I have a question about your genitive/possessive distinction. Is there
really a distinction, or is possessive just a subcase of genitive? Is
there any grammatical behavior that distinguishes the two?
In particular, I notice that "my doctor's prescription" and "John's
appointment to the Supreme Court" can both be paraphrased with
possessive determiners:
-My doctor wrote me a prescription, but the pharmacy had to call him
because his prescription wasn't readable. -or-
-His prescription wasn't the appropriate treatment for what is wrong
with me.
-His appointment to the Supreme Court was very controversial.
Nominalizations (turning verbs into elements that can occupy noun
slots) get progressively "nounier", and the nounier they get, the more
noun affixes they can take. But they can keep their verbal arguments
such as subject and direct object; but these also get less clause-like
marking as they get nounier:
-George appointed John to the Supreme Court.
-For George to appoint John to the Supreme Court was a provocative move.
-George appointing John to the Supreme Court was a provocative move.
-George's appointing of John to the Supreme Court was a provocative
move.
-George's appointment of John to the Supreme Court was a provocative
move.
The nounier the verb gets, the more it has to use noun-complement
markers (like prepositional phrases with 'of') for other markers.
I think 'prescription' as a noun is fairly independent of the verb 'to
prescribe'. For example, the "his prescription wasn't readable" can't
be paraphrased with "prescribing" as can "appointment" in the John
sentences.
Another thing: how would the blending of possessive and genitive lead
to apostrophe errors? I don't see things like "teachers union" as a
confusion between the two, but rather a confusion between the first
noun as plural modifier vs. the first noun as possessor. This practice
has become so common I doubt it is reversible. My intuition (completely
unresearched) is that this only happens with plural possessors or
possessors that can be construed as plurals, e.g. 'workers
compensation'. I think of 'worker' in this term as singular, but some
may read it as plural. Did you have a different source of the
apostrophe error in mind?
On another note -- I don't know if this message posted to the list or
not. I am still having posting problems. Could you post it for me? --
Thanks.
From: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Question re: introducing grammar
Date: May 12, 2006 5:31:14 PM PDT
To: [log in to unmask]
Cc: [log in to unmask]
This is a very long message. I hope you all will read it anyway.
There's no question that children can handle grammar. Everything
depends on what is taught and how it is taught.
It's fine to start grammar instruction later rather than sooner. I
sometimes think, in fact, that it might be better to leave grammar
until 4th grade; I'm not sure how ready primary-school children are for
metalinguistic work. However, I have seen some evidence that they are.
In any case, what's taught should be adjusted to grade level, of
course. Starting in 4th-5th grades should work just fine. That gives
children 7-8 years to study it, which is plenty, if the curriculum and
the method are sound.
A return to a teacher-centered classroom isn't the answer to what's
wrong with education today. Comparisons like Japan and Korea aren't
realistic; the cultures are too different. Also, the Japanese and
Korean systems aren't the best: they may deliver terrific skills in
those who survive sane, but stories aren't told about those who don't
come through well. Many children in Japan go to after-school tutoring
and Saturday-morning school to prepare for exams. The suicide rate
among children in Japan is higher than average, which many attribute to
stress over school achievement. The Germans even have a word,
"Schulstress", to name the excessive anxiety that high-stakes,
regimented education causes in children. Comparisons between these
countries and the USA don't look at the downside of those countries'
systems.
Unfortunately, in education as in most things, the pendulum swings. The
swing away from teacher-centered, drill-and-kill instruction has gone
too far. But the answer is not to go back to the classrooms of 1955.
Regimentation is appropriate for some parts of the curriculum, but
learning should be creative and interesting -- and fun. That doesn't
mean "recess in the classroom". Creative classrooms may look chaotic,
but in good schools that means that a lot of different good things are
happening all at once. Montessori schools are not regimented, yet look
at how much students there learn. I visited a family once with a
3-yr-old in a Montessori school. She choked mildly on a bit of her
dinner, and afterwards said, "The food went down my trachea instead of
my esophagus!"
A lot of people idealize "the old days", believing that everyone came
out of school then with a solid handle on grammar. I doubt that that
has ever been true. Maybe those who entered the white-collar workforce
did, but that is probably because they had a background similar to the
culture of the school and managed to learn something in spite of the
seriously insufficient grammar curriculum and lousy methods that were
used then (and have only gotten more watered-down now). What about the
majority, that is, working-class people? Schools were segregated and
girls were expected to achieve less than boys. How many lower-middle
and working-class kids went past 8th grade? How many finished high
school? How many finished high school with A's in English? Even today,
only about 30% of high school graduates finish college.
Grammar instruction will work when:
1 - the "correctionist" approach (so named by Wheeler & Swords) is
abandoned. This approach reduces English grammar to a small number of
topics. Most of the curriculum is focused on the "the typical
problems", namely, changes underway in the standard dialect,
differences between standard and nonstandard dialects, differences
between formal and informal language. The basics of sentence structure
are taught, but not for their own sake: subject and verb are taught so
that verb agreement is done acc. to standard English; negation is
covered to retrain children whose native dialect uses double negatives;
"whom" is taught in an attempt to resuscitate a form that is dead even
in standard English, etc. Teaching grammar is essential for people to
understand punctuation, but this is only necessary for the written
language, and it has little to do with grammatical differences between
one form of English and another. The natural variation in English has
to be respected and taught about in accordance with linguistic facts,
not exclusionary social traditions. Children shouldn't be told that
their natural forms of language used at home and in informal situations
is full of mistakes. They should be told that school and the future
workplace requires them to add another form of English to their
language abilities.
2 - instruction takes advantage of children's intuitive (subconscious)
knowledge of English. This will give them confidence in their ability
to learn grammar; combined with a non-correctionist approach, it will
make grammar much less distasteful to many students.
3 - the grammar curriculum actually advances from grade to grade. The
current curriculum does add more-complex material, but there is a
tremendous amount of repetition of the exact same material, sticking
with the impoverished description that is the basis of the whole
curriculum. Students lose interest and their knowledge of the
tremendous expressive range of language remains restricted.
4 - grammar is intimately related to all other uses of language --
composition, literature, public speaking, media literacy. The role of
grammar in structuring meaning is seriously neglected, yet it is the
real key to understanding why knowing grammar is an advantage.
5 - work with grammar is creative and fun (such as Mad Libs, writing
nonsense poetry, using magnetic poetry kits to build phrases and
sentences, "translating" from one genre or register or dialect to
another, watching how language is used in entertainment media to convey
social information, etc., etc.). It's not a crime for learning to be
fun. I constantly wonder why primary-school children are so
enthusiastic in school, but by high school, it's all a great big drag.
My college students have very little intellectual curiosity. They want
to get their A's, get their degree, and go make a lot of money
somewhere. Or they believe that they don't need a deep and broad
knowledge base to be teachers.
Traditional grammar instruction deserved to be abandoned, but nothing
replaced it. The current revival is just reviving the old curriculum
and dumbing it down even more. Attempts to contextualize the grammar
topics look pretty much like the old stuff; the random drill sentences
are just replaced with material from the current reading selection, or
children are instructed to write paragaphs using adjectives (a highly
unnatural approach to writing). But it's still all simplistic
pronouncements of rules ("verbs must agree with their subjects" -- duh!
This is true for any dialect or language that has verb agreement)
followed by dull worksheets. Many of these just regurgitate lessons
about stuff middle-class kids already know -- in what way is it a task
or a learning experience for a 3rd-grade child to choose correct forms
of "be" to write in blanks in ten sentences? Children that age don't
have to work to do this; they just write in the word that sounds right.
The exercise exists to correct nonstandard usage in some of the
children. There is worksheet after worksheet. Daily error hunts hammer
home the correctionist message and assure that kids will be afraid to
write for fear of making a grammar mistake.
California is currently changing its application of NCLB such that all
children, even special-education children, are going to be judged by
the same standards as kids going to school in Silicon Valley or Bel
Air. This is absurd! Children with severe emotional problems and
serious learning disabilities may never be able to attain the minimal
required levels of skill. Schools that don't make the grade will be
punished, not helped. NCLB simply ignores the huge disadvantages that
children from underclass neighbors and children who don't speak English
face in our current school system. Politicians and state ed.
bureaucracies are ignoring the science on teaching non-English-speaking
children and setting by law curricula that are based on popular myths.
Same with grammar instruction -- 200 years of linguistic science is
ignored.
Much of what is wrong in schools today has little to do with actual
curriculum, anyway:
1 - Standards for teacher education are low. Teaching is traditionally
a female profession, and female professions have mostly been
undervalued. We also know a great deal more about how active a process
learning is, and about the complex psychology of learning. A century of
scientific, technological, and artistic development, along with a new
appreciation for cultural diversity, means there is a lot more to
teach. A good teacher has to be knowledgeable in three areas: subject
matter content, child development/psychology of learning, and pedagogy.
Teachers should be required to have a Master's degree, as is the case
in Germany, for example.
2 - Funding varies wildly and is discriminatory. Inner city schools are
in horrible shape, while affluent schools have all the latest
technology. The best teachers should be in the most difficult schools,
but they are concentrated in affluent schools. The poor schools get
poorly-trained or very inexperienced teachers, and the turnover is high
(surprise, surprise).
3 - The culture is anti-intellectual, focused on short-term gain,
entertainment, and consumerism. Schoolchildren read less. They spend
many, many hours in front of the TV and playing video games. Now they
also spend hours every day with the cell phone glued to their ear; I'm
sure they're not discussing philosophy or literature with their
friends. The current economy demands so much of working parents that
parents don't have time to have dinner with their kids, help them with
homework, and play educational games with them. The parents themselves
do not model reading as a pleasurable and practical activity. Parents
are so focused on short-term gain and prestige that they complain if
schools assign "too much" homework or give out "too many" F's.
4 - The government is pushing the corporate model for schools and
universities and bending the curriculum towards producing compliant
worker bees, not well-educated, thinking citizens. Politics (at least
in CA) is constantly interfering with the schools, changing course
suddenly and imposing practices on schools. Teachers have less and less
leeway to exercise their own creative ideas and imaginative teaching
methods. Education policy is being set by public referenda. Can you
imagine if the public voted on the best ways to do heart surgery or
build an airplane?
People are working on a new way to teach grammar, integrated into
language arts instruction. This will take time, but it can happen. It
already is in some schools.
Johanna Rubba, Assoc. Prof., Linguistics
Linguistics Minor Advisor
English Department
Cal Poly State University
San Luis Obispo, CA 93047
Tel. 805.756.2184
Dept. Tel. 805.756.6374
Home page:
http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
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/
|
