I hate to generalize; however, a creative writing teacher, author or not,
would be the last person that I would ask about correct usage--just behind
the journalism major. I suffered a full term with a PhD in creative writing
from a prestigious school who had a lot of problems with my writing. I had
to carefully explain that 'bases' is not an incorrect spelling of 'basises
but is the plural of 'basis.' That was only one of his misgoofs--but it
typlified his English. Interestingly enough, he was a good teacher on
English Novels: he just was incompetent with any vocabulary or grammatical
construction not heard on the streets. The teacher was an intelligent
middle class Caucasian from a school in VA: no justification evident for his
weaknesses. In days of yore one did not evaluate professors except by
avoiding them if at all possible or by standing in line early to get their
classes. But we did evaluate--informal as it may have been. We boycotted
one atrocious professor and wondered whom he had slept with or paid off to
get his degrees. The departmental response was to use 'staff' as the name
of all Freshman English instructors and penalized anyone who dropped his
class after seeing who he was. The only advanced class that he taught was a
required class offered only once a year.
In case our instruction pattern sounded like a lockstep, students were
allowed to make any errors that they wished on paper as long as they put an
asterisk after the error and explained themselves in a footnote at the
bottom of the page. In a paper on why egoists never cheat, I explained
that, regardless of past history of achievement, egoists are always certain
that they know more than any neighboring test-takers. I emoted, "More
credible a blasphemous priest than a dishonest egoist." and added my
asterisk.
N. Scott Catledge, PhD/STD
Professor Emeritus
history & languages
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of ATEG automatic digest system
Sent: Sunday, December 06, 2009 12:00 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: ATEG Digest - 4 Dec 2009 to 5 Dec 2009 (#2009-247)
There are 9 messages totalling 2513 lines in this issue.
Topics of the day:
1. bending the rules
2. Dennis Baron's article (6)
3. Looking Back (2)
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----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 5 Dec 2009 06:26:22 -0800
From: Brad Johnston <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: bending the rules
--0-1005038583-1260023182=:81046
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
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Herb suggests that we click on ...
=A0
http://illinois.edu/db/view/25/17976?count=3D1&ACTION=3DDIALOG.
=A0
... as well we should. At the end of the article, there are three comments,=
of which this is the third:
=A0
3.=A0Posted by [log in to unmask] =A0 Thu, 03 Dec 2009
=A0
Properly taught, teaching students Standard Formal English DOES address the=
issue of audience.=A0 It provides them with the tools to be taken seriousl=
y in the larger world.
I also like the colorful language my rural Southern Iowa students speak, sa=
lted with Spanish from newcomers to the area and various idioms from other =
parts of the country.=A0 We need to arm our students with the linguistic to=
ols to compete in the world of formal communication without depriving them =
of the artistry of their own backgrounds.
I don't think we do that by rejecting the idea of rules; we just need to em=
phasize the skill involved in knowing the rules but also knowing when they =
can be bent or broken to a writer's advantage! (underlining=A0Brad's.)
=A0
Apropos of the last morsel underlined, I suggest, nay urge, that you avail =
yourselves of a copy of "The Long Division", c.2009, a novel written by Der=
ek Nikitas, who teaches 'creative' writing at Eastern Kentucky University a=
nd thus is no stranger to right and wrong.
=A0
Read 50 or 100 pages=A0and see what you think he accomplishes by bending an=
d breaking rules=A0in=A0a most unusual way.
=A0
Fascinating. Have a look.
=A0
.brad.05dec09.=0A=0A=0A
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--0-1005038583-1260023182=:81046
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Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
<table cellspacing=3D"0" cellpadding=3D"0" border=3D"0" ><tr><td valign=3D"=
top" style=3D"font: inherit;"><DIV id=3Dyiv2129961309>
<DIV id=3Dyiv1201436607>
<DIV class=3Dcomment-last>
<DIV class=3Dcomment-info>Herb suggests that we click on <STRONG>...</STRON=
G></DIV>
<DIV class=3Dcomment-info> </DIV>
<DIV class=3Dcomment-info><A href=3D"http://illinois.edu/db/view/25/17976?c=
ount=3D1&ACTION=3DDIALOG" rel=3Dnofollow target=3D_blank>http://illinoi=
s.edu/db/view/25/17976?count=3D1&ACTION=3DDIALOG</A>.</DIV>
<DIV class=3Dcomment-info> </DIV>
<DIV class=3Dcomment-info><STRONG>...</STRONG> as well we should. At the en=
d of the article, there are three comments, of which this is the third<STRO=
NG>:</STRONG></DIV>
<DIV class=3Dcomment-info> </DIV>
<DIV class=3Dcomment-info><EM>3. Posted by </EM><A rel=3Dnofollow><FON=
T color=3D#2c4967><EM>[log in to unmask]</EM></FONT></A><EM> Thu, 03 =
Dec 2009</EM></DIV>
<DIV class=3Dcomment-info><A href=3D"http://illinois.edu/db/dialogEdit/25/1=
7976/18151?ACTION=3DPAGE_DIALOG_CREATE_AUTHENTICATION_OPTIONS" rel=3Dnofoll=
ow target=3D_blank><FONT color=3D#2c4967></FONT></A><EM> </EM></DIV>
<DIV><EM>Properly taught, teaching students Standard Formal English DOES ad=
dress the issue of audience. <U>It provides them with the tools to be=
taken seriously in the larger world</U>.<BR>I also like the colorful langu=
age my rural Southern Iowa students speak, salted with Spanish from newcome=
rs to the area and various idioms from other parts of the country. We=
need to arm our students with the linguistic tools to compete in the world=
of formal communication without depriving them of the artistry of their ow=
n backgrounds.<BR>I don't think we do that by rejecting the idea of rules; =
we just need to emphasize the skill involved in knowing the rules but also =
<U>knowing when they can be bent or broken to a writer's advantage</U>! </E=
M>(underlining Brad's.)</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Apropos of the last morsel underlined, I suggest, nay urge, that you a=
vail yourselves of a copy of "The Long Division", c.2009, a novel written b=
y Derek Nikitas, who teaches 'creative' writing at Eastern Kentucky Univers=
ity and thus is no stranger to right and wrong.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Read 50 or 100 pages and see what you think he accomplishes by be=
nding and breaking rules in a most unusual way.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Fascinating. Have a look.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>.brad.05dec09.</DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></td></tr></table><br>=0A=0A =
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<p>
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--0-1005038583-1260023182=:81046--
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 5 Dec 2009 15:03:04 -0500
From: Craig Hancock <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Dennis Baron's article
Herb,
I should have started my post with a summary of what I think Baron has
gotten right. With all we know about language (all we have learned in
the last 250 years), the way grammar is taught in the schools is
shameful. We certainly shouldn't be passing on prescriptive rules as if
they are divinely given. I like the idea of a flexible standard and a
healthy appreciation for the varieties of language we find in various
genres and registers.
I think prospective teachers are being taught that flexibility is a
value, but that doesn't do a whole lot if they haven't explored those
differing patterns in differing contexts. That would be the case if
they studied the new corpus grammars, but my sense is that's not
happening. When I ordered a teacher's copy of the Longman Student
Grammar of Spoken and Written Language (Biber et. al.), I was
redirected to the ESL division and got a follow-up call from an editor
who was startled (suspicious?)that I was thinking of ordering it for
something other than ESL. Biber says, too, that working in the corpus
grammars leads you to believe very quickly that there is no sharp break
between the lexicon and the grammar and you begin working on the
assumption that these patterns are functionally driven, not simply a
different kind of "correctness". If the primary grammar a teacher is
introduced to is transformational grammar (Baron's claim), then they
have not been led to expect either of those perspectives. They may not
have had any detailed attention to the way grammar changes in different
discourse contexts. They may have been oriented to the rules for
passive transformation, but not to the ways in which passives might be
motivated or to the reasons why passives are eight times more likely to
show up in academic registers. Prescriptive grammars and formal
grammars are not discourse oriented.
Baron implies that linguistic theory is as solid as the theory of
evolution, but the most dominant theory in American linguistics for
the last few decades is now being called seriously into question. (I
don't want to restart that debate, just to say that there is no clear
consensus to draw on for something as basic as language acquisition.)
It has been an unfortunate commonplace for some time that we don't need
to teach language to native speakers. And it may be good advice to "at
least do no harm" and back off from enforcing rules that have no
relationship to the way language is used in the real world. I
personally feel that if we believe that our primary goal is
"correctness" (as Baron also implies, although more flexibly), we will
be stuck with a high level of ignorance among teachers, students, and
policy makers alike. Corpus (and other discourse oriented approaches)
might give us a way to accomplish that without seeming irrelevant or
being prescriptive.
I know you and I are singing in the same choir. It has to be
frustrating to see a continuation of these old patterns of
misunderstanding when we know so much more.
Craig
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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>>
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>> interface at:
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>>
>> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>>
>>
>>
>
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------------------------------
Date: Sat, 5 Dec 2009 12:24:34 -0800
From: Brad Johnston <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Looking Back
--0-747313253-1260044674=:24144
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
------Original Message------
From: Brad Johnston <[log in to unmask]>
=A0
Xxxxxxxxxxxx Xxxxxxx, Chapter 1, page 1.
=A0
Few people shared my walk, an activity I <had undertaken> undertook to clea=
r my head. That <had been> was a mistake.=20
=A0
My business partner and girlfriend <had not> did not hold up her end of the=
festivities. We <had agreed> agreed to split everything fifty-fifty, but s=
he claimed her single glass from the bottle <had been> was enough.
=A0
page 2.
=A0
I <had lost> lost a leg in Iraq ..
=A0
Now I <had planted> planted both feet in my adopted community.
=A0
She <had parked> parked her car near the Cafe'=A0where we=A0<had eaten>=A0a=
te, and when I <had declined> declined a ride home, she did ... whatever
=A0
Geraldine=A0probably <had come> came back to help me.
=A0
Before you write another book, you might want to find a copy editor who pai=
d attention in 6th grade.
=A0
.brad.sat.05dec09.=A0
=A0
~~~~~
=A0
Brad,
Sorry my tense choice put you off.=A0 My first person tone was supposed to =
be conversational in the storytelling past tense with past perfect for even=
ts preceding the time of his evening walk.=A0 My copy editor is quite good =
and has done hundreds of books.=A0 I'll pass your comments along.
=A0
~~~~~
=A0
Let's see if I can get the hang of it.
=A0
a.)=A0 Here I am at my 20th reunion talking to my old friends. I love these=
guys. We were all in the class of 1988.
=A0
b.)=A0 Here I am at my 20th reunion talking to my old friends. I love these=
guys. We had all been in the=A0class of 1988.
=A0
a.)=A0 I went to my 20th reunion last year and talked to my old friends. I =
loved those guys. We were all in the class of 1988.
=A0
b.)=A0 I went to my 20th reunion last year and talked to my old friends. I =
loved those guys. We had all been=A0in the class of 1988.
=A0
I don't think we talk that way. In fact, I know we don't talk that way. Why=
would we write that way? The two a.)'s are correct. To get to the two b.)'=
s, he must be following a back-shifting rule that makes no sense when you c=
onsider what the words mean. I'd love to know what he says.=A0
=A0
.brad.05dec09.=0A=0A=0A
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--0-747313253-1260044674=:24144
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
<table cellspacing=3D"0" cellpadding=3D"0" border=3D"0" ><tr><td valign=3D"=
top" style=3D"font: inherit;"><DIV id=3Dyiv1189758930>
<DIV id=3Dyiv1988160154>
<DIV id=3Dyiv1259036921>
<DIV>------Original Message------<BR>From: Brad Johnston <<A href=3D"htt=
p:[log in to unmask]" rel=3Dnof=
ollow target=3D_blank>[log in to unmask]</A>><BR> <BR>Xxxxxxxxxxx=
x Xxxxxxx, Chapter 1, page 1.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Few people shared my walk, an activity I <STRONG><FONT color=3D#c00000=
><</FONT>had undertaken<FONT color=3D#c00000>> <U>undertook</U></FONT=
></STRONG> to clear my head. That <STRONG><FONT color=3D#c00000><</FONT>=
had been<FONT color=3D#c00000>> <U>was</U></FONT></STRONG> a mistake. </=
DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>My business partner and girlfriend <STRONG><FONT color=3D#c00000><<=
/FONT>had not<FONT color=3D#c00000>> <U>did</U> </FONT><FONT color=3D#c0=
0000><U>not</U></FONT></STRONG> hold up her end of the festivities. We <STR=
ONG><FONT color=3D#c00000><</FONT>had agreed<FONT color=3D#c00000>> <=
U>agreed</U></FONT></STRONG> to split everything fifty-fifty, but she claim=
ed her single glass from the bottle <STRONG><FONT color=3D#c00000><</FON=
T>had been<FONT color=3D#c00000>> <U>was</U></FONT></STRONG> enough.<BR>=
</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>page 2.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>I <STRONG><FONT color=3D#c00000><</FONT>had lost<FONT color=3D#c000=
00>> <U>lost</U></FONT></STRONG> a leg in Iraq <STRONG>..</STRONG></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Now I <STRONG><FONT color=3D#c00000><</FONT>had planted<FONT color=
=3D#c00000>> <U>planted</U></FONT></STRONG> both feet in my adopted comm=
unity.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>She <STRONG><FONT color=3D#c00000><</FONT>had parked<FONT color=3D#=
c00000>> <U>parked</U></FONT></STRONG> her car near the Cafe' where=
we <STRONG><FONT color=3D#c00000><</FONT>had eaten<FONT color=3D#c=
00000>> <U>ate</U></FONT></STRONG>, and when I <STRONG><FONT color=
=3D#c00000><</FONT>had declined<FONT color=3D#c00000>> <U>declined</U=
></FONT></STRONG> a ride home, she did ... whatever</DIV>
<DIV><STRONG></STRONG> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=3D#000000>Geraldine probably</FONT><STRONG> <FONT col=
or=3D#c00000><</FONT>had come</STRONG><FONT color=3D#c00000><STRONG>>=
<U>came</U></STRONG> </FONT><FONT color=3D#000000>back to help me.</FONT><=
/DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><STRONG><FONT color=3D#c00000>Before you write another book, you might=
want to find a copy editor who paid attention in 6th grade.</FONT></STRONG=
></DIV>
<DIV><STRONG><FONT color=3D#c00000></FONT></STRONG> </DIV>
<DIV><STRONG><FONT color=3D#c00000>.brad.sat.05dec09.</FONT></STRONG> =
</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>~~~~~</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Brad,<BR>Sorry my tense choice put you off. My first person tone=
was supposed to be conversational in the storytelling past tense with past=
perfect for events preceding the time of his evening walk. My copy e=
ditor is quite good and has done hundreds of books. I'll pass your co=
mments along.</DIV></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>~~~~~<BR>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Let's see if I can get the hang of it.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>a.) Here I am at my 20th reunion talking to my old friends. I lo=
ve these guys. We <U>were</U> all in the class of 1988.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>b.) Here I am at my 20th reunion talking to my old friends. I lo=
ve these guys. We had all <U>been</U> in the class of 1988.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>a.) I went to my 20th reunion last year and talked to my old fri=
ends. I loved those guys. We <U>were</U> all in the class of 1988.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>b.) I went to my 20th reunion last year and talked to my old fri=
ends. I loved those guys. We had all <U>been</U> in the class of 1988.=
</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><STRONG><FONT color=3D#c00000>I don't think we talk that way. In fact,=
I know we don't talk that way. Why would we write that way? The two a.)'s =
are correct. To get to the two b.)'s, he must be following a back-shifting =
rule that makes no sense when you consider what the words mean. I'd love to=
know what he says. </FONT></STRONG></DIV>
<DIV><STRONG><FONT color=3D#c00000> </FONT></STRONG></DIV>
<DIV><STRONG><FONT color=3D#c00000>.brad.05dec09.</FONT></STRONG></DIV></DI=
V></DIV></DIV></td></tr></table><br>=0A=0A
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface
at:
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and select "Join or leave the list"
<p>
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
--0-747313253-1260044674=:24144--
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 5 Dec 2009 16:15:38 -0500
From: "Spruiell, William C" <[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.=20
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.=20
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=3D1&ACTION=3DDIALOG =
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.
>
>
> 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/
>
> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web
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> and select "Join or leave the list"
>
> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>
>
>
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------------------------------
Date: Sat, 5 Dec 2009 17:07:59 -0500
From: Craig Hancock <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Dennis Baron's article
Bill,
As a heartfelt amen to that, I would point out that students who come
to college, in New York state at least, seem to have had no exposure to
the term "Standard English." Writing patterns are "correct" or
"incorrect," "proper" or "improper," not standard or non-standard. It
is fairly common for a student to say "My problem is that I write the
way I talk, and the way I talk isn't proper."
If Standard English is a goal--and I wouldn't argue with that--we
should at least be clear about what it is.
I'm reminded of the student in my grammar class who, after ten weeks
of "meaning-centered" attention to grammar, got my approval for a
project for an optional paper examining the language of his five year
old son. After the weekend, he came back and said he would have to
change the topic; he had listened to his son, and "there wasn't any
grammar there," by which he meant that the child wasn't making errors.
I'm not sure why it's so hard to get these perspectives across. I told
him "just transcribe what you hear, and we can look at what he is
doing right," which turned into a fine project.
In a real sense, I think NCTE opposses direct grammar instruction
because they equate grammar with prescriptive and regressive practices.
In opposition, people have argued that students will learn language if
you just let them express themselves and "correct" them in context.
Neither approach is effective, but they end up owning the conversation.
It's hard to convince them that progress will require different
thinking from both sides, in part because both sides have a good deal
invested in their positions.
Craig
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.
>>
>>
>> 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/
>>
>> 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"
>>
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------------------------------
Date: Sat, 5 Dec 2009 20:49:42 -0500
From: "O'Sullivan, Brian P" <[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 i=
n 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" leve=
l 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 hegemon=
y), to the extent that students' felt need for rules is learned, it seems l=
ikely that is is learned in many contexts beyond English classes. This is w=
hat I thought was interesting about Baron's "grammar fundamentalist" exampl=
e; 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 neurolo=
gical reasons to feel a real need for prescriptions, it's not surprising th=
at those teachers are trying to meet that need, even if they they have lear=
ned 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 the=
y never learned enough "true propositions" (in the form of well-grounded bu=
t more-or-less prescriptive rules) from English education and linguistics p=
rofessors who were understandably eager to teach more mature and sophistica=
ted approaches to language. I think Craig's point about explicitly teaching=
"standard English" as such is helpful here; if we can ask students to dist=
inguish standard English from other registers, maybe we can give them somet=
hing like the rules they want without falsely teaching them that these rule=
s are universal.
Brian
________________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]
U] 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=3D1&ACTION=3DDIALOG 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.
>
>
> 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/
>
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interface at:
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> and select "Join or leave the list"
>
> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>
>
>
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------------------------------
Date: Sat, 5 Dec 2009 21:32:32 -0500
From: "STAHLKE, HERBERT F" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Dennis Baron's article
Craig,
Thanks for a typically lucid and thoughtful posting. I didn't take up Baro=
n's equating transformational grammar, even indirectly, with the theory of =
evolution, although there is much that we do know that is every but that so=
und. We just don't have clear mechanisms we can expound on like natural se=
lection. The problem with all linguistic theories to date is that they are=
vastly more underdetermined by the data than evolution was when Darwin spe=
lled it out a century and a half ago. There have been moves in the directi=
on of "evidence-based linguistics," I see corpus-based studies moving in th=
at direction as well, but we're still a long ways off from an evidence-base=
d, empirically testable, highly predictive theory of language. What our ex=
isting theories do that is of value, and this is of considerable value, is =
provide us with a framework for analyzing data, even though what constitute=
s data is itself somewhat theory-dependent.
For linguists who study language with scientific rigor and are more concern=
ed with description and theory than with pedagogy, it's not particularly a =
problem that theories fail. We expect them to. In fact, that's what we ha=
ve them for, to make them fail so we can learn more and devise stronger the=
ories. But that is the work of science, and it doesn't make for effective =
pedagogy, as Paul Roberts demonstrated so clearly for us four decades ago. =
Even Chomsky, in an early interview, recommended traditional grammar (Jesp=
ersen, et al.) as a much better basis for pedagogy than syntactic theory. =
I suppose I feel a bit like a Tea Partier must feel: I know better what I'=
m against than what I'm for. And I'm against pedagogy based either on pres=
criptivism or on any specific theory of language. I am for pedagogy that d=
raws carefully on the findings of linguistic theories as well as on researc=
h into pedagogy and into rhetoric.
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]
U] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: December 5, 2009 3:03 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Dennis Baron's article
Herb,
I should have started my post with a summary of what I think Baron has
gotten right. With all we know about language (all we have learned in
the last 250 years), the way grammar is taught in the schools is
shameful. We certainly shouldn't be passing on prescriptive rules as if
they are divinely given. I like the idea of a flexible standard and a
healthy appreciation for the varieties of language we find in various
genres and registers.
I think prospective teachers are being taught that flexibility is a
value, but that doesn't do a whole lot if they haven't explored those
differing patterns in differing contexts. That would be the case if
they studied the new corpus grammars, but my sense is that's not
happening. When I ordered a teacher's copy of the Longman Student
Grammar of Spoken and Written Language (Biber et. al.), I was
redirected to the ESL division and got a follow-up call from an editor
who was startled (suspicious?)that I was thinking of ordering it for
something other than ESL. Biber says, too, that working in the corpus
grammars leads you to believe very quickly that there is no sharp break
between the lexicon and the grammar and you begin working on the
assumption that these patterns are functionally driven, not simply a
different kind of "correctness". If the primary grammar a teacher is
introduced to is transformational grammar (Baron's claim), then they
have not been led to expect either of those perspectives. They may not
have had any detailed attention to the way grammar changes in different
discourse contexts. They may have been oriented to the rules for
passive transformation, but not to the ways in which passives might be
motivated or to the reasons why passives are eight times more likely to
show up in academic registers. Prescriptive grammars and formal
grammars are not discourse oriented.
Baron implies that linguistic theory is as solid as the theory of
evolution, but the most dominant theory in American linguistics for
the last few decades is now being called seriously into question. (I
don't want to restart that debate, just to say that there is no clear
consensus to draw on for something as basic as language acquisition.)
It has been an unfortunate commonplace for some time that we don't need
to teach language to native speakers. And it may be good advice to "at
least do no harm" and back off from enforcing rules that have no
relationship to the way language is used in the real world. I
personally feel that if we believe that our primary goal is
"correctness" (as Baron also implies, although more flexibly), we will
be stuck with a high level of ignorance among teachers, students, and
policy makers alike. Corpus (and other discourse oriented approaches)
might give us a way to accomplish that without seeming irrelevant or
being prescriptive.
I know you and I are singing in the same choir. It has to be
frustrating to see a continuation of these old patterns of
misunderstanding when we know so much more.
Craig
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 student=
s
> 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 th=
e
> 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 wel=
l
> 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 th=
e
> 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 wa=
s
> 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=3D1&ACTION=3DDIALOG dealin=
g
>> 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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>>
>>
>>
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------------------------------
Date: Sat, 5 Dec 2009 21:33:34 -0500
From: "STAHLKE, HERBERT F" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Looking Back
I agree that writers should not write "had not hold up," although I wouldn'=
t object to "had not holed up."
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]
U] On Behalf Of Brad Johnston [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: December 5, 2009 3:24 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Looking Back
------Original Message------
From: Brad Johnston <[log in to unmask]<http://us.mc365.mail.yahoo.com/mc=
[log in to unmask]>>
Xxxxxxxxxxxx Xxxxxxx, Chapter 1, page 1.
Few people shared my walk, an activity I <had undertaken> undertook to clea=
r my head. That <had been> was a mistake.
My business partner and girlfriend <had not> did not hold up her end of the=
festivities. We <had agreed> agreed to split everything fifty-fifty, but s=
he claimed her single glass from the bottle <had been> was enough.
page 2.
I <had lost> lost a leg in Iraq ..
Now I <had planted> planted both feet in my adopted community.
She <had parked> parked her car near the Cafe' where we <had eaten> ate, an=
d when I <had declined> declined a ride home, she did ... whatever
Geraldine probably <had come> came back to help me.
Before you write another book, you might want to find a copy editor who pai=
d attention in 6th grade.
.brad.sat.05dec09.
~~~~~
Brad,
Sorry my tense choice put you off. My first person tone was supposed to be=
conversational in the storytelling past tense with past perfect for events=
preceding the time of his evening walk. My copy editor is quite good and =
has done hundreds of books. I'll pass your comments along.
~~~~~
Let's see if I can get the hang of it.
a.) Here I am at my 20th reunion talking to my old friends. I love these g=
uys. We were all in the class of 1988.
b.) Here I am at my 20th reunion talking to my old friends. I love these g=
uys. We had all been in the class of 1988.
a.) I went to my 20th reunion last year and talked to my old friends. I lo=
ved those guys. We were all in the class of 1988.
b.) I went to my 20th reunion last year and talked to my old friends. I lo=
ved those guys. We had all been in the class of 1988.
I don't think we talk that way. In fact, I know we don't talk that way. Why=
would we write that way? The two a.)'s are correct. To get to the two b.)'=
s, he must be following a back-shifting rule that makes no sense when you c=
onsider what the words mean. I'd love to know what he says.
.brad.05dec09.
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface =
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------------------------------
Date: Sat, 5 Dec 2009 23:03:58 -0500
From: "MARLOW, DAVID" <[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 co=
nversation <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 a=
nd across different time periods and should incorporate that that knowledge=
into instruction and assessment that acknowledge and show respect for lang=
uage."
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 Reas=
er & others at North Carolina State have created some really great material=
s discussing the logic and regularity of non-standard English - and are mak=
ing progress in not only getting them used in schools, but also gaining acc=
ess 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 ho=
me/heritage dialect & then (via contrastive analysis & other techniques) to=
bridge them into bidialectalism (the use of SAE on demand)... & also coord=
inating a series of community discussions in various venues around our stat=
e....
I'd be delighted to hear about any other projects addressing these issues a=
t 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 ATE=
G members there...>
Dave
________________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]
U] 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 i=
n 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" leve=
l 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 hegemon=
y), to the extent that students' felt need for rules is learned, it seems l=
ikely that is is learned in many contexts beyond English classes. This is w=
hat I thought was interesting about Baron's "grammar fundamentalist" exampl=
e; 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 neurolo=
gical reasons to feel a real need for prescriptions, it's not surprising th=
at those teachers are trying to meet that need, even if they they have lear=
ned 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 the=
y never learned enough "true propositions" (in the form of well-grounded bu=
t more-or-less prescriptive rules) from English education and linguistics p=
rofessors who were understandably eager to teach more mature and sophistica=
ted approaches to language. I think Craig's point about explicitly teaching=
"standard English" as such is helpful here; if we can ask students to dist=
inguish standard English from other registers, maybe we can give them somet=
hing like the rules they want without falsely teaching them that these rule=
s are universal.
Brian
________________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]
U] 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=3D1&ACTION=3DDIALOG 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.
>
>
> 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/
>
> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web
interface at:
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> and select "Join or leave the list"
>
> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
>
>
>
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------------------------------
End of ATEG Digest - 4 Dec 2009 to 5 Dec 2009 (#2009-247)
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