Ed,

I'll go ahead and be shamelessly arrogant.  Yes, linguists are a
definite minority in the world of high school and college English and
writing, but we are a minority in the same sense that lawyers, skilled
mechanics, and structural engineers are minorities.  We know what things
to name, how to name them coherently, and how the things we name
interact with each other.  

The current debate easily slides over to the position that it isn't
worth bothering to know these names and interactions.  That tendency is
a by-product of having a generation of writing and language arts
teachers who haven't been trained in that part of the disciplines of
language.  In short, while it's appropriate to tell high school teachers
what we college grammar teachers want our students to know on entry,
it's asking more than most of those teachers can deliver because they
too do not know those things and therefore much of what we're asking
doesn't even make sense to them.

But what makes even less sense is any lowering of the standards of what
we are asking for, because that lowering is a concession to ignorance,
when what we have to be doing is training a generation of teachers who
do know the content of language so that they can understand and provide
what students need to know to manipulate their own language with skill.


We are awash in a sea of ignorance that is of our own making.  The
importance of the initiative that Craig started a couple of years ago,
the New Public Grammar, is that it is a reasonable and serious program
(well, not yet, but it's getting there) to address this ignorance.

Herb


Craig,
     I admire your post about working at the conference to address the
scope, sequence, and assessment problems, and I wish you well. It will
be interesting to see how you address the questions. My sense is that
current assessment addresses errors because it cannot address anything
else. The terminology in the textbooks is not standard, so assessment
tests cannot, for example, ask students to identify clauses,
participles, or even parallel constructions. And, as much as they will
not like it, I would suggest that you take care in considering the
desires of people like Bill and Herb. They are, after all, linguists * a
definite minority in the educational world as a whole. Most of the
college English professors I know would seriously disagree with what
they have proposed. Most of the professors (of composition) that have
discussed the question with me have said that they would be pleased if
students could simply identify the subjects, verbs, and clauses in their
own writing.
Ed



    The conversation is becoming enormously rich and productive.
      I have worked out a fairly firm plan with Amy Benjamin to devote
half of  a full day of the ATEG conference (Friday afternoon, July 15,
prime conference time) for a working group to address these issues and
make at least draft proposals.  (A working group on scope, sequence,
standards, and assessment.) As part of that, certainly, we can encourage
people like Bill and Herb to tell us what they would like incoming
students to know.  It would be interesting to ask the same question of
writing teachers; what  should students know on entrance to college that
would make your job easier.  I would love to see a presentation or two
on language acquisition, though I think we can do a better job than most
at keeping clear the difference from having the language and being aware
of the language and how that awareness might be put into practice. I
think we shouldn't limit ourselves to formal views of the sentence, but
should encourage a functional perspective as well (rhetorical and
functional approaches), and it would be interesting to think about how
that might be integrated into a K-12 curriculum.  Ultimately, I think we
need to address head-on the failure of the current NCTE policy and the
dire need for quick and radical replacement.  We should make sure we
find approaches compatible with writing as process pedagogy and with
egalitarian (democratizing) social practices.  We should take a position
on standardized, error focused testing, which demeans both writing and
grammar. If anyone knows of ideal articulations of any of this or model
programs currently in place, we should hear about that as well.  If
someone was interested, they could trace down what's happening in
England or Australia or New Zealand, where reform seems to be much
further along.
    In short, there's a whole lot of work to do, and everyone is welcome
to come and/or make proposals.

Craig

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