Ed and everyone,
Sorry for the blank message.
Ed,
I agree with Johanna that the problem of clause terminology is more
perceived than real. In my UG grammar classes, the students and I use
all of these terms because they are part of our common discourse.
Frankly, I don't care if a student calls a clause subordinate or
dependent as long as she recognizes that there is a distinction between
main/independent and subordinate/dependent and learns how to identify
that difference. I don't find that it takes very long to establish this
either. And, like Johanna, I use positions and functions in the simple
sentence to show how subordinate clauses relate to main clauses, as
subjects, objects, adverbs, adjectives. In fact, I get more aha!
Reactions from this simple demonstration than from anything else I do
with the class.
Rather than post essays and see how people identify types of clauses, I
think it would be both more interesting and more worthwhile to use such
a set of essays to talk about the kinds of grammatical information that
could help a student to improve the essay. That will get us some ways
towards an understanding of what students need to know. And I'm not
looking at something that's just utilitarian. To understand where to
position a clause in a sentence, a student needs to know something, for
example, about given and new information, extraposition, expletive
subjects and objects, etc. These problems don't exist as cognitive
islands. They are related to knowledge about language.
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Edward Vavra
Sent: Monday, April 18, 2005 4:44 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Craig & Amy * I wish you well.
Herb,
I agree. But the question is "What do teachers (and students) need
to know first?" My point is simply that the lists that you and Johanna
sent (of what you would want students to know) was heavily weighted with
things such as morphology, phonology, etc. If the group intends to
propose a set of standards to NCTE * for adoption as English grammar
standards, I'm suggesting that such a list will not be supported even by
the teachers of English comp at the college level. (And, if we cannot
get their support, it is unlikely that we can get national support.)
Johanna suggests that it will be easy to teach students to identify
subjects, verbs, and clauses in their own writing. I find her suggestion
fascinating, but from what I can tell, few people on this list have ever
really tried to accomplish that goal. It is not nearly as easy as
Johanna thinks, even if one uses a coherent set of definitions. Again I
would suggest that the group select a few sample essays * they could be
posted on the ATEG web site * and first try to analyze them. These
analyses could be discussed on this list. Let's see if people agree on
what is, and what is not, a "subordinate" (Or is it a "dependent"?)
clause. Let's see what happens when there are six subordinate clauses
within one main clause. I think you will find that it is not all that
easy to help students untangle such sentences.
Ed
P.S. I'm happy that Jeff is on your side and not mine.
>>> [log in to unmask] 04/18/05 2:31 PM >>>
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
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