Herb,
I think that what you're saying is more empathetic, and therefore more persuasive, than what Baron says. You say that prospective teachers are nominally supposed to learn about langauge but "still are not taught" about important aspects of language; he says that students are actually "given a healthy dose" of language education. You say that new teachers are not encouraged to develop and use their knowledge of language; he says that new teachers actively "reject such knowledge."
What I most like about his article, on the other hand, is the introduction. By quoting a student's "intelligent design" theory of language, Baron illustrates an important reason for the persistence of prescriptivism: a felt need on the part of students. I think there are many students who--for developmental, cultural or other reasons--feel a strong need to be told the "right answers" to questions of grammar and writing. How, and at what developmental stages, can teachers lead students from a craving for rules to an interest in choices?
Brian
________________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of STAHLKE, HERBERT F [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, December 04, 2009 7:33 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Dennis Baron's article
All of the topics Baron would like to see taught are specified in the Indiana Language Arts Standards, but teachers still are not taught them, and for all the reasons we're familiar with: teacher training curriculum that leaves no room to teach them, English Education programs that accept the common wisdom that knowledge about language and how it works is irrelevant and perhaps harmful, arrogant irrelevance on the part of linguists who teach the few language-related courses teacher prep students take, political pressures in school corporations to maintain prescriptive shibboleths, the absence in the schools of role models for teachers who would like to do something with language, and I'm sure many on the list could add other factors. The fact that our state standards require considerable linguistic content in the language arts curriculum and in the training of language arts teachers strikes me, somewhat cynically, as a nod to what the authors knew should be done, hoped would be done, but had no power to bring about.
The problem isn't that we've had thirty million theories of language, all of them, as scientific theories must be, inadequate. The problem is that there is much that we know that should be taught: sentence and discourse level structures, dialect variation, register and appropriateness, as well as all of the skills or literacy and orality including the love of using language well.
This group has never, in spite of serious efforts, agreed on an approach to teaching grammar, but we for the most part agree that it needs to be done. There are plenty of ways to do it well and also a fair number of ways to do it badly, and insisting on teaching as fact propositions that we know to be false, which is what Baron inveighs against, is probably the most common of the ways of doing it badly.
Herb
Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47306
[log in to unmask]
________________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bruce Despain [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: December 4, 2009 3:53 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Dennis Baron's article
My take is that he muddied the waters so badly that it is much easier to throw it all out. I hope I didn't throw any baby out with it. I have entered a subscription and plan to look at some of his other essays. My jury is still out. Society has done quite well with whatever standard was set up whether it was a foot or a meter. He seems to think that language itself is the measure, but it is the linguistic theory that measures language. I don't think the issue is with there being a single standard. As of 1979 linguists had proposed over 30 major theoretical frameworks (models) for grammar (syntax). I think the point can be made that all of them eventually led to contradictions, not really much better than traditional grammar. The models have become 20th century prescriptions based on what linguists took as important in language study.
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
Sent: Friday, December 04, 2009 10:20 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Dennis Baron's article
Herb,
This is a very rich and interesting article, though it seems a bit
disingenuous to me that he characterizes linguists as doing everything
right and English teachers as getting it all wrong. I'm not saying he's
wrong, just that he fails to look sympathetically at the other side or
second guess his own certainty.
Here are two key paragraphs that set up that contrast.
"It's not that English teachers don't know that linguistic knowledge has
progressed over the past 250 years. Prospective teachers get a healthy
dose of sociolinguistics, transformational grammar, and the history of
English. They study the emergence of dialects and the social contexts
from which language standards grow. And they learn that unlike the
standard meter or kilogram, which can be measured with scientific
precision, there is no single, objective standard language which
everybody speaks. They study language contact, assimilation, and
heritage language loss, and they learn that when schools abandon
bilingual education and leave non-English-speaking students to sink or
swim in English-only classes, most sink. And last but not least, they're
taught to regard their students' language not as something to be
constantly graded and corrected, but as an energetic, highly-competent,
continually-evolving form of language, complete with its own standards
and variants.
But when they get their own classrooms, many of these same teachers
reject such knowledge in favor of the simplistic language model they
absorbed when they were in school, a model that ignores the complexities
of the language people use every day in favor of a few prescriptive
rules that can be memorized and tested, but that have little connection
with what really happens when we talk or write."
First of all, prospective teachers may only have a single semester of
exposure to linguistics, which is hardly enough to bring those concepts
home in any kind of compelling way. And they are also faced with
students who do not seem to be reading and writing with any kind of
facility and need some kind of intervention, perhaps intervention in
ways that their language study hasn't suggested.
Here's Baron again, at article's end:
"Perhaps the most important grammar lesson to learn, then, is to trust
our language instincts instead of mimicking some ideal which turns out
to be a moving target. We need to finally leave the eighteenth-century
prescriptions behind and aim for language that is simply good enough to
do the job of expressing whatever it is we need to say. And when we
study language, we should study what it is, not what someone thinks it
should be."
Once again, the prime advice is to "trust our language instincts."
Everything is still focused on 'correctness", though Baron calls it a
"sliding scale." There seems to be no connection between effective
"expression" and language choice, no hint at how a study of language
might help us become better readers or writers.
You could easily turn the criticism around. Linguists want us to use
knowledge about language in our teaching of reading and writing, but
have failed to show us how. Teachers revert to prescriptive rules by
default.
Craig
STAHLKE, HERBERT F wrote:
> As it happens, Dennis Baron (Illinois) has just posted an article on his Web of Language site
> at http://illinois.edu/db/view/25/17976?count=1&ACTION=DIALOG dealing with what it means to teach Standard English.
> As we have come to expect from Baron, it's a good read.
>
> Herb
>
> Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
> Emeritus Professor of English
> Ball State University
> Muncie, IN 47306
> [log in to unmask]
> ________________________________________
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Brad Johnston [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: December 3, 2009 10:02 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: making the past paster
>
> Someone wrote: Many varieties of non-standard English do make the distinction grammatically, and for these speakers the second example would have to be
>
> I had left last year.
>
> because the time of the action is remote. This is not a standard use of the past perfect and is, in the varieties that use it, not a past perfect but a remote past.
>
> Brad now: Here's an item from my archives.
>
> It doesn't matter how long ago it was. The past is past. The Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066, however remote that year may seem. 'Had been' won't help the Anglo-Saxons a whit, even now.
>
> Note also that ATEG stands for the Teaching of English Grammar. There is no place for the "remote past" or the "paster past" in the teaching of English grammar. It may be interesting that the "remote past" is sometimes heard in waterfront bars in Houston or San Diego, but that doesn't help a grammar teacher accomplish the task at hand.
>
> .osistm.brad.03dec09.
>
>
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