Bill said
"They do want prescriptive rules, although I think it's important to keep in 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" level 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 hegemony), to the extent that students' felt need for rules is learned, it seems likely that is is learned in many contexts beyond English classes. This is what I thought was interesting about Baron's "grammar fundamentalist" example; 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 neurological reasons to feel a real need for prescriptions, it's not surprising that those teachers are trying to meet that need, even if they they have learned 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 they never learned enough "true propositions" (in the form of well-grounded but more-or-less prescriptive rules) from English education and linguistics professors who were understandably eager to teach more mature and sophisticated approaches to language. I think Craig's point about explicitly teaching "standard English" as such is helpful here; if we can ask students to distinguish standard English from other registers, maybe we can give them something like the rules they want without falsely teaching them that these rules are universal.
Brian
________________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] 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=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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