Bill,
I agree with almost everything you wrote. The only thing I
question is "hegemonic." Are clear, consistent definitions of terms all
hegemonic? Perhaps, but I would suggest that the current confusion in
grammatical terminology is the core of the pedagogical problem. One of
the problems on this list is that almost everyone on it loves to discuss
questions of grammar. But the general public, including most students
and perhaps most teachers, do not. They find the terminology confusing.
As I have repeatedly stated, I wanted a name for what I call KISS
grammar in order to make it clear that it is one (of many possible)
approaches to grammar. Within KISS, alternative explanations are
encouraged and often offered, both within the KISS terminological
framework, and, at times, with references to other opinions. Many of the
KISS analysis keys have notes to the effect that grammarians and
linguists disagree about the point under consideration.
Might I also point out that KISS is intended to be a minimalist
approach to the teaching of grammar. If you look at the curriculum
design (See: http://home.pct.edu/~evavra/kiss/wb/index.htm)
you will see that it provides three years (Grades four, five, and six)
for students to learn to recognize, discuss, and apply the concepts of
subject, finite verb, and complements. The only objective, within the
basic KISS framework, is that by the end of sixth grade, most, if not
all students should be able to identify subjects, verbs, and complements
in whatever they read and write. Similarly, grades seven through nine
are devoted to the addition of clauses to the students' analytical
toolbox. That is a huge amount of time to master concepts that are not
that difficult. Within that time, teachers and parents can use a wide
variety of approaches, including various types of diagramming. They can,
if they wish, include explorations of phrasal verbs, passive voice, and
a number of other questions. But the primary objective, within those six
years, is to enable students to be able to identify S/V/C patterns and
clauses.
I admire what Johanna describes as her objectives, but I also note
the fact that Johanna bemoans the fact that students need better
preparation. Johanna, for example, discusses the propaganda questions
that involve passive voice. I agree with her completely. But students
are not going to really understand passive voice unless they can first
recognize verbs. I have intentionally struggled to keep the KISS
terminology at a minimum, knowing that some linguistic questions are not
addressed, but let's be practical. Give any class of college Freshmen a
short paragraph and ask them to identify the prepositional phrases,
subjects, and verbs. Many of them, if not most, will not identify "is"
or "were" as verbs. How then, can they really understand more advanced
linguistic questions?
Having noted that I have kept KISS as simple as possible, I would
like to suggest that, for many purposes, it is an extremely powerful
descriptive grammar. See, for example, the twelve exercises on "Advanced
Appositives."
http://home.pct.edu/~evavra/kiss/wb/G11/Sep/D16/Notes.htm
These exercises all came from Mr. Fortune's Maggot by Sylvia Townsend
Warner. Not only are they suggestive of her writing style, they also
explore variations in how appositives can be used, structured, etc. I
might also note that a member of the KISS list wondered if I am not
stretching the definition of "appositive" too much. Although I would
guess that some members of this list would agree with her, I would also
note that current textbooks give very different definitions of
"appositive." Hacker, for example, defines them as explaining a
preceding noun. Morenberg, on the other hand, shows that appositives
can appear before the noun to which they are in apposition.
Again, my primary points in this post are that I agree with
almost all that you wrote, but I don't consider the establishment of a
clearly defined set of terms as hegemonic. Instead, I consider them to
be a pedagogical necessity. I am sure that most of the linguists on this
list can explain, in great detail, any of the twelve sentences. But the
question is, can they teach students in K-12 to do so? I think the KISS
Approach can, thereby enabling the students to discuss questions of
style, logic, error, passive voice, and a number of Johanna's other
objectives. People who are using the KISS Approach are testing my
hypothesis, and beginning to show that it can work.
I would still like to see other approaches developed, but they
need to be named. What is probably my last article in English Journal
used the metaphor of cooking. As I look at this list, I see a lot of
food. But Mexican tamales are covered by Indian spices and dumped into
bowls of spaghetti. The result is not an appetizing meal. Members of
this list may not like the idea, but if we want to make the public more
interested and aware of the importance of grammar, we need to identify
and keep our cooking styles clear.
It's time to go to class. Bill, I appreciate the time you took to
make your response.
Ed
>>> [log in to unmask] 01/14/04 04:53PM >>>
Ed,
The point I was trying to make is that "theoretical discussions,"
should
be an integral part of grammar-teaching, as long as it's done in an
age-appropriate way; in other words, the act of arguing about how to
analyze something is, itself, a pedagogic act. It's *not* having such
discussions -- e.g., not focusing, albeit briefly, on points of
potential contention -- that leads to a perception on the part of
students that they're getting a "my way or the highway" approach. My
original wording was as follows:
>Despite its obvious attractions, adopting a single descriptive
framework
>without acknowledging to the students that it's a position rather than
>"fact" is, I would argue, dangerous. It looks too much like a power
move - >a kind of, "do it my way or be damned" system, of the type
that
adolescents
> perennially find inflammatory.
They way you had dealt with "look up" in your post was to label the
"up"
as an adverb. I didn't want to say that was a "bad" analysis, only
that
this is one of those areas for which there are multiple analyses. Your
reply acknowledges a second one (e.g., that it's a part of "look up"),
and I think you'd probably be satisfied with several more. If I
understand you correctly, however (I'm always willing to entertain the
idea that I've misconstrued something!) you feel that a single
standardized terminological framework should be adopted as a matter of
utility -- that if it's not your KISS framework, that it should at
least
be something. The framework you're presenting is one that is quite
flexible, but I'm not sure it presents itself as a set of good
solutions
rather than the set of good solutions. However, I should also admit
that
I need to look at your website in more detail.
You can't create a standardized framework without "pruning" some
otherwise-viable analyses for the sake of internal coherence. What I
was
trying to argue is that the framework has to make clear, to the
students, its own contingency -- the fact that to some extent, it's
artificially exclusive. And I don't think we should overlook the
extent
to which imposing a standardized terminology *is* a hegemonic act (now
I'm starting to sound like a PMLA abstract, darn it). That doesn't
mean
we shouldn't do it, but it I think that if we do, we ought to make
very,
very clear that we're doing it out of pragmatism, not out of a sense
of
"factiness."
-- Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University
-----Original Message-----
From: Edward Vavra [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2004 12:26 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: A Basic Question
Bill,
I found your message to be very disappointing. The two ideas that
you present, as if I might disagree with them, are, as I have
suggested
repeatedly on this list, fundamental to the KISS Approach. Part of the
problem here might be my incomplete response to a previous question.
When I said that within KISS, students would explain "up" in Look up"
as
an adverb, that is true. What I did not explain is that in the
sentence
"Look up that word in the dictionary," students could explain up in
one
of two ways. They could still explain it as an adverb, or they could
explain it as part of the verb phrase "look up." Such alternative
explanations appear regularly in KISS exercises. In addition, within
my
explanations, I often note that grammarians diagree about the point in
question. Why then, do you write as if KISS were a "my way or the
highway" approach to grammar?
How many times do I have to respond that my problem with this
list
is not with the theoretical discussions but with the lack of almost
any
connection between those theoretical discussions and what should be
taught in the schools? You mention "teaching tips," but teaching tips
are not enough. If I understood her correctly, even Johanna agrees
that
instruction has to be spread across several years. Thus, the question
is
what can effectively be taught at which grade levels? This should not
be
left up to individual teachers. I just posted a question about
subjunctive mood being taught to second graders. Now I know that there
are some people out there who think that everything can be taught to
second graders. In practice, however, that won't work. It is simply
too
much, too fast. Thus, it seems to me that ATEG is the group that
would
be most qualified to discuss what should be taught, at which grade
levels, etc.
Ed
>>> [log in to unmask] 01/13/04 06:51PM >>>
Ed,
The pedagogical necessity of providing information at a level students
in a particular age range can understand is, as you have pointed out,
undeniable. As teachers, though, part of our job involves worrying
about
the distinction between simple and too simple, and that's a
distinction
that has to be reevaluated for every age range and even every specific
class (and frequently has no definite answer).
I don't think middle-schoolers have particular difficulty with
understanding the following two ideas, although I'm open to
contradiction by you or anyone teaching middle school:
(1) Different kinds of words or sentence elements have different
basic "jobs," but sometimes an element can fill a job that's more
commonly filled by a different kind.
(2) While most elements fit firmly into established categories,
there are some cases that are in grey areas, and people working on
grammar argue over these.
Both of these match the students' everyday experiences, and it is easy
to set up analogies with non-linguistic domains them. If they
understand
#1, they will have little difficulty understanding those of us who
might
want to say that the "up" of "He looked up" and the "up" of "I pushed
the sack up the chimney" are in one sense the same "up,"
(preposition),
but performing different functions. And if they understand #2, they
can
be open to the idea that some grammarians might disagree with that
characterization. I find I have a lot more trouble telling students "X
is true" when I don't really think it is, than telling them "For now,
we'll treat X as true, and we'll deal with some complications later."
What I really *don't* want to do is give students the impression that
there is exactly one accurate description of language. That doesn't
mean
I think we should focus on all the debates and minutae associated with
them (although I think that as their teachers we should at least be
familiar with the broad outlines of these debates), but rather that we
should acknowledge, simply but at regular intervals, that "doing
grammar" is a process that can yield different results. In other
words,
we don't need to concentrate on the grey areas from #2, but students
need to know that they're there, that we know that they're there, and
that that's o.k.
Despite its obvious attractions, adopting a single descriptive
framework
without acknowledging to the students that it's a position rather than
"fact" is, I would argue, dangerous. It looks too much like a power
move
- a kind of, "do it my way or be damned" system, of the type that
adolescents perennially find inflammatory. Again (I'm probably being
annoyingly redundant) I don't think that means we shouldn't use a
particular descriptive framework in class - only that we should tell
the
students that any such framework has some holes in it, and not
everyone
will agree on how to fix those. For later grades (10-12), I don't
think
looking at a few of the debates would be harmful in any way. Schools
certainly do that in other areas; I distinctly remember that part of
my
11th grade history class focused on the competing explanations for why
the Great Depression occurred. In fact, thinking about some points of
grammar in terms of argument involves practicing higher-order thinking
skills than simply labeling the units according to "accepted practice"
does. I already have too many students who think reality is a list,
and
that education consists of memorizing portions of it.
As for theory-wrangling on the ATEG list, I've already pontificated at
length on the topic, but I'd reiterate that I think lack of such
debate
would be odd, and intellectually unhealthy. Does posting a theoretical
thread *prevent* people from posting teaching tips? If not, we need
more
people posting teaching tips, not fewer people arguing points.
Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University
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