Edward, Johanna, and others on the list,

I am not qualified to propose terms from linguistics because
I've not been trained as a linguist.

On the other hand, I AM qualified to say which terms have
helped me to understand language, which have helped me to
"open up" language for prospective teachers, and which hold
promise from my perspective for learning language across
grades and curricula.

As these negotiations proceed, I hope you will consider
a language of function terms as well as class terms. Although
everyone including myself despairs at the idea of
teaching systemic functional grammar -- a huge
apparatus, admittedly -- the more I learn about language
the more a meta-language of referential functions (Halliday's "ideational
grammar") make sense to me, as a "way in" to how language works.

For those who might know less even than I about SFG,
the grammar I am referring to names grammatical functions
like "actor"**  and "process" instead of class terms like "noun" and "verb"
(** I actually prefer the term "actant" following Bruno Latour)

One advantage of such terms for breaking up clause constructions
is that most people have an intuitive grasp of the distinction
"actor/process" which can be built on to develop a more elaborate
and less intuitive sense of grammar. Another advantage, from my point
of view, is that it DISRUPTS traditional grammar terms, which come
with a load of prescriptivism, arbitrariness, boredom, in the
experience of most non-linguists, and opens up the possibility
for a different experience of language analysis.

If anyone has  interest in pursuing this line of conversation,
I hope you will contact me via my personal email. It's hard to
know what others in the ATEG community, which is new to me,
want or expect from the discussion.

Judy





Judith Diamondstone  (732) 932-7496  Ext. 352
Graduate School of Education
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
10 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1183

Eternity is in love with the productions of time - Wm Blake