P.S. I admire what Bill McCleary is suggesting in his proposal, but
I'm wondering what, if any grammatical terms students would be
expected to be able to use. I would love to see the curriculum for
grades 4-9 developed in detail, but I can't picture what he has in
mind. In one sense, that curriculum could deal exclusively with
linguistic principles, and totally exclude analytical ability on the
part of the students. Which is more important, that students be
taught morphology, or that they be taught to identify subjects and
verbs? Does what Bill is proposing include both? That would be great.


In the above PS to an e-mail commenting on other issues, Ed said that
he might be interested in a Language Awareness curriculum such as I
suggested if he could be sure that it included teaching students
about certain grammatical concepts such as verbs and subjects. Many
of you have already written to request the article by Larry Andrews,
so you know something of what Language Awareness involves. However,
it might be good to use Ed's comment within a concrete example.

Let me preface the example, though, by saying that the makers of a
curriculum specify what they want the outcomes to be. If they want
students to be able to reliably identify subjects and verbs by a
certain age, they say so and then at some point must specify how that
might be done, given their educational philosophies and what they
know about students. And if no materials or methods exist for doing
the task, they get someone to invent whatever is necessary. We hope
that the desired outcomes are within the capabilities of the
students, and we understand that if teachers don't know the material
themselves or how to teach it, we must help them out with teachers'
manuals and in-service training. We also understand that teachers
will not adopt anew idea unless they are convinced that it is
desirable and teachable, so we must be willing to "sell" the
curriculum to them.

So, let us assume that, by the end of sixth grade, we want students
to be able to identify subjects and verbs and certain other
linguistic entities. Following the principles of Language Awareness,
we want an authentic situation in which to to teach students do this.
It need not involve all aspects of our objective, but it should
involve some of them.

An obvious answer that comes to mind is dictionary study. It is
widely believed among teachers that students should be able to use a
dictionary efficiently. Furthermore, there are dictionaries written
especially for elementary schools, so that we can expect the task of
learning to use them to be within the capabilities of the students.
(We're trusting the dictionary people on this, so I hope they're
right.) For my example, I will use _The American Heritage Children's
Dictionary_. I think there is a Merriam-Webster for elementary
schools, but if so I've misplaced mine.

We study this dictionary and say "Oh, wow, look at all the linguistic
stuff we could teach! Phonology! Morphology! Syntax! Semantics! Is
this heaven on earth or what?" Then we wonder if it will meet the
goals of our good friend Ed, which are of course goals that we think
we agree with, understanding that at the moment we know almost
nothing about the capabilities of elementary students to learn
concepts like subjects and verbs. (At least, I don't.) We can see
that all words in the dictionary have grammatical labels such as noun
or verb, and a few subcategories such as past participle. So using
this dictionary does involve understanding parts of speech but not
parts of the sentence. Well, that's not bad. We can find other
avenues to teach parts of the sentence and, we hope, reinforce
lessons from dictionary study at the same time.

So now we bring Language Awareness into play as we figure out ways to
incorporate dictionary study into the curriculum. Thus we do not plan
to do dictionary study in isolation from the actual need to use a
dictionary. We might say that we should advocate that students be
taught to jump up a consult a dictionary whenever they encounter a
new word. But then we realize that this violates language awareness
because it's bogus--no normal adult, including teachers, does any
such thing unless, perhaps, the word is key to understanding the
material being read.

So we say, let's do it in the context of vocabulary study. After all,
teachers often give students 20 words to learn each week and require
them to look up the words in the dictionary and use them in a
sentence. But then someone among us says, "Oh, ick! Barf! We are not
going to include in our curriculum the absolute worst way to teach
vocabulary ever imagined!"

Thus maybe we look around and find better methods of vocabulary
study, and we incorporate dictionary study in one of those. One
approach is to teach words in clusters that are related in some way.
So perhaps we use reading assignments that involve a semi-technical
subject like sailboating and build dictionary use around
understanding the cluster of sailing-related terminology used in the
reading (gunwale, spinnaker, foremast, tack, navigate, rudder, keel,
etc.). This can be done before the reading, during the reading, or
afterward--depending on the need to understand the vocabulary in
order to understand the reading material. Students will learn to use
the dictionary as they actually use it to accomplish a task.

Now we want to go back to the dictionary, study the parts of a
definition as given for elementary students (fewer, obviously, than
in a dictionary for adults), and build an understanding of those
concepts into our curriculum. Fortunately, we find that this
particular dictionary has a nice introduction explaining each part of
a definition, from the principle of dividing into syllables to some
very basic stuff on word history. Unfortunately we find, to our
amazement, that the introduction every part of a definition EXCEPT
THE PARTS OF SPEECH! So we have to figure out how to explain that
subject ourselves and then suggest how teachers might actually teach
this aspect of a definition. It shouldn't be hard: we would probably
have students look at the words in the actual text and figure out how
words like spinnaker and gunwale differ from words like tack and
navigate.

Well, I see that this e-mail has gone on much too long. Anyway,
that's my example of how the language leg of the English tripod can
be taught with the principles of language awareness. The method can
teach anything within language that students are capable of learning.

Bill
--
William J. McCleary
Livonia, NY

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