Re: Subject / Object / ?

On Mon, 13 Sep 2004 17:34:32 +0200, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:

>Quoting Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>:
>
>> En réponse à Andreas Johansson :
>>
>> >* This is not a rhetorical question. I am genuinely curious as to why
>> > you apparently see a need for primary schools to teach kids how to
>> > analyze sentences in their native language.
>>
>> Because that's the only way to make them able to reliably and
>> consistently build and understand complex sentences in their own
>> language. I remember reading the results of a survey that proved that
>> illiteracy was caused in part by a lack of teaching the basic analytic
>> tools necessary to analyse sentences in one's native tongue. It was in
>> dead tree form, so I don't have a link to it (nor do I have it here).
>> Note that I'm referring to illiteracy here (the inability to understand
>> texts of medium to high complexity), not analphabetism, which has other
>> causes.
>
>I must say this much surprises me. Particularly since I know plenty of
>people who could not grammatically dissect the simplest sentence (altho
>they likely could for a while during their school years), yet can read and
>write texts of highish complexity perfectly well.
>
>It also seems a priori unexpected - why would not one's subconscious grasp
>of one's native grammar suffice, when it clearly does for speaking? At
>least I "say" what I'm going to write in my head as I type it, which makes
>it hard for me to believe the mental processes involved in the production
>of written and spoken texts are _that_ different.
Spoken language is different from written language.

>> If your goal is just to allow all children to write SMS messages on their
>> mobiles, then you're right that this is unnecessary. I personally think
>> literacy should be a little higher than that.
>
>I would too, but I had never in my life suspected that that sort of
>conscious grammatical understanding would be necessary or even
>particularly helpful for achieving it.
I've experienced this. In the gymnasium school (age 15 to 20), we had a
very tough German teacher, that is, a teacher who teached us much of
grammar, quite exceptional here in Switzerland (at least by impressionistic
comparison to Linguistics university students). When we got a written text
back, it used to be all red because of his corrections, even if it were
written by the best students. He made us analyze thoroughly our errors,
syntactical errors, logical errors, stylistical errors, errors of word
choice, etc. We all hated it, but the awareness of syntactical ambiguities
proved to be very useful for the better domination of the written language.

I believe that the same effect can be achieved by years of reading practice.

g_0ry@_^s:
j. 'mach' wust

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