Re: OT-ish: txt - Could it replace Standard Written English?

At 12:24 PM -0500 3/6/03, John Cowan wrote:
>English teachers used to have a theory of English grammar that
>they taught.  When scientific linguistics arose as a discipline, it
>pointed out that the existing grammar theory was N.F.G. and seriously
>misrepresented what English was all about.  English teachers stopped
>teaching it, and have been waiting for a replacement for decades now.
>Linguists, for reasons of their own, have not been forthcoming.
I've been thinking about this for a while now. I don't think that the lack of
grammar instruction in public schools can be laid at the feet of professional
linguists.[1] The grammar instruction which English teachers provide is
influenced by the instruction they received in their own grammar pedagogy
courses preparatory to their becoming teachers. If their instructors were
linguists, then there is a possibility that the instruction they received was
linguistically informed. More likely though, they received instruction from
some junior faculty member who had to teach the dreaded Grammar Course instead
of, say, The Victorian Novel because the senior faculty foisted it on them. So
the quality of instruction may or may not have been adequate to begin with, and
it probably wasn't very enthusiastic or engaging.

Newly minted English teachers come to the classroom and face the reality of teaching
in public schools, something which no amount of student teaching could prepare
them for. They are likely to face apathy (at best) or hostility (at worst)
towards grammar from their students. Since their own experience is likely to
have been less than positive, they may just as soon teach _The Old Man and the
Sea_ as the difference between restrictive and non-restrictive relative
clauses. Even if they do teach grammar, students block it out as being boring
and irrelevant (because everyone knows that grammar is boring). Students who
take accelerated and AP courses are presumed to already know grammar, and so
they are never given any refresher units on it. Instead, these students are
drilled on writing essays and in the exegesis of the Received Texts
(_Huckleberry Finn_, _The Old Man and the Sea_, _Of Mice and Men_, etc) to
prepare them for the AP tests. Grammar falls by the wayside.

Dirk

[1] If there is such a lack; a quick poll of my almost 70 students suggest there's
a lot more grammar teaching out there than we think.
--
Dirk Elzinga                                               Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"It is important not to let one's aesthetics interfere with the appreciation of
fact." - Stephen Anderson

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