Is Traditional grammar becoming unpopular?

[treestarfae]

This article explains a bit about linguistics impacting traditional grammar.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2004/dec/15/20041215-085728-5559r/

[treestarfae]

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3325/is_4_7/ai_n29059153/?tag=content;col1

[8filltheheart]

This article explains a bit about linguistics impacting traditional grammar.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2004/dec/15/20041215-085728-5559r/

 

Interesting article and one of the concerns that came to mind last night but which I thought I had actually misunderstood in the other thread.

 

I do find it bizarre though that her article is rife with these punctuation errors:

As a result of linguists' refusal to be prescriptive, non-standard usages have crept into areas where they would not have been allowed 30 years ago, and have become accepted.

 

It wasn't just once; she did it repeatedly. Is that linguistic pausing vs. strict grammarian punctuation?

 

I guess I am a die-hard grammar traditionalist (though I never even knew that until today. :tongue_smilie:)

[Matryoshka]

I particularly like this quote, which pretty much sums it up, I think:

 

Attempts were made to incorporate T-G into elementary and high school curricula. But educators and writers of school textbooks had missed the point that T-G was a theory of grammar, and not a pedagogical tool. Using T-G to teach elementary school students grammar was like using the General Theory of Relativity to teach school children about gravity.

 

 

I actually love Steven Pinker's books (and he's a Chomsky-ite through and through). I love linguistics, and I love analyzing language. I just don't think it's the place to start teaching kids the foundations of grammar. And as the article points out, linguistics is a social science, and as such defies simple "right" and "wrong" answers.

 

I've been wondering where this puts me as a descriptivist and someone that thinks that Chomsky makes some good points, and simultaneously as someone who thinks basic grammar "rules" should be taught, or we will descend into chaos. :tongue_smilie:

 

For example, I think sentences like "The student who brings a knife to school to peel their orange may be expelled" should be fine - the English language needs an indefinite/neuter singular pronoun, and "their" has been used as one since as early as the 1500's. If "your" can be both singular and plural, why not "their"?? I also think "It's me" should become some kind of exception to the rule - no one actually says "It's I" in English, predicate nominative or not.

 

I also think that once one knows the "rules", one can decide where it's prudent to break them (especially in a more literary than academic context - newspapers fall under the latter for me, btw) - but that's different than saying there should be no rules at all. (And I think the rules should be updated to be based on English, not on Latin - let's split us some infinitives! :D). And I don't much like universal rules based on a particular language's syntax. If there's a "universal grammar" (which I can mostly buy, actually), then we need more universal rules, and I think the traditional definitions of parts of speech are more universal than the structural definitions (at least as I've seen them defined here over the past day or so).

 

This makes me eclectic? Schizophrenic? Able to argue both sides of the argument? ;)

 

Fascinating article - thanks for posting!

Edited December 9, 2010 by matroyshka

[Matryoshka]

I do find it bizarre though that her article is rife with these punctuation errors:

 

It wasn't just once; she did it repeatedly. Is that linguistic pausing vs. strict grammarian punctuation?

 

 

Seems like she is a victim of the problem described in her article. :D

[johnandtinagilbert]

I'll have to read this when the dc are sleeping, but at first response to the title of this thread....popular smopular...phonics hasn't been popular for a long time and look at the decline in literacy. For me, grammar falls to the same place -- popular or not, there is merit beyond rules.

 

FWIW, it also falls in the same place for my adopted daughter, who just finished a remedial grammar class. She sure wishes she would have learned traditional grammar now that she's in college and her discovery that most people her age and younger lack the articulate conversation she's observed amongst those of us who actually had a grammar teacher.

 

Looking forward to the article. Thanks for posting!

[stripe]

I also think "It's me" should become some kind of exception to the rule - no one actually says "It's I" in English, predicate nominative or not.

 

Well, some people do. Grammar freaks included. My sister-in-law, for one -- but English is not her first language.

 

I, however, have trouble saying it and not feeling ridiculous. I have moved to using "I" with a verb (such as "Who's there?" / "I am" to avoid it), on occasion.

 

I'm not sure when grammar has been popular in the last 40 or 50 years.

[mcconnellboys]

I don't know enough about how the teaching of education has evolved to know if the TG doctrine resulted in the dropping of grammar almost altogether in most schools across our land. I do know that linguistics is non-judgmental and I can understand this attitude of 'I'm okay, you're okay' having crept into schools over time to show our tolerance for all ethnic groups regarding language usage.

 

Today, with the rapid advancement of technology, our living language is undergoing great change and modification to make it compatible with that technology. I don't know what our language usage will look like in ten years as a result of this.

 

Any living, dynamic language is going to be in a constant state of flux. We can't expect language usage to remain the same forever. That said, I believe a lot of the conventions being dropped may result in confusion as we go forward, and that may make business dealings more difficult, as well as personal dealings....

[Matryoshka]

Well, some people do. Grammar freaks included. My sister-in-law, for one -- but English is not her first language.

 

 

Yes, but it's not natural - it's people who have learned the "rule" and then apply it to be "correct". The fact that you (and I) feel ridiculous using it in spoken langauge in spite of knowing the "rule" says something. Since it is not used by anyone who is not artificially correcting, I think the "rule" should just earn itself an excpetion.

 

(Ironically, my non-language oriented, horrible speller, engineer dh will correct the kids on this every time they do it. It must've been drilled into his head at some point!)

 

OTOH, I think that sentences like "Jim and me went to the store." and "Tom gave the present to Bob and I." are abominations. :lol: The latter is usually a hypercorrection of someone who's been told the former is wrong and is overcompensating, not because it sounds natural to them (until they've done it wrong so many times that it doesn't). :glare:

Edited December 9, 2010 by matroyshka

[Momling]

I think its ridiculous. Since when have linguists had so much power? Blaming linguistics for causing "a generation of children" to not know standard conventions for writing is like blaming biologists for a population decline or blaming sociologists for a rise in crime. Linguists describe language, they have nothing to do with educational policy... I've never met any theoretical linguist who believes that standard writing conventions shouldn't be followed.

 

I've gone to syntax talks with Chomsky and he's not all that charismatic. He did amazing things in linguistics, without a doubt, but the only theoretical linguist I've ever met who had an interest in education is a syntactician from UMass -- David Pesetsky. Here's a report from him on reading instruction...

 

 

A large literature exists that denies everything I have said. This literature —not the hundred years of linguistics that I have just described — drives many of our society's most important decisions about language, including decisions about how to teach children to read. This literature claims that language is not an instinct. Language, in this view, is a tool, something created by people in order to communicate — just as a bicycle was created in order to get places, and a hammer was created for driving nails.

The appeal of this view is easy to see. It is natural to think that language exists because people want to communicate. Communication, after all, is one of the main uses to which we put language. (Others include organizing our own thoughts, as when we talk to ourselves, and giving vent to our emotions.) Reinforcing this alternative view is the fact that some aspects of language really do serve the purposes of communication. For example, as a language user, you can tinker with some aspects of language. You can make up new words and new expressions — "outsource," "downsize," "grow the economy." But as we've just seen, many of the most interesting aspects of language do not fit this folk view of language-as-tool. Our innate knowledge of speech sounds, for example, was nobody's invention, and may even predate language in our evolutionary history.

What happens when the view of language as tool comes to dominate public discourse? One thing that happens is a blurring of the boundaries between language and other communicative systems. In the area of education, this blurring of the boundaries permitted the rise of a dominant orthodoxy called "Whole Language," which has been much in the news over the past year.

Whole Language starts with the idea that the "really important" properties of language are its uses as a vehicle for communication. Consequently, the fact that all human beings possess language is attributed to nothing more than our intense need to communicate with each other. (If you're thinking that this view does not account for any of the evidence I just discussed, you're right.) Now the argument turns to reading and writing. Why should kids have difficulty learning to read when they don't have any difficulty learning to talk?

To a linguist, the most likely answer to this question is obvious. Speaking is the result of innate capacities — our "Language Instinct." Written language is a technology that makes use of this instinct, by providing a notation for the structures of speech. But there is little evidence that written language itself arises from any instinct. Except, perhaps, for newspaper editors, we have no "writing instinct," no "reading instinct." Consequently, from the standpoint of linguistics, it is likely that most children will need to be taught to read in a way entirely alien to language acquisition. Learning to read, unlike learning to speak, is expected to look like the acquisition of technological skill — the ability to mentally translate marks on a page into speech. This view dovetails precisely with what cognitive psychologists have learned about reading, and is beginning to find support in the best recent studies of actual classrooms.

To a Whole Language educator, who disregards most of the lessons of linguistics, the answers are quite different. Whole Language starts from the premise that there is no special Language Instinct. Consequently, learning to read and learning to write should be a lot like learning to talk. From a Whole Language perspective, all communication systems are equal, and should be learnable in much the same way. Therefore, Whole Language finds little value in systematicity or explicitness in reading instruction. Instead, the entire focus is on getting kids enthusiastic about reading, making them "feel like" readers, and showing them at most an assemblage of "strategies" that might clue them into the reading process. Whole Language gambles everything on the hypothesis that children, placed in the right environment, will learn to read in the same way they learned to speak.

Consider the following, from a recent brochure of the National Council of Teachers of English, aimed at parents: "We used to think . . . that in order for children to learn to read and write whole texts, they had to learn the smallest parts of language first. Because of this 'part-to-whole' belief, it made sense to first teach kids letter names, then 'sounds' the letters make, then introduce them to simple words and short sentences. We spent a good deal of time working on what we thought were prerequisite skills to reading and writing. Though many children learn to read and write under these conditions, many did not. In fact, such instruction made it difficult for most children to understand the joy and benefit of reading and writing — to make them lifetime readers and writers." Now comes the clincher. "We now know that learning to read and learning to write are a lot like learning to talk. We would think it funny if parents hovered over their newborn's crib chanting the sounds of language one at a time. Parents are not trying to teach language, but rather trying to communicate with their child."

Reading this, I ask: Where is the response to any of the evidence from linguistics? In fact there is none. Yet linguistics is very relevant to the discussion. For example, we know why parents don't need to "chant the sounds of language" to their infants. It is because their children were born knowing these sounds. There is no evidence that anything comparable is true of letters of the alphabet. Children are born knowing the sounds of the world's languages, but they are not born knowing even which side of the book is up!

Unfortunately, I have yet to find any Whole Language publication that even addresses this fundamental disparity between what we know about language and the wishful thinking that lies at the foundation of the Whole Language movement. If this disparity were purely an intellectual curiosity, there might be no reason for others to pay attention to the issue. But in fact, difficulties faced by many schoolchildren learning to read are widely attributed to the growing influence of Whole Language on schools throughout the English-speaking world. If these conclusions are true, it is important to learn why they might be true. Linguistics provides a piece of the answer.

Once the news gets out, what do we do next? Well, linguists are not the ones to answer that question. Linguistics is relevant to the conceptual foundations of the debate, but linguists must pass the baton to others when it comes time to make practical decisions. Nonetheless, from what I can tell, the lessons of linguistics provide exactly the right baton. The view of language provided by linguists fits exactly with the view of reading provided by cognitive psychologists, which in turn accords quite beautifully with the classroom results emerging from the most recent educational studies.

So how could Whole Language happen in the first place? Who's at fault? Unfortunately, linguists have to shoulder their share of the blame. Despite the obvious relevance of linguistics to public issues like reading, linguists have rarely made their results accessible to the public, or taken the time to enter these debates. With the publication of Pinker's book and others, this state of affairs is beginning to change. Right now, there is considerable turmoil about reading instruction in the press and in government, with state legislatures passing laws that mandate changes in teacher education — laws that often mandate an alternative to Whole Language called "phonics." Phonics —systematic instruction in the relation between written language and the sounds of spoken language — can be a rational alternative to the problems of Whole Language. But I have some worries. Can laws favoring one form of instruction substitute for the scientific knowledge that should be the real motivation for this choice? I suspect not. I suspect that a truly productive revolution in teaching will require the closing of the gap between scientists' knowledge and popular knowledge about language and reading. This will take time and, of course, efforts by journalists as well as scientists and educators.

 

http://www.asne.org/kiosk/reports/97reports/literacy/Literacy5.html

[Crimson Wife]

I think its ridiculous. Since when have linguists had so much power? Blaming linguistics for causing "a generation of children" to not know standard conventions for writing is like blaming biologists for a population decline or blaming sociologists for a rise in crime. Linguists describe language, they have nothing to do with educational policy.l

 

:iagree::iagree:

If any one group is to blame for the deplorable state of grammar (non-)instruction in government-run schools, it's the "whole language" promoters in the nation's colleges of education.

 

The linguists are up there in their Ivory Towers debating their field's esoteric "hot button" topics du jour and not bothering about what gets taught at the K-12 level.

[stripe]

Yes, but it's not natural - it's people who have learned the "rule" and then apply it to be "correct".

Right, and in the case of my SIL who is hardly a grammar freak but because she is not a native speaker, she learned through "rules," some of which [in other cases] are incorrect such as mispronunciations, and doesn't have a "feel" for what is "natural" for American English, since speaking English is only somewhat natural to her.

 

The fact that you (and I) feel ridiculous using it in spoken langauge in spite of knowing the "rule" says something.

I agree. I also remember the entire class in 11th grade English (about the only time I learned English grammar formally) being shocked to learn that "snuck" is not the past of "sneak."

 

OTOH, I think that sentences like "Jim and me went to the store." and "Tom gave the present to Bob and I." are abominations. :lol:

The former doesn't bother me much in spoken English (it does in written!), but using "I" like that -- or myself! -- and incorrectly using "whom" when it should be "who" (Whom is at the door?) fill me with dread. However, I've been observing the slow takeover of "myself" since I was in high school.

[Spy Car]

 

I agree. I also remember the entire class in 11th grade English (about the only time I learned English grammar formally) being shocked to learn that "snuck" is not the past of "sneak."

 

 

:lol::lol::lol:

 

Your post led me to the discovery of a "fun" website (for traditional prescriptivists anyway :D) of common "errors" in Enlish usage.

 

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.html#errors

 

Bill

[justamouse]

 

OTOH, I think that sentences like "Jim and me went to the store." and "Tom gave the present to Bob and I." are abominations. :lol:

 

In this we totally, 100% agree. :001_smile: The same with 'snuck' although I would say that on a board, and in conversation, but not writing. And I would use it in dialogue, but not in narration.

Edited December 9, 2010 by justamouse

[Paige]

So are people saying that many schools no longer teach grammar?

 

They don't teach much more than the parts of speech around here. I asked some people what their 3rd grade children were learning in grammar this year and the answers I got were all things like, "the difference between narrative and persuasive writing," "writing personal narratives," "story elements," "writing responses to literature and dictionary skills," with a smattering of punctuation. :001_huh: I specifically used the word grammar and not language arts or reading because I wanted my son to be ready for the test he has to take in the spring and make sure we were covering everything. I don't see how these kids can be writing personal narratives when they haven't even learned how to write a good sentence. I guess a linguist would say they have all the skills they need because they can speak, but that's not my style. I want my kids to do it "right" and by right, I mean the way that will get them an A in a college English class and convey to others that they have been educated about what is the culturally accepted way to speak and write.

Edited December 9, 2010 by Paige

[LittleIzumi]

:lol::lol::lol:

 

Your post led me to the discovery of a "fun" website (for traditional prescriptivists anyway :D) of common "errors" in Enlish usage.

 

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.html#errors

 

Bill

 

Oh, that's wonderful. "As less as possible!" :lol::lol::lol:

 

I actually have a book about this, called, "The Language Instinct." I never thought about applying the theory to how I homeschool. Hmmmm. I should break that out again. One problem of mine is that dd is an incredibly visual/holistic learner. She DOES learn through the whole language approach. I have tried to teach her phonics rules for over a year. Not a single one sticks. But she is read to and read to and read to and suddenly something clicks and she jumps to the next reading level all at once. That ruins some of my theories :tongue_smilie:. (She can do MadLibs though!) Her sister is learning through phonics, but not my oldest.

[Spy Car]

 

Your post led me to the discovery of a "fun" website (for traditional prescriptivists anyway :D) of common "errors" in Enlish usage.

 

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.html#errors

 

Bill

 

Nice going dude! :D

 

Bill

[Rosie_0801]

I've never met any theoretical linguist who believes that standard writing conventions shouldn't be followed.

 

 

Maybe because if you don't follow them, you don't get good enough marks to become a theoretical linguist...

 

 

Rosie

[Trish]

Well, some people do. Grammar freaks included. My sister-in-law, for one -- but English is not her first language.

 

I, however, have trouble saying it and not feeling ridiculous. I have moved to using "I" with a verb (such as "Who's there?" / "I am" to avoid it), on occasion.

 

I'm not sure when grammar has been popular in the last 40 or 50 years.

 

When someone calls the house and asks for Mrs. Trish, I have always responded "This is she," -- now, maybe because I've always considered it phone etiquette I don't think of it as sounding odd. But do other people say, "This is me?" Or "this is Mrs. ZZZZ?" Or just, "Speaking?" To me "speaking" sounds even odder than "This is she."

[Paige]

I say, "I am Mrs X" when the caller asks for me.

[Mommyfaithe]

Interesting article and one of the concerns that came to mind last night but which I thought I had actually misunderstood in the other thread.

 

I do find it bizarre though that her article is rife with these punctuation errors:

 

It wasn't just once; she did it repeatedly. Is that linguistic pausing vs. strict grammarian punctuation?

 

I guess I am a die-hard grammar traditionalist (though I never even knew that until today. :tongue_smilie:)

 

:D me too.

[stripe]

Or just, "Speaking?" To me "speaking" sounds even odder than "This is she."

I say "Speaking" no matter who they ask for. Especially if they ask for Mr. X. Heh. Just kidding.

 

How about "That's me, partner!" or "Yes?"

 

Or a sultry "You are!"

[catholicmommy]

:iagree::iagree:

If any one group is to blame for the deplorable state of grammar (non-)instruction in government-run schools, it's the "whole language" promoters in the nation's colleges of education.

 

The linguists are up there in their Ivory Towers debating their field's esoteric "hot button" topics du jour and not bothering about what gets taught at the K-12 level.

 

:iagree::iagree: and that's exactly what i thought when I read the article in the OP!!

[catholicmommy]

I say "Speaking" no matter who they ask for. Especially if they ask for Mr. X. Heh. Just kidding.

 

How about "That's me, partner!" or "Yes?"

 

Or a sultry "You are!"

 

:lol::lol::lol: i like the third option!

[EKS]

I do find it bizarre though that her article is rife with these punctuation errors:

 

It wasn't just once; she did it repeatedly. Is that linguistic pausing vs. strict grammarian punctuation?

 

 

 

In her defense, someone at the newspaper may have inserted them for her.

[8filltheheart]

In her defense, someone at the newspaper may have inserted them for her.

 

Ahhhh......the irony of that concept!! Imagine an article ridiculing journalists and editors as not knowing grammar and having an editor insert improper punctuation throughout said article. :lol: I'm not sure which idea is more pathetic!

[8filltheheart]

I say "Speaking" no matter who they ask for. Especially if they ask for Mr. X. Heh. Just kidding.

 

How about "That's me, partner!" or "Yes?"

 

Or a sultry "You are!"

 

I'm usually struck silent in awe. ;) In our house, 99.9% of all phone calls belong to my pre-teen and teens. When I finally get around to realizing that the phone call is really for me, I'm sure the person on the other end must think I am dumb! :lol:

[johnandtinagilbert]

:iagree::iagree:

If any one group is to blame for the deplorable state of grammar (non-)instruction in government-run schools, it's the "whole language" promoters in the nation's colleges of education.

 

The linguists are up there in their Ivory Towers debating their field's esoteric "hot button" topics du jour and not bothering about what gets taught at the K-12 level.

Yup.