Transcript Dowload PowerPoint

Non-Remedial approaches to
Grammar: Competence focused
grammar instruction in a stretch
model course at UAlbany
• Craig Hancock
• Director, Writing and Reading
Educational Opportunity Program
• University at Albany (SUNY)
• [email protected]
• When Glenn Beck “parted company” with Fox
News in June of last year, he took his Glenn
Beckness with him.”
James Parker, “Glenn Beck in Exile”
Atlantic Monthly June 2012
• He took his tears, and his chalkboards, and his
patriotic unction. He took his world-historical
sweep and his zodiac of personal demons. He
took his edifying projects and his long-haul
feuds, his hobbyhorses and hobgoblins. He
took his face, his voice, the vials of his wrath,
the quivering curds of his indignation—he
took it all, and he left the network. Gone!
• There was no replacement for Glenn Beck.
None was possible. The portal simply resealed
itself, and there we were again—we the
people, the watchers of Fox, back with the
everyday lineup of guffers and bluffers.
How did we get where we are?
• Remedial courses have a history rooted in
open-admission policies of the late sixties and
seventies. They countered criticism that
college would be a “revolving door” or a place
of lowered standards. They would free other
teachers up to teach legitimate college level
courses.
• Now we are faced with the uncomfortable
realization that these course may be counterproductive. Rather than helping students, they
may be impeding graduation.
Possible explanations
There is a stigma to non-credit courses. Students
are demeaned by the placement and lack
motivation.
We are at the mercy of placement instruments that
are not fully predictive.
Extending the time a student needs to graduate
increases the possibility that family, health, and job
problems may intercede.
Faculty are underpaid, underappreciated, and
overworked.
Another Possibility
• “Remedial” approaches to literacy are
philosophically oriented in the wrong
direction.
• Rather than remediate deficiencies,
instruction should focus on the construction
of competence.
• Though they show up at the level of the
sentence, most writing problems are not
problems with the sentence, but problems in
the construction of text. In order to solve
them, you need a text based view of the
sentence. You cannot do this with an
oversimplified view of text or an
oversimplified view of the sentence.
• You should not treat the sentence as if it were
a neutral form and you should not treat the
sentence as if it were isolated from the
sentences around it and from the ungoing
construction of a text. You should not
oversimplify text, as happens in curriculums
that center around the five paragraph theme.
A critique of the progressive position
• Literacy does not happen solely from
engagement, perhaps least of all with
students who have been significantly
unengaged over their lifetime. Engagement
may be a important component of success,
but it is not in and of itself sufficient.
• What is needed is a much deeper
understanding of literacy. If we are to serve as
mentors for students aiming at sophisticated
goals, we need to understand what goes into
the success they are aiming for. We can’t
assume it will simply rub off.
General Principle 1: Start with the end
in mind
• Establish a foundation for excellence.
• Don’t settle for short term expediency at the
expense of long-term gain.
• Aim for an understanding the student can
build on.
• Focus not on eliminating error, but on building
competence.
General Principle 2: Stimulate a
genuine exploration
• Find out what the student currently
understands.
• Challenge misconceptions.
• Embrace a genuine complexity.
Connect the sentence to text
• Both prescriptive (traditional) and formal
(structural and generative) grammars deal
with sentences in isolation.
• Functional, cognitive, and corpus approaches
to grammar orient the sentence to text.
Reorient attention to language as a
resource for meaning
• Language represents the world, including the
interior world of our thoughts and feelings.
• Language allows interaction.
• Language participates in the construction of
text.
• All three of these meta-functions are realized
at the level of the sentence.
• A drunk driver killed my dog just before
Christmas.
• My dog was killed by a drunk driver just
before Christmas.
• Just before Christmas, a drunk driver killed my
dog.
• The dog the drunk driver killed just before
Christmas was mine.
• The driver who killed my dog just before
Christmas is drunk.
• The driver who killed my dog just before
Christmas may have been drunk.
• It was my dog the drunk driver killed.
• It was just before Christmas that my dog was
killed.
• It was a drunk driver that killed my dog.
Texts are dialogic
• writing involves entering into a complex
conversation and making some sort of
contribution to that conversation on the basis
of our own unique perspective.
• To write well, it helps to be a good listener. It
helps to be able to summarize. Summary is
one of the most effective interventions for
improving writing.
Sentences as schematic structures
• To the cognitivists, schematization is “the
process of extracting the commonality
inherent in multiple experiences to arrive at a
conception representing a higher level of
abstraction” (Langacker, 17).
• What that means, in essence, is that the
meaningful forms of language—word, phrase,
clause, sentence, paragraph, text—grow out
of use. Language is what it is because of what
it does.
• The form of a well- constructed sentence
makes certain kinds of meanings possible, and
those meanings will continue to be available
when we replace one set of words for another.
Pattern sentence
• Charlie made his way up the stairs.
Additional sentences
• Sally pushed her way through the crowd.
• Paul lied his way out of trouble.
• The young boy whistled his way past the
cemetery.
• He cheated his way to the top.
• She sang her way into my heart.
• She cooked her way into my bed.
Five paragraph theme as schematic
structure
• The five paragraph theme is useful precisely
because it makes certain kinds of meanings
possible.
• The five paragraph theme is limited precisely
because it makes a very limited range of
meanings possible.
• Good writers and very good writers are good
precisely because they are comfortable with a
wide range of forms and are practiced at
finding forms suitable to a wide range of
contexts and purposes.
Metadiscourse
• Metadiscourse is quite simply discourse about
discourse. It’s the places in the text where the
writer talks directly to the reader about the
text as a text. Sophisticated writers are aware
of their text as a text and are aware of the
need to orient their readers.
Explicit versus implied meaning
• Traditionally, English teachers tend to value
texts that need to be interpreted more than
they value texts in which meaning is overt and
explicit. Meaning happens quite differently in
nonfiction texts than it does in what we
normally think of as literature.
• Students have very little practice with this
kind of reading.
Directive for nonfiction texts
• Find the place where the writer tells you what
the text is about.
• In question form: Is there a place where the
writer tells you what the text is about?
• What do you see as the most important
sentence? The most important paragraph?
Sentence pairs for metadiscourse
• She spoke honestly.
• Honestly, she spoke.
•
•
He fired several workers for example.
For example, he fired several workers.
• He wore two rings on the other hand.
• On the other hand, he wore two rings.
Sentence combining
• Sentence combining is an intervention that
has been shown to improve writing. It seems
to work best when accompanied by a
conversation about the relative effectiveness
of choices.
• Sentence combining gives practice in the
different ways information can be added into
a sentence.
• Sentence combining gives students practice in
loading information into a sentence.
Lexical density
• Lexical density is roughly the information
density of a text.
• You can measure it in terms of the number of
lexical terms per clause OR in the ratio of
lexical to non-lexical terms within the text.
Lexical versus function words
• All words have lexical meaning and all carry
grammatical meaning, but the balance differs
substantially.
• Nouns, verb, adjectives, and adverbs—the open
class words in the language—carry largely lexical
meaning.
• Other terms—pronouns, prepositions,
determiners, verb auxiliaries, conjunctions and
the like, the largely closed class words—carry
more weight in terms of the grammar.
Speech versus writing
• What we know from the corpus grammars—
from grammars built out of a large body of
texts—is that writing is lexically more dense
than speech
• Within writing, journalistic prose and
academic writing are far more lexically dense
than fiction.
Sample sentence
• “Ironically, this high tech behavioral revolution
is rooted in the work of a mid-century
psychologist once maligned as morally
bankrupt, even fascist.”
David H Freedman, “The Perfected Self”
Atlantic Monthly, June 2012.
• Here it is again with the lexical terms in
boldface.
• “Ironically, this high tech behavioral
revolution is rooted in the work of a midcentury psychologist once maligned as
morally bankrupt, even fascist.”
• “Ironically” is metadiscourse.
• “This high-tech behavioral revolution” is a
complex noun phrase acting as “given.”
• “rooted,” the central verb, is highly
metaphoric. Probably passive.
• The sentence is about seven times more
lexically dense than typical speech. A great
deal of information is packed in a tight space.
Punctuation
• Punctuation is the most functional aspect of
traditional grammar.
• For end stop punctuation, most students have
only “complete thought” to guide them.
• For internal punctuation, most students have
only “put commas where you hear the
pauses.”
Alternative views
• A standard sentence requires at least one
independent clause. (Grammatical
independence, not semantic).
• A sentence is a run-on sentence if
independent clauses are joined in nonstandard ways.
• Rather than “pauses,” speech governs the
flow of discourse through intonation groups,
governed by the rise and fall of pitch.
Default places for intonation
•
•
•
•
•
After introductory word groups.
To set off non-restrictive modifiers.
To set off parenthetical insertions.
To mark boundaries in a compound series.
To mark the end of a clause and the beginning
of another.
• To mark adjectives as coordinate.
Sentence attention
• The most important decisions involve how
much information we place in a sentence and
how that information is organized.
• Punctuation decisions should work in
harmony with that.
• All sentences should work in harmony with
each other and in harmony with the unfolding
purposes of the text.
Some conclusions
• Too often, at all levels, we spend much energy
AVOIDING a deeper understanding of
language as a flexible resource for the
construction of meaning. We try to eliminate
error with as little metacognitive demand as
possible. These practices aim very low.
• The alternative is to deepen understanding of
how meaning happens in different kinds of texts.
• Knowledge about language is a useful resource
when the focus is on how language participates in
the construction of text based meaning.
• Critical reading and critical writing reinforce each
other. The greatest benefit comes from exploring
language when language is working well.
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Sources and Suggested Reading
Fish, Stanley. How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One. New York. Harper Collins. 2011
Graff, Gerald and Cathy Birkenstein. They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. 2nd
edition. New York. Norton. 2010
Graham, Steven and Delores Perin. Writing Next. Effective Strategies to Improve Writing in Adolescents in Middle and High School. New York.
Carnegie corporation. 2007.
Halliday, M.A.K. and C.M.I.M. Matthiessen. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 3rd edition. New York. Oxford. 2004.
Hancock, Craig. Meaning-Centered Grammar: An Introductory Text. London. Equinox. 2005.
“How Linguistics can Inform the Teaching of Writing.” In The Sage Handbook of Writing
Development. Eds. Roger Beard, Debra Myhill, Jeni Riley, and Martin Nystrand. Sage. London. 2009.
Pps. 194-208.
Langacker, Ronald W. Cognitive Grammar: a Basic Introduction. New York. Oxford. 2008
Locke, Terry. Ed. Beyond the Grammar Wars. New York. Routledge. 2010.
Myhill, Debra. URL for the Exeter Study http://education.exeter.ac.uk/projects.php?id=419
Schleppegrell, Mary J. “At Last: The Meaning in Grammar.” Research in the Teaching of English. 42 (1): 121-128. 2007