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)• chancock@albany.edu

• 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 counter-productive. 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 mid-century 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 non-standard 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