The Teachers Grammar Book - James Williams

teachers that are part of theory-based language arts classes strengthens the connecting pathways that build the neural network associated with language in general and writing in particular.

Cognitive grammar also helps us better understand why grammar instruction does not lead to improved writing. The ability to identify a noun or a verb is linked to a specific set of mental models and has, at best, only a tenuous relation through the neural network with the models associated with written discourse. There are indications that knowledge of grammar may be stored in an area quite far removed from knowledge of writing, stored in different parts of the network in a way that makes association difficult. Grammar instruction is likely to strengthen connecting associations in that part of the network responsible for grammar, but there is no evidence that it strengthens connections between these different parts of the network.

The implications for teaching are significant: “There is a sense in which writers, even experienced ones, must approach every writing task as though it were their first. They are faced with individual acts of creation each time they attempt to match a mental model of the discourse with the premises, paragraphs, examples, proofs, sentences, and words that comprise it” (Williams, 1993, p. 564). If cognitive grammar offers an accurate model of language, then the focus of our language arts classes must be on immersing students in language in all its richness and engaging them in examinations and discussions of content and form. Mastery of grammar and usage will follow.

APPLYING KEY IDEAS

1.In what ways does the rejection of grammar “rules” affect notions of correctness in language?

2.Parents and people who work with children know that the very young never seem to tire of repetitive interactions. How might this observation be linked to cognitive grammar?

3.Some people see important connections between critical thinking skills and the idea that thought is largely imagistic rather than verbal. Reflect on this notion, and then list some of the connections you see.

4.What are some of the pedagogical implications of cognitive grammar with respect to teaching grammar to students?

5.Although linguists focus almost exclusively on spoken language, teachers generally focus on writing, and historically grammar has been seen, incorrectly, as a means of improving writing skill. Does cognitive grammar have any implications for teaching reading and writing?

• Fred jumped off of the table.

Figure 7.1, put together by William Labov, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg, illustrates the major regional dialects in North America:

FIG. 7.1. Major North American dialects. Reprinted from The Atlas of North American English with permission.

HOW DO DIALECTS DEVELOP?

When we look at the history of language, we find that all languages fit into specific language families. The largest of these is Indo-European, which includes English, Spanish, German, French, Greek, Iranian, and Russian. About half of the world’s population speaks an Indo-European language as their first language.

Research has shown that Indo-European emerged in the Transcaucus area of eastern Anatolia about 6,000 years ago. Language itself predates Indo-Euro- pean by many thousands of years, but we have not been able to look sufficiently far into the past to trace its history beyond this point. Scholars generally agree that Cro-Magnon man used language 40,000 years ago, but there is significant disagreement over whether Neanderthals did. The question of when mankind

began using language is important because it can help us understand human evolution. As mentioned in the previous chapter, some scholars argue that language evolved from preexisting cognitive abilities, whereas others argue that no evidence exists for this view and that language seems to have emerged rapidly with the appearance of the Cro-Magnons. If the latter view is correct, language has a very short history.

There are approximately 5,000 different languages, so the fact that half the world’s population speaks some variation of Indo-European is remarkable. How could it achieve such a dominant place? Recent research on mitochondrial DNA (MDNA) may provide an answer. MDNA is present in every cell in the body, and it remains virtually unchanged (aside from random mutations) as it passes from mother to daughter. Geneticist Brian Sykes (2002) analyzed and quantified the mutations of this relatively stable type of DNA in an effort to learn more about human evolution, and his discoveries were significant. First, modern humans are not at all related to Neanderthals, as some anthropologists had claimed, and second, modern Europeans are descendants of one of seven women who lived at different times during the Ice Age.

Initially, the idea that today’s Europeans are all descended from such a small number of women may be hard to accept, but biologists know that most lines do not survive more than a few generations. Family trees tend to be narrow at the top and bottom, with a bulge in the middle. Only the most vigorous lines last. We therefore can describe the probable scenario for Indo-European. No doubt there were many unrelated languages in use 10,000 years ago, at the time of the great agricultural revolution, but these languages disappeared as the people speaking them died out. Those who spoke Indo-European, on the other hand, survived and spread throughout the Old World. Some of the migrants invaded Anatolia from the East around 2000 B.C. and established the Hittite kingdom, where the official language was among the first of the Indo-European languages to find its way into writing (Bryce, 2002).

All living languages change, and the migration of the original speakers of Indo-European from the Transcaucus would have accelerated the rate of change as bands separated and lost contact. Jacob Grimm—famous for authoring, with his brother Wilhelm, Grimms’Fairy Tales— proposed the “law of sound shift” in 1822. He argued that sets of consonants displace one another over time in predictable and regular ways. Soft voiced consonants in Indo-Eu- ropean—such as b, d, and g—shifted to the hard consonants p, t, and k in German. On the basis of Grimm’s law, it is possible to trace the evolution of certain words from Sanskrit, the oldest Indo-European language still in use, to their modern equivalents. For example, the Sanskrit word char (to pull) evolved into the English draw and the German tragen without changing meaning.

In most instances, language change is always subtle. Exceptions are related to advances in science and technology and to conquest. The word modem, for example, did not exist in the 1960s; it emerged owing to developments in computers. Prior to the Norman invasion of England in 1066, English contained few French terms, but it quickly absorbed hundreds of them afterward. Barring such events, language change is the result of children’s efforts to match the adult speech they hear around them. The match never is exact, and over time the minute variations between the language of children and the language of adults produces changes in lexicon, accent, and even grammar. Within a given group, the changes tend to be uniform; thus, everyone in that group is essentially using the same language at any point in time. Geographical barriers, however, inhibit uniform change whenever they prevent easy and frequent travel between any two groups. In cases where travel is infrequent, the language of groups with a common base dialect always is moving in different directions at any given time. As a result, significant dialectical differences may appear within three generations.

The United States and Britain provide an interesting illustration of the factors underlying dialect shift. The ocean separating the two countries ensured that a variety of differences would emerge, even though at one point American colonists spoke the same dialects as their English brethren. Some of the differences are related to vocabulary: Americans use the word truck for a vehicle designed for transporting goods, whereas Britons use the word lorry. Other such differences abound.

With regard to pronunciation, postvocalic r (as in car) has disappeared in much of England, but it is present throughout most of the United States (an exception, however, is the South, where postvocalic r no longer exists in many areas). Interestingly, the shift has not been in the direction one might expect. Language change in America has been slow and conservative, whereas it has occurred much faster in Britain. The reason is that during most of the 230 years since independence, America’s population was smaller and more isolated than the population of Britain. Large, cosmopolitan populations experience more rapid linguistic change than small, isolated populations. On this basis, one could assume that the rapid growth in the U.S. population since 1960 has resulted in significant linguistic changes and that these changes will accelerate in the years ahead, in light of projections that show the population doubling by 2030. The first assumption appears to be accurate.

Socioeconomic factors also affect dialects, but they play a more complex role. Every language has a prestige dialect associated with education and financial success. The prestige dialect in the United States is known as Standard English, and it is spoken by a large number of people. Those who do not grow

up speaking Standard English are motivated to learn it because it is the language of school and business. In this text, we have referred to formal Standard English as yet another dialect, associated most commonly with writing, especially academic writing, and members of the educated elite. The number of people who use formal Standard English when speaking is relatively small, but it nevertheless is the most widely accepted dialect. Given the importance of Standard and formal Standard dialects and their numerous differences from nonstandard dialects, we can understand why a significant portion of the U.S. population must be considered bidialectical.

Because SES is closely tied to level of education (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994), nonstandard speakers who are not fully bidialectical tend to be undereducated, and they also tend to be linked to the working-class poor. Education, however, is not an absolute indicator of dialect: Anecdotal evidence suggests that colleges and universities are more tolerant of nonstandard English than they used to be, and a number of factors have made public schools more sensitive to, and indeed more tolerant of, nonstandard English. As a result, it is fairly easy to observe college graduates—and, increasingly, college and public school faculty—uttering nonstandard expressions such as “I ain’t got no money” and “Where’s he at.”

STUDENTS AND DIALECTS

Students who want to succeed academically have good reasons to shift from their home dialect, and many do so. This motivation continues in the workplace, where employers deem nonstandard home dialects unacceptable for many positions. Language is perhaps the most important factor in defining who we are, and we judge and are judged continually on the basis of the language we use. Consequently, the desire to be identified with an elite group leads many people to drop their home dialect for Standard English, if not formal Standard English.

Changing one’s home dialect is not easy. First, there is the challenge of mastering a new set of linguistic features, such as vocabulary, accent, rhythm, and in some cases, grammar. Motivation appears to be the key. We note, for example, that when aspiring actors and actresses come to Los Angeles, the first thing many do is hire a diction coach to help them replace their New York or Southern or even Australian dialects. The efforts are nearly always successful: Few people remember that superstar Mel Gibson grew up in Australia and that he spoke Australian English in his first films. We also note how quickly dislocated teenagers shift dialects. When on the faculty at the University of North Carolina years ago, I worked with many students from the

Northeast who blended New York and Southern dialects within a few months of their arrival in Chapel Hill. Within a year, only traces of their home dialect remained. The desire of teenagers to conform to a peer group is well known and accounts for the rapid dialect shift.

But adopting a new dialect can be problematic when there is little motivation. We define ourselves and develop our identity through the interactions we have with those closest to us—our families and friends. Adopting the prestige dialect may make some students feel that they are losing their connection with home and community. At the university level, we often hear students talking about the difficulties they face when they go home for a break and find that the language they now use is different from what their parents and friends speak. Some feel that they are outsiders in their own homes. First-generation college students are especially prone to this experience. Although nearly all parents want their children to get a college education, ours is a very class-conscious society, and education that threatens to move children too far outside the boundaries of their communities is often seen as a threat by friends and family, in spite of their good intentions and best wishes.

This conflict is especially acute in our public schools owing to the huge influx of immigrants that began in the mid-1980s and continues today. Census Bureau data indicate that a large percentage of these immigrants are in the country illegally, which necessarily erects a barrier to any notion of assimilation. One result is that emotional (as well as fiscal) ties to the home country remain quite strong. Ghettoization is rampant as immigrants seek to find comfort in communities that perpetuate their home values, customs, ideals, and language.

The result is a serious dilemma for immigrants, our schools, and the nation. Some states, such as California, Arizona, and Colorado, have dismantled bilingual education programs, and in many other states the pressure to reclassify children as English proficient is so strong that it frequently occurs too soon. Consequently, becoming bilingual is a real challenge for the children of immigrants. On achieving bilingual proficiency, they then face an equally difficult challenge—Standard English. Those who do not master the prestige dialect are likely to remain insiders in their communities but outsiders with respect to the workplace and the broader society. Most people try to solve this problem by becoming bidialectical, over time learning how to use both dialects with varying degrees of success. Others may find jobs that do not require much proficiency in the prestige dialect.

Many of our students who speak Black English Vernacular (BEV) or Chicano English—the two most pervasive nonstandard dialects in the coun- try—resist using Standard English in school because they do not want to be identified with the white mainstream. Meanwhile, the white population is di-

minishing. Again turning to California, which often is an early indicator of trends, the population in 1970 was 80% white; by 1998, it had dropped to just over 50% (Reyes, 2001). What I have observed in many schools with a predominantly Hispanic student body is that some white students use Chicano English in order to fit in. Frequently, anyone—white, black, or Hispanic—who uses Standard English is ostracized by peers. The mysterious popularity of “gangster chic” has exacerbated this unfortunate situation.

The role language plays in personal and cultural identity has motivated numerous well-meaning educators to argue that our schools should not teach Standard English or expect students to master its conventions. In 1974, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), for example, passed a resolution proclaiming that students have a right to their own language and arguing that conventions of Standard English should be abolished because they are elitist and/or discriminatory.1 Although this resolution originally sought to address the difficulties of our black students whose home dialect is BEV, some teachers feel that it is even more relevant today, in the face of uncontrolled immigration from Mexico, Central America, and China that has altered the very foundation of public education by creating student populations at many schools that are 100% nonnative English speaking. The link between education and income, however, cannot be denied. Reed (2004) reported that Hispanics as a group have the lowest levels of educational achievement and also the highest poverty rate; about 25% of all Hispanics live at the poverty level, and for illegal immigrants the number is probably higher. Meanwhile, as Weir (2002) indicated, the rapid growth of the U.S. population has led to an equally rapid increase in competition and sorting, with education being the most significant factor in the growing disparity in income that is turning America into a two-tiered society. Given the important role language plays in academic success and thus in economic success, we have no choice but to recognize that students need to expand their repertoire of language skills and conventions, not reduce them, which necessarily would be the outcome of any serious effort to enforce the idea that students have a right to their own language. In the hard realities of the marketplace, students may have this right, just as they have the right to wear a T-shirt and jeans to an interview for a banking job. But in exercising this right, they also must be prepared to accept the consequences, which in both cases would be the same—unemployment.

1The NCTE resolution is in stark contrast to the TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) resolution of 1981: “Whereas speakers of nonstandard English should have the opportunity to learn standard English and teachers should be aware of the influence on nonstandard English on the acquisition of standard English, and whereas TESOL is a major organization which exerts influence on English language education throughout the educational community, be it therefore resolved that TESOL will make every effort to support the appropriate training of teachers of speakers of nonstandard dialects by disseminating information through its established vehicles.”

We have an obligation to be sensitive to the situation that our students find themselves in. At the same time, it is important to recognize that positions like the NCTE resolution oversimplify a complex problem. As teachers, we have an even greater obligation to provide students with the tools they need to realize their full potential, which they must do within the framework of sociolinguistic realities. It may be entirely wrong and unfair, but people nevertheless view certain dialects negatively. Wolfram, Adger, and Christian, (1998) reported that these negative views are held even by those who speak nonstandard dialects.

Some people may argue that it’s a mistake to put so much emphasis on the socioeconomic value of helping students master Standard and formal Standard English. Doing so serves to commodify education, making it a means to a dubious end. There is truth in this argument. However, we must be careful not to press this argument too forcefully—the value of economic security and social mobility cannot realistically be denied, especially for students from poor families. The ease with which even the best and the brightest fall into ideologically induced incoherence on this point is stunning. We need only look at professional publications over the last two decades to see it everywhere. Some years ago, for example, Anthony Petrosky (1990) criticized schools in the Mississippi Delta because they were too successful at graduating students who went on to college and made successful careers for themselves in other states. Petrosky complained that learning Standard English, or what he called “instructional language,” maintained the “existing class and socioeconomic order by allowing the students who do well the opportunity to leave the Delta …; this opportunity can be said to reinforce the values necessary to maintain the authority, the priorities, and the language that allow those values to exist in the first place” (p. 66). In other words, if the schools had not provided instruction in Standard English, the students who left the Delta would not have had the opportunity to do so, and they would not have had the opportunity to pursue careers in medicine, teaching, engineering, law, and so on. Instead, like their less capable, less diligent cohorts who did not master the Standard dialect, they would have been forced by circumstance to remain in the Delta, where unemployment hovered around 20% and the number of people living below the national poverty level was as high as 68% in 1994 (U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, County & City Data Book, pp. 2–3). Such arguments seem to confuse dignity and value. Without question, there can be dignity in poverty, but value? It is relatively easy for those who do not have to deal with closed socioeconomic doors to engage in this sort of political posturing. In the name of ideology, they are always too ready to sacrifice the dreams others have for a better life.

Fortunately, most teachers understand that education is the key to opportunity, that opportunity is a clear good, and that mastery of Standard English is a key to education. Large numbers of educators believe that schools must adopt an additive stance with respect to dialects, and they view mastery and use of Standard English as complementing the home dialect, whatever it may be. This additive stance calls for legitimizing and valuing all dialects while simultaneously recognizing the appropriateness conditions that govern language use in specific situations. From this perspective, there are situations in which Black English, for example, is appropriate and Standard English is not; and there are situations in which Standard English is appropriate and Black English is not. The goals of schools, therefore, should include helping students recognize the different conditions and mastering the nuances of Standard English. Sadly, this commonsense approach tends to get lost in all the noise surrounding language policy and language curricula. Those involved simply cannot reach agreement on fundamental principles. Education is intensely political.

APPLYING KEY IDEAS

Reflect on the foregoing discussion and your own views on the question of teaching the prestige dialect in our schools. What is your position? Write a page or two explaining your position and its implications for your teaching. Share your writing with your class and determine whether there is any consensus. Based on the outcome of the class discussion, what conclusions can you draw about the status of Standard English instruction in our schools of tomorrow?

Evaluate your own dialect. If your goal as a teacher is to provide a model of Standard English for students, what adjustments may you have to make in your language?

SLANG

Although slang is a variation of a language, it is not the same as a dialect. Slang differs from a dialect in several ways. For example, it is limited to a relatively small group of people, whereas a dialect is used by large numbers. Slang typically is associated with young people between the ages of 12 and 25, who use it as a means of group bonding that distinguishes insiders from outsiders, especially with respect to age and gender—boys tend to use more slang than girls. The lexicons of dialects remain stable over time, as we see in the case of the word elevator in American English and lift in British English. Slang, on the