Education
The practice of diagramming sentences first began in America in the middle of the nineteenth century. Set against the full history of grammatical study, diagramming is a relative newcomer. Language has been studied systematically since at least the second century bce in the western world, and even earlier in India. Yet sentence diagrams—visual depictions of the relationships among words—were developed only after over 2000 years of study. From our vantage, the desire to visualize sentence structure may seem like an intuitively obvious move.
8
Apr
2007
The Persistence of Prescriptivist Nonsense
Submitted by Karl HagenWhen I taught linguistics-for-teachers courses, I spent a significant portion of my class time trying to get students to question their assumptions about language, assumptions that, whether they learned them in school or by general osmosis, are based on premises that linguists know to be incorrect. It always distressed me, therefore, when certain students would make it to the end of the course and drop some comment that made it clear they had internalized little of what I was trying to communicate.
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17
Feb
2007
Don't use the passive?
Submitted by Karl HagenAlmost everyone was taught in school to avoid using the passive voice. Fewer know how to identify the passive voice, but I'm going to assume for the moment that you are part of the elite who can and ask you to do a little grammatical analysis with me.
9
Feb
2007
Grammar, usage, and education
Submitted by Karl HagenSally Thomason has been championing a kind of humane prescriptivism, which is surely a bit unusual for the crew at Language Log, but I have a great deal of sympathy.
In the context of language-arts education, a certain prescriptivism is unavoidable. There is a written standard, like it or not, and there are social consequences to violating the standard in certain contexts.
31
Jan
2007
Adjective or Noun
Submitted by Karl HagenMark Liberman at Language Log was kind enough to comment on my last post on the expression "Democrat Party."
He makes the point that noun modifiers are recognized in some varieties of traditional grammar, citing the extremely popular 19th-century grammarian Samuel Kirkham as an example.
11
Nov
2006
Lies my teacher told me
Submitted by Karl HagenGrammar teachers (and I mean those who are actually teaching grammar, not grammar-school teachers) could pick up a few pointers from math teachers. Thanks to a recent post on The Quick and the Ed, I learned about a great book by Liping Ma on teaching elementary mathematics. I've just ordered the book from Amazon, so all I've had a chance to read is the snippet available on the search-inside pages, but I immediately ran across some very interesting remarks that seem directly relevant to grammar pedagogy.
24
Oct
2006
Back to the bad old days
Submitted by Karl HagenThis Washington Post article is a little different from your run-of-the-mill story on how the new Writing section of the SAT has affected education in that it focuses on the multiple-choice part, and the way that those questions have been encouraging a return to explicit grammatical instruction.
The distinction between proper and common nouns is probably familiar to you from your earlier education. Fred and Netherlands are instances of proper nouns. A proper noun is a type of noun that refers to a specific person, place, or thing (Evelyn, Cairo, Saturday, etc.) Common nouns refer to classes of things (cat, trash, stone, etc.) rather than particular ones. All nouns that are not proper are common.
15
Aug
2006
The Result of High-Stakes Testing
Submitted by Karl HagenHigh-stakes tests come in for a lot of criticism in various quarters, not all of which is particularly well informed.
One of the primary downsides, as far as I'm concerned, particularly given the way many of these tests are administered, is the corrosive effect that they can have on teachers and administrators.
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