Children come in all sorts of languages. Their language IS correct and should not be corrected. They have knowledge of formality and situations with various participants. If they know how to talk (and most of them do!), they know phonology, morphology (words and word parts), lexicon (vocabulary), syntax (grammar), semantics (meaning), and pragmatics (how to do things with words in various situation). They may or may not know Standard Formal American English (SFAEng), and they may not have had the experiences of the white middle class or the schooled culture – these two can put the child at an extreme disadvantage. Their language shows who they are and something of the experiences they have had. Good teachers know this and use it. Good teachers teach code switching and SFAEng as part of the writing process, not with grammar books, exercises, and corrections. Furthermore, good teachers model SFAEng.
The insanity begins when all schools (based on governmental regulations) admit children based on their age and expect all children to make the same progress at the same time. These government regulations set policies in an absolutist manner; the same policy holds for all no matter the background or language. With modern computer systems, we have the mechanisms to track individual progress and standards that set general expectations; they allow the tracking of individuals in very sophisticated ways that can be based on various types of performances in real situations. Why don’t we use them? Why are we still using age as our major sorting system for children rather then their performances towards standards.
Roger Bacon observed that "all languages are built upon a common grammar." I’m going to quibble about this because Bacon was only looking at Indo-European languages, which were closely related (especially English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Latin, and Greek). For instance English is basically a positional language with standard subject-verb-object (SVO) order for declarative sentences. Among the list of European languages, only German uses a verb final structure commonly; but Japanese is verb final (and the tense and mode markers are at the end of the verb), and the order of all the other parts of the sentence is optional (additionally Japanese has a double subject structure that is hard to duplicate in English; it’s sometimes called the topic-subject and the comment-subject). SFAEng is explicit, direct, and redundant in expression of subjects, various dialects of English allow the elision of the copula (the verb “to be”), but Japanese is implicit, indirect, and omits many contextually understood words and markers (*’was going to the university’ isn’t acceptable in English, but in Japanese, ‘daigaku-ni ikimashita’ would invariable elide the subject pronoun for the speaker or the spoken to person which Italian and Spanish can do sometimes). English has very few grammatical inflections (like I -> me/my/mine depending on the grammatical case), but every noun in a Japanese sentence (oral or written) must have its grammatical marker expressed explicitly (German does this with articles, but Japanese has no articles). Japanese does not use grammatical gender or number but has complicated sets of counter words that are used for the construction of plurals. English and Japanese both use pitch, stress, and rhythm for complicated implications of meaning (play with different ways of saying these exact words: ‘I did not say you stole my red sweater from the hook.’ and analyze what each means in difference contexts as the patterns of pitch, stress, and rhythm change), but Japanese has a complicated alternate vocabulary and inflection patterns called “women’s speech” that is used in specific gender situations; I have some indications that there is also a specialized “men’s speech”, for hype-masculine settings, but I haven’t read anything to support than. Both languages use layers of words to indicate politeness and status of speaker and listener. The issue of noun and noun-like structures cause problems for the analysis of Japanese because it does not fit into the same patterns as Indo-European languages.
What is a noun? What is a verb? (Hint: these ARE NOT properties of words, despite what’s in dictionaries.) Why do children get so confused with grammar instruction focused on parts of speech? Part of the reason seems to be that teachers are confused about the functional properties of words in sentences and haven’t gotten the message that words take on different functions and meanings depending on how and where they are used in sentences. All the old grammar books that focus on parts of speech as if they were properties of words are wrong. Now add the layer of multiple languages to the child in the classroom. The child knows how to talk in one or more of these, but the organizational structures of sentences (syntax) are not necessarily the same. Is there any wonder that confusion is common?
In classrooms today, we encounter tremendous language variation. Children come speaking varieties of English from all over the country and the globe; they come from different cultures and languages. For instance, I encountered this utterance just before Mardi Gras in New Orleans: ‘we-ya(t du( mawde- graw da(n ye-u( di(s ye-u(’ [where e- represents long ‘e’, a( represents short ‘a’, and u( represent a schwa], the standard spelling and syntax would be something like ‘We are at the Mardi Gras down here this year’. Notice that in this dialect the words ‘here’ and ‘year’ are homonyms, and the copula (the verb ‘to be’) is elided as in several European and African languages. Is there any surprise that a child whose family and cultural groups use this dialect of English have difficult with short and long vowels on tests in SFAEng? They are fluent and proficient in their abilities to communicate; they are not inferior, and they use of language is pragmatically competent while teachers speaking SFAEng are immediately judged by them as non-fluent and incompetent speakers by all members of their language groups. They judge SFAEng speakers as deficient in language skill and lacking communicative competence for situations of daily life. In this dialect, ‘ya’l’ and ‘alu’ya’l’ are respectively the plural familiar and plural formal forms of the second person pronouns.
The good teacher must understand the autobiography of the child from this language community and the biography of the community language, accept it, and gradually teach the child to code-switch between the home dialect and SFAEng. Good teachers who come from this language community recognize the two dialects and can switch from one to the other, maintaining their modeling of SFAEng as they teach. Now add to the language complexities in a classroom with other dialects and levels of proficiency with English, dialects of Spanish and other European languages, dialects of Chinese (Sino-Tibetan languages), Hindi (and other languages from South Asia like Thai, Vietnamese, Hmong, Khmer), dialects of Arabic, African languages, Polynesian languages (and their variants in places like Japan and Korea), and Native American languages (Mayan has over 30 dialects). This diversity is much more complex that most politicians and policy wonks can conceptualize, but good teachers need to keep up with all of it.
Further Reading:
Delpit, Lisa, & Perry, Theresa. (eds.). The Real Ebonics Debate: Power, Language, and the Education of African-American Children. Beacon Press: Boston.
Good Teaching Initiative Richard Speaker Blog
GTIrbs.blogspot.com
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