Book suggestions

[hancock at albany.edu]

     Readability is a somewhat complex topic. In US schools, "whole
language" has been the progressive norm for some time, the prevailing
view being that language is acquired in use. In English classes, that
means largely narrative texts and largely expressive writing. Little
attention is paid to how those texts work (beyond a fairly narrow
view of "literary elements"), and, as Johanna points out, to how
language itself works. This has certainly drawn heavily on generative
theory, which emphasizes that language is acquired without direct
instruction, that the 'competence' is there no matter how awkward the
performance.
    There are a number of problems to this. Academic writing--especially
in the technical disciplines--is not narrative. At the level of the
sentence, it is far more lexically dense (fewer clauses and more
meaning packed into the clauses) and far more heavily nominalized.
This is an inevitable result of the construction of a technical
discipline. But students--especially those whose reading has been
largely literary and whose writing has been more expressive than
analytic--will have trouble with the language and with the process of
interacting (reading) those kinds of texts. They need to be more or
less mentored into it, and our public school system is not doing that.
We are now undertraining most of our students in the sciences.
    Some academic writing is artificially difficult. The language itself
is much more difficult than the concepts require. Making something
more readable doesn't necessarily mean that it is being watered down.
We can talk in our disciplines in ways that leave the uninitiated out,
and at times it makes all the sense in the world to do that. But
students need to be mentored into the content of a discipline, and for
that we need to reflect on the nature of what it means to be a
linguist and bring students along that path in a thoughtful way. The
other question might be what are the insights of the discipline that
educated adults should be aware of. Respect for dialects is one, but
it is a bit of an easy sell given the prevailing progressive
celebration of diversity. Studies have shown that formal grammar
instruction doesn't carry over to improved reading and writing (at
least in the short term), but that is fairly predictable. If you treat
language as a discreet formal system, it's hard to put that to work. I
think most English teachers (education specialists) are unaware that
there are alternatives.


Craig

>> I'm not sure what I'd do if I ever had to teach in the US. My
>> inclination
>> would be to refuse to use dumb-downed materials, but that may be only
>> because I have the easy option of not teaching in the US. When I was
>> teaching in Germany, all the students could read and write and
>> everything.
>> I could even speak tangentially of algebraic equations without losing my
>>audience.
>
>> A viewing of Mike Judge's film _Idiocracy_ might help put this kind of
>> decision into perspective, i.e. what will be the end result if we always
>> dumb everything down, all the time?
>
> Since I've lived and worked in Germany (& in England & in a few other
> nations), my first reaction was a bit defensive, to point out that even
> today
> far fewer Germans or Britons make it to university than in the US, so
> that we're really not dealing with the same population segment.  Or to
> decry German insularity, their "Deutschland ist kein Immigrationsland"
> mentality & explain that here in the States we deal with a far broader
> gamut of cultural backgrounds and needs.
>
> But then I recalled a passage from the German section of my Sixties
> book where I discussed possible linguistic differences between
> German & English that might account for differences in understanding.
> That passage follows, but
>                                       WARNING !!!
> what you are about to read is somewhat Whorfian & totally violates
> mainstream & PC dogmas that all languages are equal & are not
> influenced in their structure by cultural factors.
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> I suspect--if I may be permitted a brief digression--that the difference
> here may lie in the nature of the German language, and that the structure
> of the German sentence actually allows for the inclusion of more sentence
> elements before confusion sets in, that it encourages a longer attention
> span—and hence more thoroughness—than sentences uttered in either
> the British or American varieties of English.
>
> By this I do not mean merely the usual cliché observation about the
> German verb coming at the end and making you wait for it, but from
> the gut feeling I have gained from having spoken all three tongues,
> German poorly, British English sometimes passably, and American,
> well, the way we're supposed to speak it. The sensation I have
> when I'm trying out either English or American is that I'm a
> station-master sending out a sentence composed of railway
> cars. If I get the wrong car in the wrong place, I'm in a lot of
> trouble, because I have to haul the whole train back in and start
> over or, at best, launch another car out into the middle of the
> train and hope it lands in the right place. Otherwise, I have to
> send out a whole new train to sit beside the first one, possibly
> blocking it from view.
>
> In German, by contrast, there are no stations and no trains.
> Rather, I feel like I'm a housewife hanging out laundry on a
> line of almost infinitely expandable length. Provided I more
> or less follow a few simple placement rules, I can hang
> anything anywhere I want and keep adding elements, even
> changing or modifying them, up until the time I feel the
> laundry line has enough on it. Then I just stop and let other
> speakers admire my laundry until they set out a line of their
> own. Of course the line is extremely long, and there are a
> lot of things hanging from it. But because its construction
> has followed all the rules, you can see it all with a single glance.
>
> I can't do this in English. This means I probably have to use a
> lot more short sentences and fragments to say the same thing
> I can express in one long German sentence. I don't point this
> out to revive the old "German Is Best" prejudice propagated
> by some scholars several wars ago but merely to explain that
> there is a difference. English and American obviously also
> have their own distinct virtues, which German, for its part,
> cannot emulate.
> --------------------------
>
> Not to mention Chinese, most of which I have now lost, though
> I did once enjoy what I call a Six-Year Window of Reading
> Fluency.  As I recall, a sentence such as:
>
> The man punished the boy who beat the cat for chasing the birds.
>
> would get recast in Chinese as something like:
>
> The cat chased the birds,
> the boy beat the cat,
> the man punished the boy.
>
> Wonder how Flesch tests would apply to that...?
> Does this make the Chinese a nation of idiots?
> I rather doubt it...
>
> Anyway, AS WE ALL KNOW,
> culture plays no role
> WHATSOEVER
> in language structure.
>
> Happy holidays to everyone!
>
> alex
>
> **************************************************************
> The principal purpose of language is not communication but to persuade
> ourselves that we know what we are talking about, when quite often we do
> not.
>
> **************************************************************
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Mark P. Line" <mark at polymathix.com>
> To: <funknet at mailman.rice.edu>
> Sent: Monday, December 27, 2010 1:05 PM
> Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] Book suggestions
>
>
>> Johanna Rubba wrote:
>>> Hey, Tom ...
>>>
>>> No disrespect, but -- write me up a ten-week syllabus in which I can
>>> teach all of that and I'll take you up on it. Be sure you keep the
>>> language accessible to, say, a ninth-grader.
>>
>> Needing to Flesch-test college materials to ninth grade, isn't that sort
>> of a root cause of something here?
>>
>> I'm not sure what I'd do if I ever had to teach in the US. My
>> inclination
>> would be to refuse to use dumb-downed materials, but that may be only
>> because I have the easy option of not teaching in the US. When I was
>> teaching in Germany, all the students could read and write and
>> everything.
>> I could even speak tangentially of algebraic equations without losing my
>> audience.
>>
>> A viewing of Mike Judge's film _Idiocracy_ might help put this kind of
>> decision into perspective, i.e. what will be the end result if we always
>> dumb everything down, all the time?
>>
>> -- Mark
>>
>> Mark P. Line
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>> Happy New Year!
>>>
>>> Dr. Johanna Rubba, Ph. D.
>>> Professor, Linguistics
>>> Linguistics Minor Advisor
>>> English Dept.
>>> Cal Poly State University San Luis Obispo
>>> San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
>>> Ofc. tel. : 805-756-2184
>>> Dept. tel.: 805-756-2596
>>> Dept. fax: 805-756-6374
>>> E-mail: jrubba at calpoly.edu
>>> URL: http://cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> -- Mark
>>
>> Mark P. Line
>> Bartlesville, OK
>>
>>
>
>