kitchen table math, the sequel: Grammar

Thursday, November 15, 2007

Grammar

Tuesday after class, I met Martha. She's retired, in her 60s, she's a tutor, and she's misplaced (to say the least). I'm glad she's volunteering, but she has no experience teaching ESL, and she has no idea what she's doing (which she readily admitted). I suggested that she move to the literacy program for native English speakers.

Anyway, Martha wanted tips, and she veered into grammar, and then into "We should go back to teaching Latin so people will learn grammar." We had a long discussion about this. There's no point reproducing it here, but if you're interested, my abbreviated
response is here.

Now, I have about 20 more essays to read and comment on.
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18 comments:

SteveH said...

"But teaching the grammar of a dead language whose grammar bears very little resemblance to English grammar is pointless when we could be teaching English grammar by — wait for it — teaching English grammar, is it not?"


Rather than figure out exactly what the problem is and attacking it directly, people use "guess-and-check". Unfortunately, there will be a long time before the check is done, if at all.

If kids have problems tying their shoes, perhaps they should take a course in marlinspike seamanship. They can dress up in sailor costumes and write poems about the sea. Then they can splice the ends of their laces together so that they will never have to tie their shoes again.

November 15, 2007 at 12:45 PM
NYC Educator said...

It's tough to teach kids English. But it would be substantially tougher if I had to teach them Latin first. I suppose I'd actually have to study it.

When I was studying Spanish, someone told me studying Latin would help me learn Spanish. I replied that studying Spanish would help me even more to learn Spanish.

There's a lot to be said for being direct.

November 15, 2007 at 2:24 PM
LynnG said...

Nice post, certainly something to think about.

People believe that latin should be taught in schools. They have no idea why. So they start coming up with reasons to teach latin. Ergo, we end up with let's teach them latin so they'll learn grammar.

Makes about as much sense as the presentation I sat through last week -- let's teach the kids powerpoint in third grade because it will help them learn science.

groan

November 16, 2007 at 5:12 AM
concernedCTparent said...

There are many good reasons to learn Latin. Learning English grammar isn't one of them. Expanding your vocabulary in English is certainly a benefit. Something like 50% of the words in the English language come from Latin. If you'll be working in the sciences, law or other very techinical fields, having a grounding in Latin will certainly help expand your understanding of the language of your chosen discipline. It also makes it much easier to learn and understand a number of other languages particularly Spanish, French, and Italian.

That said, my nine year old began studying Latin this year. She loves it and looks forward to her lesson each day. She does make connections from her English grammar to the Latin. It helps to understand the concept of subject, predicate, case, gender, etc. that she's learned as part of her English grammar curriculum. It certainly helps to understand the complexities of Spanish grammar that she is studying concurrently. But is it teaching her grammar? No. If she didn't have a good understanding of English grammar she would be very lost in her Latin studies. Studying and understanding the grammar of her own language should always be the priority.

November 16, 2007 at 6:15 AM
Tex said...

My son is in his second year of high school Latin, and I admit I’ve had my doubts as to whether it has been a valuable use of his time. My primary consolation now is that I think good grades in this subject might look favorable for college admission. Another interesting tidbit is that his Latin class comprises mostly high achieving students. Not a bad thing for my son.

However, it has been fun to discuss the roots of words and to compare Latin with Spanish, another language both of us know. I do find that knowing Latin and Spanish helps in expanding our knowledge of English vocabulary.

November 16, 2007 at 8:38 AM
Anonymous said...

Well, I'll have to respectfully disagree, somewhat. Latin doesn't teach grammar, but applying grammar to reading Latin can be another way of learning it.

Translating a Latin sentence means that you must be absolutely clear about grammar, such as 8 parts of speech, as well as case. You can't be halfway in your knowledge.

Speed of processing becomes important or you could be sitting there with a Latin sentence for an hour. It's applying what you know over and over. It can really solidify these concepts.

I spent a couple of years teaching both grammar and basic Latin to my grade-schooler at the same time. They work together beautifully. He's forgotten a lot of the Latin, but his grammar has stuck. It's a great tool, IMHO.

November 16, 2007 at 8:43 AM
Anonymous said...

Of the many benefits of Latin, one is that it teaches how to spell ad nauseam and other phrases.

November 16, 2007 at 9:25 AM
Anonymous said...

when they tried to tell me
about nouns & verbs and whatnot
in seventh grade, i didn't even
pretend to listen. who needs it?
i already speak english like a native.

but when i studied a *foreign* language,
all of a sudden all the analysis
made a great deal of sense.
teaching english grammar
by teaching english grammar
*sounds* like the obvious best way
but at least one counterexample exists.

November 16, 2007 at 1:09 PM
Anonymous said...

"teaching english grammar
by teaching english grammar
*sounds* like the obvious best way
but at least one counterexample exists"

The counterexample being that you ignored what you were being taught? That's not a counterexample; that's sheer laziness -- yours.

November 17, 2007 at 3:45 AM
Anonymous said...

"Speed of processing becomes important or you could be sitting there with a Latin sentence for an hour. It's applying what you know over and over. It can really solidify these concepts."

Concepts that have little to do with English grammar -- unless you have a very elementary concept of grammar. The list of English grammatical concepts Latin will not tell you about is far longer than those it will. Participles v. gerunds. Weak v. strong verbs. Inseparable v. separable phrasal verbs. Perfect v. simple aspect. The list goes on and on. Case? No English speaker needs to know what an ablative is. Such knowledge is useful for Latin, but utterly useless for English.

November 17, 2007 at 3:49 AM
Anonymous said...

Ablative has to do with prepositional phrases other than to/for. Prepositions and objects of prepositions are somewhat important to know about, although I agree it is "elementary."

I believe an elemental knowledge of grammar is probably necessary before you tackle gerunds, no? You certainly don't need to learn Latin for that, but I found that it gave a lot of extra practice without being boring.

I agree about its limitations, but so what? And like another person mentioned, you get the extra bonus of learning some roots.

November 18, 2007 at 11:21 AM
le radical galoisien said...

Learning Latin is useful if you're going into Romance philology and learning Spanish, French, Portuguese, Catalan, Occitan, Italian, Sardinian, Romanian all at once.

Otherwise yeah, it's beneficial to be direct first. But I find that teaching the sound changes between Latin and French is useful as a sort of a quick "cheat algorithm" -- you can apply some quick and dirty changes when you don't actually know the word but want a reasonable guess at it (and its gender).

For example, say if you had never heard the word "chemise" before or you were trying to guess the gender, you could reason that the "che" in the front was really a palatalised form of "ca", and because of the /s/ turned voiced /z/ reason that -ise must have been -isa, and reconstruct "camisa", which sounds feminine in Latin because of the singular -a ending.

Another example is "affiche" -- another basic word. It's unlikely that a word ending in -che in French is masculine, since the more obvious sound change is -ca => -che, where -ca would alert a feminine ending.

If you forgot the gender of a word like "cycle", then a quick and dirty reconstruction would yield probable cyclus and maybe cyclum, but it's harder envisioning a "cycla". So you would guess masculine. And you would be right. You don't need to go too in-depth into Latin to realise that -us and -um generally imply masculine or neuter genders (the neuter gender was merged into the masculine in all Romance languages, save for some plural neuters reinterpreted as singular feminine, e.g. pl. neu. gaudia => sing. f. jodia => joie).

Very useful in examinations (for tougher words beyond the basic examples). It's not so much as learning Latin as some general principles of an ancestor language I don't know Latin at all, but knowing what happened between Latin and French comes in very useful when you need to guess on situations. And if you studied one Romance language but find yourself in a neighbouring country

November 18, 2007 at 9:04 PM
le radical galoisien said...

Also, once you've done it for a while, the mental reconstruction process almost becomes like a reflex, so it's easier than it sounds. I have never studied Latin, I just know a few basic rules -- but those few basic rules go very far when studying the vocabulary of its descendant languages.

The only reason Latin would help for English grammar is that it makes some grammatical ideas explicit -- other languages mark them implicitly. However, while Latin marks some concepts explicitly, it makes some others implicit, e.g. with the dropping of the subject pronouns with most verbs and the frequent omission of the copula, reminiscent of the syntax of Chinese proverbs. Students are better off doing morphology trees. ;-)

November 18, 2007 at 9:11 PM
Tracy W said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
November 19, 2007 at 4:34 AM
Tracy W said...

I had a teacher try to teach me grammar in English (which was not part of the curriculum at the time, she just tried to teach it anyway).

I didn't grasp it all. I think that was because I didn't have any idea of how another language could be different. I thought English grammar was the only way of expressing ideas. Foreign languages consisted of different words, but always arranged the same way as in English. I know now of course that the same thought in English can be expressed grammatically in different ways just within English itself but that didn't occur to me back then.

When I studied Latin, I learnt that words could be arranged differently, so English grammar made sense to me. Studying Latin had a major advantage for me in that we were not expected to be able to speak it correctly so I was not disadvantaged in exams.

Perhaps there was some other way of convincing me about grammar without teaching a foreign language. But it worked for me. All the English grammar I know I learnt in Latin class.

November 19, 2007 at 4:34 AM
le radical galoisien said...

Ah, but why not teach an English creole like Singlish? ;-)

November 19, 2007 at 8:39 AM
Anonymous said...

"Ablative has to do with prepositional phrases other than to/for"

That is only one of many uses of the ablative.

"Foreign languages consisted of different words, but always arranged the same way as in English."

Ich möchte nach Hause gehen.
I want/must to the house go (infinitive)

Same way as English?

Je dois lui donner son livre
I need him (clitic) give (infinitive) her book

Same way as English?

November 27, 2007 at 5:11 AM
Anonymous said...

Rightwingprof- I think that Tracy meant that she used to think that foreign languages had their words arranged the same way as English.

March 2, 2011 at 3:47 AM

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