kitchen table math, the sequel: palisadesk remembers being taught how to read pronouns

Saturday, September 15, 2012

palisadesk remembers being taught how to read pronouns

On the subject of pronoun instruction in reading class, palisadesk writes:
I remember being explicitly taught about pronouns and antecedents -- 8th grade, I think. We had to memorize the rule, "a pronoun refers back to the nearest noun that agrees with it in gender, number and case" (or something like that). Then we had lots of assignments where we had to circle or underline the pronoun, go back and find the noun it referred to and circle that, and then draw an arrow arc connecting the two.

It seemed tedious at the time but it cleared up a lot of misconceptions, such as why wasn't a noun nearer the pronoun the antecedent, as in examples like, "Phil passed the ball to Anton. Later, he scored the only goal for the team." "He" has to be Phil, not Anton, b/c both are nominative. Of course if you wanted the goal scorer to be Anton you could connect the two sentences with "who" and delete " he."
Fascinating! I don't remember ever being taught how to understand pronouns in writing.

I think today a writing instructor would probably have to tell students that the "he" in the sentence "Later he scored the only goal..." is unclear. No one teaches the nominative rule today, no one learns it, and no one knows it, including me. I'm pretty sure composition textbooks caution against this kind of reference, and I myself wouldn't use it!

Now that I read palisadesk's comment, I wish I could.

Is this a case of writing conventions changing in reaction to changes in reading instruction?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Quote: "I'm pretty sure composition textbooks caution against this kind of reference, and I myself wouldn't use it!"

I don't understand what you mean by this. Are you saying that kids wouldn't know the terms "pronoun", "antecedent" and "nominative rule"? (I'd agree with you there.)

Or, are you saying that an intelligent child could not tell you who "he" refers to to in the context of those two sentences: "Phil passed the ball to Anton. Later, he scored the only goal for the team."

Are you saying that "he" in the second sentence is not clear and that you would encourage the student to re-write the sentences like so: "Phil passed the ball to Anton. Later, Phil scored the only goal for the team."?

People don't talk that way and shouldn't write that way either. Using pronouns is natural in speech. I have a hard time believing that the average reader could not figure out who scored the goal.

Catherine Johnson said...

Are you saying that "he" in the second sentence is not clear and that you would encourage the student to re-write the sentences like so: "Phil passed the ball to Anton. Later, Phil scored the only goal for the team."?

That's pretty much what I'm saying. In fact, I myself find those two sentences ambiguous.

I don't think a corpus linguistics-type analysis would support the existence of this rule.

I'd love to know ... I wonder whether Biber says anything about it.

Catherine Johnson said...

I'm going to poll my students tomorrow - !