Pat’s Polemics

Here's the Linguistics/Humanities comparison done one after the other, Linguistics first followed by Humanities.

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An example of how unthinking rejection of anything new effects us all. The person writing this is extremely active in providing materials for Latin teachers. This is the junk she runs into:

"To the right of those small versions of the images you will see some Latin questions I had written up to prompt engagement with the images in Latin. The publisher, however, refused to include those Latin questions in the book because they felt it would be considered as a criticism of Latin teachers who do not speak Latin in class. In order not to rock the traditional boat, the publisher preferred to not even include the OPTION of question-and-answer in Latin in the book, focusing only on reading skills, including the pictures purely as decoration, rather than using them as a tool to prompt a different kind of engagement with Latin rather than just reading a text, practicing different kinds of skills.

I am sure the publisher is quite right that some people would have found the questions irrelevant to their Latin goals, which is fine with me. But what troubles me is that people seem to consider other people's different goals to be an attack on their own - so much so that the publisher thought it safer not to put anything in the book that would be considered a "challenge" to the traditional reading approach. Instead of questions, they preferred nothing at all - white space in the book, wasted space, literally. Admittedly, I understand why the publisher made the choice they did; in their attempt to try to please everybody (or, rather, not to offend anybody), they chose logically to go to the lowest common denominator. Nobody is against pictures after all... thank goodness! But since some people are against (even vociferously against) changes to the traditional Latin curriculum, this puts the publishers under tremendous pressure to bow to tradition.

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My own minor contribution here:
From The Input Hypothesis, Stephen D. Krashen, Longman, 1985

p.2
We progress along the natural order (hypothesis 2) by understanding input that contains structures at our next 'stage' - structures that are a bit beyond our current level of competence (We move from i, our current level, to i + 1, the next level along the natural order, by understanding input containing i + 1.......

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Comments on linguistic superiority complexes sparked this blog entry in me b/c what is dogging our profession now is the heritage of both classical learning and philology encountering the linguistics inspired by the study of non-Western languages, esp. African and Native American languages.

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Let me give you an example of what I used to think of as "culture" when you are learning another language. In the recent movie The Inglourious Basterds (or some such misspelling), the German-speaking English soldier disguised as a German office gives himself away in a bar by raising three fingers when he calls for 3 drinks instead of the German way, two fingers and a thumb.

That is exactly the sort of culture we talked about when we talked about studying other languages and cultures: that an American soldier would know how to enter a home in another country, could observe customs - recall Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino when he pats the Hmong child on the head and raises hackles - and could know the terms and manners of respect so important in many cultures.

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I would like to ask any of the many teachers at my school who took a lot of Latin if they had to learn the irregular case usages, sans prepositions, for some place names like Roma, Romae, etc. But, if I were to do that, I would just about guarantee that they would feel put on the spot. “OMG, that was eons ago, I can’t possibly remember how to say that.” I wasn’t asking them to say it, just to remember if they had studied that and I would start off b y asking them if they knew how to say “I was in Rome”.

That would be to see if they used the preposition plus place name or the special case. If the former, I would then ask if they had had to learn the special case form.

The reason for that would be to confirm (which I could easily do through reviewing traditional textbooks like Jenny from the 1i950s) that indeed Latin teachers tried to teach all the exceptions to the rule along with the rule.

But what would happen? The teachers would feel put on the spot. Why? Because that’s the way languages are taught – catch the student making a mistake. The underlying thought is: if I correct them, they won’t make it again AND if they know the exceptions, that means they know the basics. Both are wrong.

Now ask someone who ACQUIRED a language such questions. All they’ll do is ransack their mind for how they would say whatever you asked. That’s b/c they have acquired the language in a natural way and wouldn’t feel put on the spot anymore than the teachers at my school would if I asked them, “What do you call that round container you put flowers in?” (answer: flower pot).

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Steven Pinker uses the term "tin ear" in talking about people who barrel through the genius of the English language, destroying syntax and morphology in their wake, to the ultimate goal of being "proper". These are the folks who will observe the "split infinitive" nonsense no matter how absurd it makes their speech.

Why is this? It is b/c some people are rule-bound. Their life revolves around following rules so they can control everything and everybody, be armored against criticism ("but it's a rule"), and feel that they are being proper at all times. One can easily imagine how these people were raised and schooled.

For them, the idea of using L2 in the classroom without being absolutely sure of the correctness of everything uttered, by them and by their students, is anathema. This accounts for much of the discord on fl teacher listservs, the clash of these folks with less bound people.

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Here's a post sent to a Latin listserv on a 19th century Latin teacher with ideas similar to what we call communicative now.

"Some of you might be interested in Latinum's new audio course in Latin ( on
DVD) , specifically designed for medical and pharmacology students, or for
those who want to learn Latin with a dash of sulphuric acid and a sprinkling
of the spanish fly, not to mention breasts perfused with blood, and other
medical horrors........ This uses a text originally written by J.W.Underwood
for students taking the Latin exams at the Royal College of Physicians and
at Apothecaries Hall. It was written for the non-classicist, and is very
clear.

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A couple of posts on a listserv attracted my attention since people were discussing what the terms top-down and bottom-up might mean. It concerned me that the definitions might unintentionally cast a bias over the discussion, so I provided the following [with the posts following and my comments appended].

From The Teachers Handbook by Shrum & Glisan, pp 51-53:

"....{In the bottom up approach] Students analyze and learn grammar rules and vocabulary, and then later practice using them in communication. Rivers used the terms skill getting and skill using to characterize this dichotomy. Skill getting refers to the type of practice that helps students "learn" grammatical structures, while in skill-using students use the learned structures in communicative activities designed to focus their atention on meaningful interaction." [and goes on to describe mechanical, meaningful and communicative drills].

"A top-down approach to language instruction resists reducing languages to word lists, verb conjugatins, discrete grammar points, or isolated linguistic elements. In this approach learners are presented with a "whole" text (e.g. story, poem, song, tape recorded listening selection), are guided through its main ideas, explore these ideas through interaction with others, and then focus on specific details and/or linguistic structures (e.g. vocabulary, grammar). Learners manipulate language to communicate thoughts using higher-level skills (e.g. relating knowledge from several areas, using known ideas to create new ones, generalizaing from facts, predicting, drawing conclusions) before attending to discrete language structures with the use of lower-level skills (e.g. recognizing, identifying, recalling, explaining, observing, interpreting).

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Here's my first quote under this new category. My aim is to show through selective quotes from material written more than 30 years ago, some going back into the 19th century and even further, that fl teachers recognized that language is acquired rather than learned through analysis and grammar study.

Linguaphone's Norwegian course has a very neat book titled Explanatory Notes. It's the sort of thing I love, similar to Barker's Urdu course: lots of comments on usage embedded in culture. The purpose, of course, is to relieve the confusion anyone experiences when encountering another language or dialect. To me, this is pure fun and I read things like this for languages I'm not even studying. Weird. I know it.

Here it is:

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