Reduction Junction, What's Your Function?

I found the choice of writing assignments very interesting for this class. The first piece, Patrick Hartwell’s “Creating a Literary Environment in Freshman English: Why and How” uses the second piece, Roger Shuy’s “A Holistic View of Language”, as a reference. Interesting. Here is the argument, and here is the theory behind the argument. What I really found interesting is that, while I had issues with a few of the pieces of the argument of the first piece, I found the second piece to be informative and illuminating. The source article was better, in my mind, than the descendent.

The centerpiece of Shuy’s article is his “iceberg theory” of how we learn language. He’s right. 10% (give or take) of how we learn language can be measured, or seen. The other 90% - that which ties meaning to the phonology, morphology, and the syntax of the language – is harder to gauge and not measurable with any type of reliability. Shuy’s take on the constructivist vs. reductionist theories of teaching language makes sense, as does his view of “holistic” teaching. By adhering to reductionist principles of breaking down the language to the smallest, most easily digestible units, language teachers neglect the interactive nature of language and omit the true power of language as a malleable tool for communication and comprehension. As we’ve seen in our previous readings from Crystal, syntax matters greatly in the identification of meanings of words and phrases. To remove the word from the sentence is to remove the ability to understand through syntax.

What seems to make the most sense to me in Shuy’s article at this point is the Natural learning concept, how modern teaching practice has flip-flopped the natural procedure of how we learn language. “For reasons unclear and almost incomprehensible, we have developed a tradition of teaching reading, writing and foreign language which goes in just the opposite direction – from surface to deep, from form to function, from part to whole.” Here is where I will offer a possible reason for this switch, something that is extremely comprehensible, which may be an unsolvable problem for teaching writing in the modern day classroom:

Politics.

I have not done hard research on this subject, and I don’t believe any of us have – side note here: I also find the attempt of language teachers to follow the practices of hard science interesting, and partially flawed, but I’ll get to that later, hopefully – but it does seem to me that the political realities of life in America in the late 20th to 21st century have really skewed the language teaching process. The reason for the flip is something Shuy touched on but did not explain further, when he discussed the reductionist mode of teaching. He discussed “measurables.” This is the key to the problem.

When English teachers were not held accountable by anything except the final outcome of the student – they are now able to read and write fluently in this language we call English – learning could take on the proper learning cycle. It takes place in different locations of the brain, as Crystal mentioned, and the learning modes are different. Reading and writing are, initially, separate entities. Eventually in the developmental process they tie together. They do so in one of Shuy’s “Iceberg” levels – deep learning. That cannot be easily quantified. And it certainly cannot be placed on a standardized test. It cannot be gauged, counted, ranked, or given any sort of standing that an administrator, a politician, a PTA board could point to and say “this student is doing well.”

And if we cannot say that, we cannot, by proxy, say “This teacher is doing well.” And by proxy, “This SCHOOL is doing well.” And of course, the final argument in the train – the final logical conjunction – “Your TAX DOLLARS are being well spent.”

The realities are that we are in a societal flux. Language depends upon interaction to master (more on this later as well). We learn less from a classroom and more from our environs. The problem is not just our teachers. In fact, I doubt it’s the teachers at all. They make wonderful scapegoats, it’s great to point a finger at them and their unions come election time, but the fact is, the need to quantify teaching results has flipped the entire system upside down. Constructivist, reductionist, holistic – just names that mask a deeper problem, a societal one, a complete eduction principle broken by political realities of the time. Hartwell mostly misses this in his article, and Shuy sideswipes it, identifying the symptoms in his article. I’ll get to Hartwell later, maybe. Of all the things I found in this reading, this is the one realization that jumped out at me the most.