understanding how language works

Crystal writes:
"we should look after languages ... by increasing our understanding of how they work. ... The more we understand about the history, structure, and use of language, the more we will be in a position to employ language effectively for our own purposes, appreciate the way other people are employing it, and manage the very real problems which come from differences of opinion about the way it should be employed" (457).

This, he says, is why he's written this book.

It is also a nice statement of why I selected it for our course. As I mentioned earlier, it's important for writing teachers to have a larger contextual sense of how writing & language work and to have a reference for consulting about how language works. This book provides that overview, but it is very much an overview - a skimming & acknowledgement of vast bodies of scholarship & research. The potential problem with using such an overview in a course is that our conversation won't go deeper than a skimming of the issues either.

So .....

[you knew this was leading somewhere, right?]

Could you, in your responses to Crystal, please do this:
after you've finished the section of the book assigned, think back over what you learned, what Crystal is saying about how language works. So at a very general (rather than a specific) level - what 3 or 4 lessons about language do you come away with from each assigned section? And then respond to those lessons - how do they mesh with or contradict what you entered the course thinking about language? how do they give you new tools for approaching the teaching of writing?

We'll organize our class discusssion around these conclusions you've drawn from the text generally.

See you on Monday. Pam


disadvantage to that is that discussing such a skimming can