|
|
Forward by Richard Lederer |
About Richard Lederer |
|
The history and present state of language teaching in the English classroom provides a classic study of lip service. Enlightened teachers across our land admit, indeed proclaim, that language is the most important hallmark of our humanness; that a focus on language, pure or applied, can vitalize the English classroom, both for the teacher and the taught. Most English teachers accept as the curricular model, the tripod, triad, triumvirate, or trinity of literature, composition, and language and perceive that since language is the medium for the other two parts, it is central to the school as well as the human experience. Yet surveys show that language study has come to occupy only about 10 percent of the English curriculum, falling far behind programs in composition, literature, and even speech. Too often, that 10 percent of study devoted to language learning is restricted to grammatical analysis and isolated usage drills. Students write S, V, DO, and 10 above the subject, verb, direct object, and indirect object of a sentence and are initiated into the intricacies of lie and lay, less andfewer, and compose and comprise. (Do you, 0 fellow inmate in the house of correction, really understand that last distinction?) The study of grammar and usage can be fascinating, but presenting language skills as a line-up of "thou shalt ... s and adversarial exercises explains why when meeting English teachers, people respond with the likes of "Gee, I'd better watch my grammar," or "English was my worst subject." Do we really want to be viewed primarily as linguistic sheriffs who organize posses to hunt down and string up language offenders who have the temerity or ignorance to float their hopefullys, split their infinitives, and dangle their participles in pubav Do we want to be the objects of such zingers as: St. Peter hears a knocking at the Gates of Heaven and calls out, "Who's there?" A voice answers, "It is I." She knows that there is more to language study than has been dreamt of in our previous philosophies. She knows that language is like the air we breathe. It's invisible; it's all around us; we can't get along without it; yet we take it for granted. But when we step back and truly listen to the sounds that escape from the holes in our faces and spring from our electronic keyboards, we are in for a lifetime of joy. And it is a lifetime because language, unlike mathematics and science, is something we get better and better at during our lives. She knows that language play in the classroom is naturally transmuted into language power in the student. She knows that as students come to see language as an activity not apart from the14 but a part of them, they will use language more competently, confidently, creatively, intentionally -- and playfully. She knows that by serving as the chief means we have for exchanging our emotions, thought, and ideas, words are the foundations of our society. She knows that words are the tools we have for living and striving together. She knows that words and people are inextricably bound together through history. Has it ever struck you how human words are? |
||
