Part 2 (2/2)

A sample sentence of his: aText books are the soup de jour, the sine qua non, the nut and bolts of teaching and learning in high school and college so to speak.a8 More Grammar Slammers?

The war against formal grammar finally reached teachers of English as a foreign language (TEFL) in 2005, when they began considering whether to discontinue teaching the subject in their English cla.s.ses. A British government study covering one hundred years of grammar research had concluded in January of that yeara”nearly half a century after the NCTE decisiona”that such cla.s.ses did nothing to help students write more accurately or fluently.

The prospect of such a move inspired Luke Meddings, a British author and teacher, to comment in the London Guardian, aGrammar is becoming a sort of touchstone for our atomized 21st century souls. As we contemplate the end of civilization as we know it, without having really mastered it in the first place, it speaks to us of order and control.a He also offered some words from Geoff Barton, head teacher at King Edward VI School in Southampton: aThere may be no evidence that grammar teaching has improved writing, but . . . no conclusive evidence that it hasnat.a9 Majoring In Remedial.

Of far more concern than punctuation and grammar are the growing dropout rates in high schools, especially where black and Hispanic students predominate. The rates are often double the national average, which hovers around 30 percent. At some colleges, up to 80 percent of incoming freshmen wind up in remedial English cla.s.ses despite the fact that almost all colleges have been forced to lower their standards to remain compet.i.tive in the market for students.

In an effort to improve student language skills, the educational establishment has intensified remedial courses that seem to be geared to a long-past era, one that English teachers themselves rejected long ago. The idea is apparently to pound outdated English rules and exceptions into increasingly less formal and more rebellious students in a decreasingly formal social environment.

While formal English is being increasingly rejected by the population as a whole, remedial cla.s.ses to support it have proliferated. As a result, many students essentially major in the subject to the exclusion of a broader education.

Although remedial teachers may be able to claim some improvements in test scores, the overall experience may be souring students by the millions on learning the standard language, while they frolic outside the cla.s.sroom in an atmosphere where virtually the only learning comes from fun and games.

The plight of one remedial student ill.u.s.trates the dilemma. The following Amglish was posted on Yahoo! Answers by a student calling himself Jason: I canat pa.s.s remedial english cla.s.s? this is my third time taking it finally i have pa.s.sed to the 2nd semester of it but iam burnt out. im doing good on everything besides English and i have heard that college level English cla.s.ses 101 and 1A are way easier than remedial English cla.s.s. can someone help me out i donat know what to do10 Remedial English courses are even beginning to become explosive. A acivil wara broke out in 2010 at City College of San Francisco (CCSF), when a college trustee suggested that such cla.s.ses be limited to one year instead of being required for as many as five semesters. Approximately 90 percent of the 100,000 students at CCSF are not considered ready for introductory English 1A. As a result of the furor, CCSF chancellor Don Q. Griffin decided to shorten the remedial courses.

Calling All Innovators.

My review of research papers on remedial English courses shows virtually no effort to examine their relevance to the vast bulk of young people today. Nor does there appear to be any rush to devise new ways to teach English in such changing conditions.

A major review of the situation by the University of Ma.s.sachusetts in August 2010 confirmed that American educators appear to have reached a dead end in efforts to bring all students up to speed for todayas IT world.11 Even the experts who wrote the report showed their secret affection for Amglish by by committing a few glaring grammatical errors.

The bottom line is that Amglish is winning the language war. It is inc.u.mbent on teachers to recognize that fact and become more innovative. Some have found ways to play on student interest in slang to get them interested in learning seriously about language itself. One is Pamela Munro, professor of linguistics at UCLA. At the height of the Valley girl craze in 1989, she got her students to publish a dictionary of slang that has been republished every four years since then.

Among terms in the latest (2009) edition, U.C.L.A. Slang 6, were schwa, a synonym for wow, as an example of pulling new words out of thin air; verbal blends such as eargasm, the sensation of beautiful sound; bromance, love between two males; and shortened words such as presh for precious.

Another English professor who has become an expert on American slang is Connie Eble of the University of North Carolina. She says she specializes in ausing the slang of my students to ill.u.s.trate the forms and meanings of words and their histories.a As S. I. Hayakawa said, aSlang is the poetry of everyday life.a Other lures to help language teachers reach out to todayas youngsters include music, money matters, and Internet commentary. Some have also used social networks to teach how to write concisely. But where are all the studies of innovative techniques to help other teachers adapt to todayas scene?

Streets Become Schools.

Is it any wonder why millions of youngsters learn their language arts in the streets, gyms, and playgrounds, especially in major cities, where the prevailing lingo is often set by African-American vernacular and Spanglish?

American black English was born when West African and Caribbean slaves. .h.i.t the docks in England and its colonies in the seventeenth century. They added some welcome color and spice to the language that was still being formed by Shakespeare and G.o.d (through English translations of the Bible) as well as the public at large.

Since then, American black lingo not only has managed to retain much of its distinctive character but has played a leading role in the gradual transformation of formal English into todayas informal language. The dees, dems, and dose of earlier centuries have morphed into a new vocabulary of words like dis for hara.s.s, hood for neighborhood, and kicks for shoes.

The PC Police.

At the same time, there has been a growing but largely hidden campaign to make educational materials politically correct. In keeping with the policy statements of teacher a.s.sociations, such as NCTE and CCCC, many schoolbooks have been purged of any words deemed to be racist, s.e.xist, elitist, or offensive to any other population group or perceived group.

Critics of such policies include Sandra Stotsky, professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas and former senior a.s.sociate commissioner of education in Ma.s.sachusetts. In her 1999 book, Losing Our Language, she declares that such political correctness is undermining childrenas ability to read, write, and reason.12 She cites a Scott Foresman reader for the fourth grade featuring an American family named Levin in which none of the members is related to any of the others. The two boys are Korean immigrants, each from different parents.

In 2003, Diane Ravitch, a former a.s.sistant secretary of education, focused further on this trend with a book ent.i.tled Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn.13 Publicity for the book said, aIf youare an actress or a coed just trying to do a man-size job, a yes-man who turns a deaf ear to some sob sister, an heiress aboard her yacht or a bookworm enjoying a boyas night out . . . [this book] has bad news for you: Erase those words from your vocabulary.a According to Ravitch, even Aesopas fable The Fox and the Crow was banned as s.e.xist because a male fox flatters a female crow. Imagine if he had dissed her!

Ravitchas book reveals the persistent social pressure in the United States to avoid even a hint of prejudice toward certain groups of people. The goal is to satisfy everyone, but the result may satisfy only a few. A happy medium is elusive.

Why a Textbook Writer Gave Up.

Author Diane Ravitch quotes an anonymous textbook writer who broke under the strain: They sent 10 pages of single-s.p.a.ced specifications. The hero was a Hispanic boy. There were black twins, one boy, one girl; an overweight Oriental boy; and an American girl. That leaves the Caucasian. Since we mustnat forget the physically handicapped, she was born with a congenital malformation and only had three fingers on one hand. One child had to have an Irish setter, and the setter was to be female. . . . They also had a senior citizen, and I had to show her jogging. I canat do it anymore.13 Who Needs the Queenas English?

Such pressures are especially resisted by creative writers. Novelist and poet Wolf La.r.s.en wrote an essay t.i.tled aWho Needs the Queenas English?a in which he said, aLanguage must be the servant of the writer . . . [who] should throw off the straitjacket of grammar whenever necessary.a He added, aTraditional grammar is not necessary in creative works. . . . Literature often has a rhythm that makes grammar unnecessary, just as a good verse has a natural flow that has made the rhyme obsolete.a14 He also attacked the alleged discriminatory nature of Standard English. aWhy should the mode of speaking of the most privileged members of our society be considered standard English? Why shouldnat the rich and constantly evolving language of poor blacks in the ghetto be considered astandard Englisha?a He added that hip-hop lingo is afar more exciting and rich in contemporary culture than the astandarda English of Park Avenue.a A Shocking Ad.

Even before the historic liberalization of grammar instruction by the NCTE in 1963, copy writers for advertising agencies were testing the bounds of acceptable grammar. The most noticeable breakthrough came in 1954 with an ad for R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. It said, aWinston tastes good like a cigarette should.a This slogan with the questionable grammar became one of the clearest public signals that a new type of English was emerging in the United States that no longer respected the outworn rules and standards of formal English inherited from the mother country.

Today, such an ad would not even be noticed for its language. But back then, pillars of culture went wobbly, English teachers were horrified, and millions of former students who had had problems in cla.s.s finally got a whiff of emanc.i.p.ation. Until then, the language establishment had insisted that in such usage, like should be as, because of the conjunction function or something.

The Winston advertis.e.m.e.nt was so widely circulated on radio and television, including the Beverly Hillbillies and The Flintstones, that the otherwise undistinguished Winston brand soon rose to the top of the market. The poet Ogden Nash celebrated with a ditty saying, aLike goes Madison Avenue, like so goes the nation.a Many Americans finally felt like they could let all their linguistic frustrations hang out if such powerful commercial interests were so relaxed.

Power to the People.

The ad also did what no previous event had been able to do: it essentially switched the power over language changes from the much-feared guardians of grammar to the general population, from professors, publishers, and lexicographers to street b.u.ms, pop musicians, and others on the lower and middle rungs of society.

Seven years later, defenders of the status quo were stunned further when Merriam-Webster published its Third International Dictionary, with no criticism of the word like for such usage. Strict constructionists, who were waiting for some support from on high, suddenly saw a major dictionary without a spine.

Language sticklers took another blow a few years later when ad writers gave the relaxed-grammar movement a new boost with a slogan for Tareyton cigarettes saying, aUs Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch.a Like the Winston breakthrough, this deliberate use of a grammatical aerrora rocketed Tareyton up the sales rankings.

These new signs of Amglish were proving to be good for cigarette sales, not to mention lung cancer.

A Social Revolution.

Although it was not readily apparent at the time, the building language revolt became part of a broader political and social rebellion. The seeds had been sown by social rebels all the way back to the ancient Greeks and from them to Jesus, Buddha, St. Francis of a.s.sisi, Luther, Th.o.r.eau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, to mention only a few who refused to conform to the norms of the day.

Signs of broad social change began a decade or so after the end of World War II. The most immediate prototypes were members of the Beat Generation, such as Allen Ginsberg, with their bohemian, beatnik styles of the 1950s. More sparks came in the next decade from yippies, hippies, and civil rights activists. Others were spurred by the a.s.sa.s.sinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Rev. Martin Luther King in 1968.

Many cities were hit by devastating riots. The city of Chicago added to the violence when the cityas police force decided to crack down with a vengeance on political dissidents at the 1968 Democratic convention. Growing resistance to the draft and the Vietnam War added even more to the general dissidence.

The hippie movement emphasized a counterculture lifestyle including sloppy (or optional) clothes, pot smoking, and free thinking, mostly by young people. It was a natural convergence of beatniks, young rebels, college dropouts, draft resisters, environmentalists, and flower girls, in addition to poets, musicians, writers, and a.s.sorted dreamers. A popular b.u.mper sticker was aIf it feels good, do it.a At first the movement centered in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco; then it spread to other cities around the country, including Greenwich Village, New York, where the New York Times is said to have fixed the letters ie to the word hippie instead of the letter y to avoid any reference to the hippy look.

The main themes soon went international, with colonies arising in Mexico, Chile, New Zealand, Australia, Britain, and Germany, among other places.

New Musical Themes.

Music was the main vehicle of the movement, with lyrics almost always pointing toward a new informality of language and indifference to societal norms. This was particularly evident at the Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock. Among the major stars were Bob Dylan and the Beatles, who helped spread the gospel of the psychedelic mindset in the BBC-banned alb.u.mas closing song, aA Day in the Life,a from their game-changing Sgt. Pepper alb.u.m.

John Lennon struck a similar theme with his dreamy vocal, aIad love to turn you on,a a notion inspired by Timothy Learyas slogan, aTurn on, tune in, drop out.a The Beatles did much the same with songs that stretched the limits of what a pop record could be, with shades of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Lewis Carroll, and the folkie-turned-rocker Dylan.

Dylan took a different path to the same place, following folk and blues idioms to craft his own catalog of songs that referenced everyone from Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot to Bette Davis. His aMaggieas Farma at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival was one of his final protest songs and was directed at the folk protest movement itself.

With their themes of protest, noncompliance, and love, these artists also were helping to shape a new American lingo, one that was free from the constraints and tensions of old-fas.h.i.+oned English.

Codifying the Patter.

Out of all this came a 688-page Hippie Dictionary by John Ba.s.sett McCleary, a former hippie himself.15 aWithin recent history,a he writes in the book, ano other counterculture has had as much effect on our lives and our vocabulary as has the hippie culture. . . . One must admit that the 1960s and a70s greatly influenced what exists today.a Adam Wojtanek, a blogger who calls himself aThe Polish Hippie,a goes further. He credits hippies and the Beatles not only for their broad cultural impact but for their powerful effect on American politics, resulting in ending the Vietnam War, granting amnesty to draft evaders, and helping to push gay rights, womenas rights, and ecology out of the shadows.

Todayas relaxed linguistic atmosphere was shaped to a great extent by hippie themes. Among popular words and phrases coined then and still in wide use are hang in there, heavy, chill, cool, cop out, and head case. The one word that seems to embody the whole story is cool, which not only survives but still flourishes today. A certain degree of cool seems to come from merely repeating the word as much as possible.

Heritage Words from Hippiedom.

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