This section of the book explores the rules of usage established by the prescriptive grammarians on present-day conceptions of grammar, especially among non-specialists of the 18th century and traces their continuing influence. Prescriptive grammar is based on grammatical classifications established by Greeks and Romans.
The Classical Period encompasses language study carried out by the Greeks and Romans. The Greeks were the innovators and the Romans were the transmitters, and their ideas spread throughout Europe. The achievements of Greek linguistic scholarship lie in three distinct areas: the development of an alphabetic writing system, a tradition of conscious speculation about the nature and use of language, and the investigation and establishment of the concept parts of speech.
The development of the first alphabetic writing system was conceived during the first millennium BC and its the most widely used today. The main figures associated with tradition were a group of known philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. They debated the concerns of nature versus convention in language and the relative contribution of analogy versus anomaly to language structure.
In the third century BC, the Greeks had expanded their influence south into Egypt and the city of Alexandria. In Dionysius classifies words into eight classes by adding five new categories toPlato's noun and verb and Aristotle's conjunction: participle, article, pronoun, preposition, and adverb. Furthermore, other related ideas of the parts of speech gave way to a concept called parsing; the process of breaking a sentence up into words, identifying the part of speech it belongs to, and identifying the function of each. Second, was the idea of organizing verbs according to conjunction, that is, by identifying the root of each verb and its suffixes.
Questions: As future teachers, would you teach your students about the Classical Period? Do you think teaching them this would be beneficial or helpful in learning about grammar?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
14 comments:
I have never learned about this before in my educational history. I do not think it is neccessary to teach this in order for one to learn grammar skills. I do, on the other hand, think it is interesting to read about the history of grammar. I think that I might mention the history, but I don't think I would make a lesson out of the topic.
I agree with Sarah. It's not necessarily important to teach this history to students in order to teach them grammar. Perhaps in some cases, if the students seem interested, I would teach the history, but I don't think that it's needed to learn proper grammar.
I agree that learning about the history is necessary to learn grammar, but I DO believe the students would be more interested in the subject if they understood the origins of it.
I think learning about the history of grammar is a bit interesting, but I do not think that it is necessary for me to teach my students unless I was able to tie a lesson plan to the history and grammar. I do think it is important to know the history of a language or concept, but I don’t think that knowing it and teaching it would benefit my students except for their historical knowledge rather than their grammatical knowledge that I think would be more important for them to learn.
I think learning about the Roman and Greek origins of grammar is a good thing if it is integrated successfully into the lesson plan. Its important to be exposed to the origins of what you are learning to get an expanded perspective on the subject. I think that you could more than likely teach grammar successfully without learning about the origins, but overall, I think the students would benefit from it.
Teaching about the Classical Period could help reach out to students whose strong subject is History rather than English. However, for most students this would bore them far beyond what rote instruction of grammar ever could. I suppose that it would be worth attempting and reflecting upon. After all, even if it doesn't work out as a regular lesson, it's still something interesting to share with students who how a particular interest in linguistics.
I most likely would not incorporate the history of grammar into my lesson plan. There are many things that needed to be covered within a year, and this particular topic, in my opinion, is not one of the most important. However, if I felt I had time I might denote a small amount of time (probably half a day) to the topic. Also, another way I could see myself incorporating in it was as an extra credit assignment, or one possible topic in a mandatory presentation assignment, distributed to a student. The student could do research and present it to the class.
I do not think teaching the classical period will be beneficial to the students. For that reason I do not think I would teach it while teaching grammar. If I were to teach the history of grammar I would not spend a whole day on it.
Like many others have already stated, I do not believe that I would incorporate the history of grammar into my lessons. I think that especially with the technologies that are available now, the history of grammar is not as important as enforcing basic rules. The issues we will be dealing with teaching students about grammar are going to be more focused on enforcing students to use proper grammar and not "text-speak" or internet lingo and we should spent time on these issues rather than technicalities of the history.
I would teach my students about the Classical period. I think that it could be an interesting addition to a regular reading or writing class. I would discuss their alphabet and language and perhaps try to link it with Greek mythology or something. Could be fun.
I agree with everyone else. The history of grammar is not necessary in the context of teaching a grammar class. It is especially not necessary when teaching a grade school or high school grammar class. Grade school and high school kids could probably care less about where and how grammar rules originated.
When I have my own classroom I do not plan on teaching this. I plan on teaching at a lower elementary level, where these concepts might be hard to understand. If I were teaching a higher level, like junior high or high school then it would probably be pretty neat to teach.
I would probably teach my students about the history of grammar, but I would only spend one lesson on it and I would more than likely use it to seguey into the grammar unit. I don't think it's necessary, but it's kind of interesting and I think that it's important to make things interesting.
I think it's kind of a strange idea, actually. I only learned about history in history classes. :) I guess a quick introduction might be interesting, just to change things up a bit, but I think it's a little more important to focus on actual grammar when we're teaching grammar. :)
Post a Comment