What Goes on in ALP?

Contrastive analysis and forging a fusion of syntactical mastery and semantic precision are two of the things that go on in ALP.

Members of the ALP faculty had requested, been granted, scheduled, and twice rehearsed for our eventually cancelled half- hour ‘slot’ on the agenda for the Fall Faculty Conference. We had wanted to tell all of you what we do because we have a very definite impression that you might not know.

When we meet non-ALP colleagues, the conversation almost always moves to “ERRORS,” so let me say a few words about them.

Here is the scenario: you are in Poland, and you do not speak a word of Polish. In four semesters you will be expected to take 20th Century Polish History, Business Law, Human Anatomy, and 19th Century Polish Literature at the college level, and all of these courses will be taught only in Polish. By then you will have long since put away your childish toy, the bi-lingual dictionary. Let’s say Polish has about the same number of words as English, which is not true, but for the sake of argument, let’s say Polish has 600,000 words. You are on your own, and that means in four skill areas: listening, speaking, reading, and writing at the college level. This is not survival Polish; this is academic Polish. Of course you will make errors as you continually use, abuse, and slowly master the Polish language.

Contrastive analysis is “the systematic study of a pair of languages with a view to identifying their structural differences and similarities” (Wikipedia). We could mark a paper with “run-on,” by which we mean ‘major syntactical ERROR,’ or we could explain to our student that Spanish and English overlay one another awkwardly as regards the use of commas and periods. In Spanish, commas are used to separate units of language--we call these sentences-- that are about the same thought. Once the thought is fully expressed, a period is placed to end that thought whereas in English a thought may well travel among a grouping of sentences, but each sentence is nevertheless ended with a period. (I think Spanish is far more logical in distributing commas and periods in this case.) Knowing something about how English overlays another language makes a conversation about the correct use of periods in English more effective than marking up “R/O” sentences.

Forging a fusion of correct syntax and semantics is very difficult. Syntax is “the study of the principles and rules for constructing sentences in natural languages” (Wikepedia). Semantics is “is the study of meaning” (Wikepedia). My training is in English Renaissance Literature, not in TESOL or Applied Linguistics, and that is why I am not attempting to define these terms (though I figure Wikepedia paid a linguist to define these terms for them); however, to a grand-mothered but rather experienced lay person like myself, forging a fusion of correct syntax and semantics means helping students begin to think in this language and therefore in its many structures, all of which have a rather specific purpose. We eschew developing a thought in one language and then translating it because we end up with English sentences like: “To my house went after his working my friend and his hungrys dogs.” Instead, we present common sentence patterns “[subject-verb-object-prepositional place explaining where, prepositional phrase explaining when],” as in “My friend and his hungry dogs went to my house before dinner.” We ask students to write grammar journals about their lives and times (authentic thoughts instead of Dick and Jane, and this is in the Grammar not the Writing class) using English structures that they have learned to write correctly. In time, we extend these structures to contain more thoughts. For example, what was the purpose of your friend’s visit to your house? In order to answer these sorts of questions, my students learn that their sentences have “legs,” as in, “My friend and his hungry dogs went to my house before dinner in order to share my dinner with me.” There are more questions to ask, such as, how often do they come, what are his dogs like, do you like this friend who sponges off you, etc.? Often it is in ‘answering’ those questions by writing related sentences that we start to get tonal and semantic authenticity, as in: “I have been living alone in an apartment in Hackensack since I arrived in the United States a year ago. I have to keep two jobs in order to pay for my rent and food. That means I don’t have enough time to study, but I am taking English at Bergen Community College anyway. I have a lazy and selfish friend, and he and his hungry dogs come to my house before dinner twice a week in order to share my dinner with me. I do not like this. Sometimes I don’t have enough dinner to serve them. I can’t even serve myself. I don’t know how to tell this man to stay home and keep his dogs home, too. I want to eat alone in order to get enough food and enough time to do my English homework.”

The above statement is written entirely in grammatical structures that are demonstrated at Level 2. In Level 2, students make the transition from writing paragraphs to writing essays, and if the Grammar teacher as well as the Writing teacher requires journals, students write about forty journals in a semester. They also write more structured essays in class. In Level 2, students focus a great deal on controlling the structure and meaning at the phrase, clause and sentence level. In Level 2, they use subordination primarily through time clauses, and they write about what is real; in Level 3 students focus a great deal on subordination through clauses that give, among other things, reason, result, purpose, and condition. They engage in writing about the real, but also about the unreal such as what could have, but did not happen, or what they would do if only, and like patterns.

My purpose in writing this is to start a conversation about what we do in ALP among all of us who teach English, with the hope that we will enter these discussions at levels other than ERRORS.