A major point this article brought up RIGHT away and I am happy about is that there is a difference between usage and grammar, and as future educators, I feel it is important for use to be able to distinguish between the two and move ahead accordingly.
Williams states, "Students already use language grammatically...the goal is to identify errors that are embedded in the patterns of everyday speech...(Kindle ed, p.4070)" Yet, delving into the murky waters of slang and teen speech to educate the students on writing conventions is a humongous undertaking. However, there has to be a balance of appropriate conventions and home and community and I really applaud the way Williams discusses this in this chapter.
The fact that some subject-verb "disagreements" ARE used in various dialects, but not in the "standard dialect that governs writing (Kindle ed, p. 4119)", is interesting to me. I wonder how children in these areas who speak in the dialects where people say "Fritz and me was going to the ball game (Kindle ed, p. 4119)" know how to write properly? I remember learning when to use "I" or "me" and "was" or "were". It was always easier to say the sentence out loud. However, the dialect my family/friends/teachers spoke was relatively standard. Overall, speaking out loud always helped me understand .
Going through each type of grammar, I learned a lot. I had never heard of phase-structure or transformational-generative grammars before this.
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