On NPR a couple weeks ago, I heard a show talking about learning a language, and the host suggested that it’s harder to learn language as we get older. The guest, a neuroscientist, countered by saying once we learn our first language, others are fairly easy to learn, but that yes, it is harder to learn new languages as we age. I wondered, though, how much of that difficulty is a result of age, and how much is method. That is, the older we are the more invested we are in the rules of grammar; as infants, we are immersed in our native tongue, and as young learners, we tend to work on fun stuff — easy reading to build confidence, and lots of opportunity for error. However, my experience in high school, where I studied both French and German, as well as plenty of language courses in college, is that we were given rules, random sentences in terribly contrived situations, and lists of vocabulary. That is, I was presented with formulae and rules, words and phrases, but no good context, no community to provide models and correction — outside the classroom, of course.
I wonder, then, if that’s the problem. There’s an emphasis on rules and memorization, not usage and trial-and-error. And it seems to me that’s how we try to teach punctuation, too. There’s all sorts of punctuation, and it is far too often misused. Or appropriate punctuation (semicolons and dashes come to mind) is not used at all, because people don’t want to misuse them and be wrong.
Teaching punctuation, and reading about it for my composition classes, I keep running into the same thing: here’s a list of rules to learn, with some contrived or out-of-context sentences to illustrate the rule. But that’s not how punctuation evolved, or even what I have come to think is the best way to teach its use.
The rules of language are often written after the fact; just like definitions, they are fundamentally descriptive of usage. They do not tell people what to do from the start, but reflect the use people have already agreed upon. It’s easier to teach that way, perhaps — end a sentence with a period or question mark. Use commas to separate items in a series. But why teach the rules? Why not teach the use?
I would propose a new focus for teaching grammar: make students think about what they say and how they say it. Approach punctuation as a way to control the pacing and tone, to give the words some aural component.
When I work on editing medieval texts, ones that have either no punctuation or a set of punctuation that makes no sense to my modern, English mind, I think about an oral presentation. How would this text be heard? And I try to replicate my sense of the pacing and tone by inserting punctuation. It is interpretive, but isn’t that what reading any text is, to some degree? See how punctuation makes this line come alive, how it changes the fundamental — though implied — meaning, the connotation, of the text:
To be or not to be, that is the question.
To be... or not to be... that is the question.
To be! Or not to be! That is the question!
To be or no to be? That is the question?
To be (or not to be), that is the question.
There’s no difference in the words — just the punctuation. And each line’s punctuation controls how we read Hamlet’s words. I was thinking about just that: delivery. How the punctuation controls the meaning, or at least guides it. I didn’t think about the rules of punctuation, just the way I wanted the line to sound when you read it. And I chose my punctuation to guide you.
While I’m sorry I cannot test my theory properly, as I am not teaching this spring, I have often described the comma as a slight pause and a period as a full stop in presenting ideas. And last fall I did try to introduce the idea that punctuation breathes life (that is, pacing and tone) into otherwise inert words on a page or screen. Students really started to get it when I talked about the unknown tone of email and texts, but I didn’t follow up nearly well enough at the time. But I have wondered if it would be better to explain punctuation as a means to guide a reader, rather than as a bunch of random rules and guidelines.
As to language, I have nothing. I know that I always liked reading the actual authors when I studied foreign languages; friends and relatives who are trying to pick up languages now often label items around the house in order to learn the language, but it’s a form of immersion. Not so much rules and lists of vocabulary. The Rosetta Stone system, as I recall, uses a similar premise of immersion, and travelers always pick up more fluency, more comfort, by traveling, by immersing themselves in the language. I again have no conclusions regarding learning a language, but I do think teaching the rules of grammar and usage can only go so far as a slid pedagogical tool for making students more comfortable, accurate writers.
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