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This article assumes the value of a scientifically grounded, rhetorically focused, professionally supported, and publicly embraced grammar within the public schools and examines the past century of practices within the United States from that perspective. It describes a brief renaissance in the 50's and early 60's, inspired largely by the structural grammar of C. C Fries, and examines the confluence of forces that brought that budding change to an abrupt close--the ascendancy of generative grammar, NCTE policy, including the 1963 Braddock report and the 1986 Hillocks update, whole language approaches to language acquisition, the ascendancy of process approaches within composition, the primacy of literature within English curriculums at all levels, minimalist grammar and its anti-knowledge stance, political pressures against the imposition of an elitist language, a general lack of preparation for those in the teaching profession, and a general public failure to recognize grammar as anything but a loose collection of prescriptive mandates. The authors describe the various factions currently allied against grammar, though often at odds with each other. They describe current pressures for change, including a more widespread recognition that ignoring grammar has been a failure and articulate concerns about highly reductive testing practices in the absence of a more sophisticated curriculum. They describe the shape a successful reintegration of grammar would have to take to accommodate the concerns of those currently opposed. (Contains 2 footnotes.)

This study examines the potential effects of crosslinguistic influence in the acquisition of subject–verb inversion in Spanish matrix and embedded wh-questions among Spanish heritage language learners living in the United States. The results from an acceptability judgment task and a written production task administered to 17 US-born heritage speakers indicate crosslinguistic influence effects. The effects are more evident with embedded interrogatives than with matrix questions. A follow-up study with the heritage speakers also shows less inversion behavior with embedded questions in oral production but higher performance levels than in written production. The findings are discussed in relation to interface vulnerability approaches and current debates on the selective nature of crosslinguistic influence in L2 and bilingual development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article it is claimed that language contact has led to structural homogeneity in the languages of Mesoamerica. Mesoamerican languages are demonstrated to be structurally homogeneous insofar as they tend to be consistently right-branching. This tendency can naturally be explained in terms of Hawkins' (1994, 2004) theory of Early Immediate Constituents (EIC), which predicts that uniform branching facilitates online processing. Adopting an evolutionary model of language change proposed by Kirby (1999), it is argued that Mesoamerican languages have become structurally homogeneous as a result of the adaptive interplay between the generation of structural variation on the one hand, and the process of selection from among existing variants on the other: Language contact acts as a source and amplifier of variation and therefore feeds the evolutionary mechanisms of change. It offers speakers a choice and allows for the selection of those structures which optimize Early Immediate Constituent recognition best. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the issue of the different status that typology has in American linguistics as opposed to European linguistics. The historical roots of the difference lie in both structural and generative linguistics, in the contrasts between post-Bloomfieldian structuralism in the US vs. Praguean structuralism in Europe, and in the extent of the influence of generative grammar on the two continents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT) was developed in response to a California State mandate (SB 2042), requiring teacher preparation programs to use performance assessments as one measure in making credentialing decisions. In this article, results are examined from statewide implementation of the PACT assessments during the first 2 pilot years. Despite the limitation of only 2 years of data, 3 years of implementation experiences have informed participating programs about how they can better support candidate learning and identify areas for examination. In addition, this research suggests that the PACT performance assessment can be used in teacher education as a valid measure of individual teacher competence for the purpose of teacher licensure and as a powerful tool for teacher learning and program improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the history and syntax of the auxiliary in lower class Afro-American speech in Chicago, Illinois. Using a theoretical perspective, this article analyzes the perfective done, the double modals and the perfective been and attempt to trace them to earlier stages of English. These auxiliaries are found in sentences like I done told her, You may should wipe the thing and I been had my wisdom teeth. The perfective done may have descended from the causative do of Middle English and is introduced into sentences by a rule of phrase structure. Double modals are also inherited from Middle English and result from subject-raising transformations applied to deep structures. The problem in the study of Afro-American English has been questionable analyses as often as unreliable data. Afro-American linguists may help to overcome this difficulty, though their training as linguists will tend to remove them from lower-class life and to impair their competence in the vernacular. Even a lower class linguist might not describe his language objectively: members of a culture may have as much reason to misrepresent it as any outsider, people often believe nonsense about their own speech and defining one's own linguistic intuition can be almost as arduous as drawing out another's.