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Kirja-arvio Sajavaara, Kari & Piirainen-Marsh, Arja (toim.): Kielenoppimisen kysymyksiä

Kirja-arvio Savolainen, Katri: Kieli ja sen käyttäjät äidinkielen oppikirjasarjan tuottamana

The response to the report of the 1906-1915 Committee on Grammar (englanti) 1/1998 (102) Fred Karlsson (Department of General Linguistics (University of Helsinki); fkarlsso@ling.helsinki.fi) THE RESPONSE TO THE REPORT OF THE 1906-1915 COMMITTEE ON GRAMMAR The key members of the 1906-1915 Committee on Grammar were E. N. Setl, as chairman, and members Ralf Saxn and Ivan Uschakoff. The background to the setting up of the Committee was the debate that had been continuing for several decades about the teaching of grammar within language teaching in schools. What actually prompted the Committee to be set up at this time was a booklet dealing with the implementation of language teaching delivered to the National Board of General Education in March 1905 by language teachers from Helsinki's Finnish reaalilyseo upper comprehensive school. Letters written by E. N. Setl and others shed light on the working methods of the Committee and the stages through which the work progressed. Ralf Saxn proves to be the main organising force within the Committee, and it was he who managed to get Setl to complete the work when the final stages of the report were being prolonged. It has been generally understood that the linguistically novel principles of the Committee's report were never applied in practice. The writer notes, however, that Ralf Saxn did actually apply the Committee's approach to the study of grammar in several textbooks: Finsk ordbjningslra ('Inflection in Finnish', 1912), Svensk sprklra fr skolans lgre klasser ('Swedish grammar for lower school grades', 1916), Modersmlet ('Swedish grammar for native speakers', 1917), Modersmlet (revised edition, 1919) and Ruotsin kielioppi oppikouluja varten ('Swedish grammar for secondary schools', 1923, together with Hannes Almark). After the report was submitted, the Senate Committee on Ecclesiastical Affairs requested a statement on it from the National Board of General Education. The Board, in turn, immediately requested statements on the report from all the country's approximately 150 schools, to be submitted by June 1, 1916. The statements came, but the National Board of General Education never gave its own statement to the Senate Committee. Contrary to what is generally believed, notes the writer, the work of the Committee on Grammar did actually receive an official decision. On March 20, 1941, the matter came up at a meeting of the National Board of General Education's secondary school division. The matter was raised by Martti Adolf Jakobsson, appointed educational counsellor in 1940. The decision in paragraph 1 of the minutes is brief: No longer any cause for action. The article refers to several reasons why the report was, in practice, buried. Researchers of classical languages directed fierce criticism at the report, especially in the statement issued by the Pedagogical Association in autumn 1915. Belief in the importance of general grammar teaching died down quietly in the early decades of the century, when communication-oriented language teaching (e.g. the reform method) gained popularity. Surprisingly few language researchers were interested in the report's linguistically advanced proposals. The majority of schools and language teachers criticised the report for being too theoretical, and doubted the possibilities of applying the report's ideas in practice. The National Board of General Education itself also took a cautious view of the reform of grammar teaching.

Towards flexible syntax (englanti) 4/1997 (101) Irja Alho (University of Joensuu; fi) TOWARDS FLEXIBLE SYNTAX The article examines the relationship between traditional syntax, the study of syntax and the teaching of syntax. The flexible nature of both language itself and the selection of conceptual tools available to analyse its structure is highlighted. The syntax of a language may contain rather more variation than indicated by traditional grammars, as is the case with Finnish, for example. It is well known that standard spoken Finnish, even when used somewhat formally, differs in many respects from the well-regulated written language. The structural properties of the spoken language, for instance, can be studied and compared with those of the written language. Concerning syntactic methods, it is argued that the traditional way of analysing sentences by classifying individual words is misleading. The same properties that make it attractive also make it unrealistic. The problem lies in the assumption of a complete and exhaustive system, that every sentence has a single correct analysis in terms of lexical classes and the form and function of each word. The traditional view that each word in a sentence is a functional constituent of the whole sentence is critically examined in the article. The writer points out that the 1915 committee on Finnish grammar chaired by E. N. Setl in fact strongly recommended the phrasal analysis of sentences. According to this approach, the parts or members of a sentence that can be identified immediately may, and in most cases do, include more than just one word. The writer, however, acknowledges that it is not easy to argue in favour of just one phrasal analysis of a sentence. Judgements over where the phrasal breaks are located can vary. This is the key point of the article. If the syntax of a language is based on phrasal analysis, then flexible analyses of sentences must be accepted. Other structural views should be utilized, such as analysis based on the crucial role of the verb in conveying information concerning the other constituents of the sentence.

Kirja-arvio Uusi-Hallila, Tuula: Aineistoaine ja tekstien keskustelu