terance involves matching a mental model of the intended representation of
reality against the range of linguistic patterns available from experience.
The implications for teaching are straightforward but unsurprising. Chil-
dren benefit from being immersed in a language-rich environment that includes
reading, writing, and active modeling of speech. Cognitive grammar, therefore,
provides a theoretical foundation for what many teachers already do. What is
not quite so obvious is that this model of acquisition suggests that the environ-
ment should be highly diverse, exposing children to multiple genres and audi-
ences so as to broaden their linguistic skills. The writing-across-the-
curriculum (WAC) movement has demonstrated the advantages inherent in
such an approach, but it is not widely implemented in our public schools, and
where it is, the results have not been particularly significant owing to faulty im-
plementation. Because WAC requires knowledge of the writing conventions in
a range of disciplines—and because most language arts teachers lack such
knowledge—all but a handful of programs and textbooks have settled on a jour-
nalistic approach. That is, they ask students to read and writeaboutscience,
aboutsocial science, andabouthumanities. They do not ask students to read
and write science, social science, or even humanities, where the typical assign-
ment is a response paper that expresses what studentsfeelabout a work of liter-
ature rather than examining its literary elements and making an argument.
Insights from cognitive grammar allow us to predict that students’ language
skills will show more growth if they actually are asked to engage in reading and
writing in these disciplines rather than about them.
Overgeneralization of Tense Revisited. Earlier, we examined the
phenomenon of tense overgeneralization and saw how it is used to support the
induction model of language acquisition. In this account, children apply the
past-participle affix to irregular verbs consistently after they formulate the
rules associated with verb forms. However, this account is incongruent with
what we actually observe. Sometimes children use the regular and irregular
forms correctly, sometimes incorrectly; moreover, adults make the same errors,
indicating that, contrary to the induction account, consistency does not come
with age. This inconsistent behavior is almost impossible to explain adequately
with a rule-governed model, but it is easily understood in terms of competing
forms: The connecting associations related to past-tense forms are insuffi-
ciently developed in children to allow one form to dominate.
With the association model, errors occur because in the neural network
there are many similar patterns of regularity with numerous overlapping fea-
tures, and these patterns are activated simultaneously by an intention. In the
case provided (Fig. 6.1), the model would propose that the patterns for these
COGNITIVE GRAMMAR 215