Karl, Craig, and all - thank you for your responses.

The SAT does include questions that pertain to usage issues that cannot be
pinned down to a survey of high school grammar instruction. That's a
separate issue, I suppose. Karl - in many cases with sentence corrections,
the subject seems somehow out of place and not, as you notice, a modifier
(or a single word in the case of my original model). Here's another:

Although criticized by a few for her daredevil aviation escapades, *most
people viewed Amelia Earhart as a skillful pilot.
*
(a) most people viewed Amelia Earhart as a skillful pilot
(b) most people viewed Amelia Earhart to be a skillful pilot
(c) a skillful pilot was what most people viewed Amelia Earhart as
(d) Amelia Earhart was viewed by most people as a skillful pilot
(e) Amelia Earhart, a skillful pilot in the view of most people

Can we name the exact and explicit grammatical principle? It's not a
misplaced modifier, since according to the question the subject and
predicate is the underlined issue. What would you call that, in a certain,
specific term? What would Warriner's call this?

As far as an error being confined to the underlined choice, a question such
as the one below defies that suggestion:

*Given her strong sense* of social justice, Burns *vehemently* *protested
over* her party's failure *to support* a tax decrease.

Only a part of the underlined phrase "protested over" needs correction -
the elimination of "over". What's the explicit grammatical principal? Is
wordiness grammatical, or stylistic?

Craig - your students need those terms from you because teachers at the
High School level believe Hillocks et al since their college professors in
Methods courses tout Hillocks et al. And then they come to department
meetings and share articles from NCTE that tout Hillocks et al. Many
students come to me, a teacher of 11th graders, not knowing that an adverb
modifies a verb, and not knowing what it means to modify at all, frankly.
That they are being exposed to these discussion is huge for them - yes, I
do let them read your collective responses. And if they and their
understandings are overly simplistic, as Karl suggests, it's because school
teaches them 1+1=2 and the SAT gets you into college and the world teaches
them that if you can sing well, run fast, look pretty, or the like then you
can probably make a whole lot of money. You might be surprised, but 17 year
old humans like to see things very clearly, especially if their teachers
tell them so: Tiger Woods cheated on his wife and deserved what he got; War
is bad and so was Bush; the "Nucleus" is that large oval body near the
center of the cell, and other facts. They like formulas because they're
constant and because you can use them on the test. When they take the SAT
at 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning, they're thinking one thing - how can I do
this and pass with a score good enough to get me into my first choice
college? It's not a conversation, it's a performance.

Grammatical ambiguity on the SAT would be a lovely thing to assess, if
teachers actually talked about it and also assessed student understanding
of grammatical ambiguity in specific cases. I posed my initial question to
the list because I found it interesting and because my students - young,
impressionable, and actually willing to talk about things that others have
labeled over their heads - wanted to know more. I believe they made a fair
argument from their knowledge base, though I told them (as suggested in my
first message) how they sentence was technically "correct." I'm not in the
business of either critiquing or defending the SAT - my role is to get them
ready for Craig.

I thank you again for your help and for these wonderful conversations.

John






On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 4:57 PM, Hancock, Craig G <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> Karl,
>      Your response is very clear and useful.
>      My experience has been that most progressive teachers believe that
> grammar is largely an intuitive system that most students will acquire
> while the attention is on other things. I teach a new group of college
> freshmen every year,and most will say that their teachers wanted them to
> learn "literary elements," but not anything substantial about grammar. I
> usually give my incoming students a list of terms that include "phrase,"
> "clause," "subordinate clause," "sentence fragment." "run-on sentence," and
> so on, and it is very rare to get even one thoughtful answer in a class.
> For "fragment" and 'run-on," they have very soft answers like "a run-on
> sentence runs on too long." For "clause," and "phrase," they have no clue.
> I don't know if that holds true outside of New York, but it has been true
> of my students for many years.
>    The SAT's, as currently constituted, don't challenge that assumption.
> If they asked for knowledge about language directly, then teachers would
> have a direct incentive to teach it. Since we don't test for it, teachers
> can continue to assume that intuitive knowledge is sufficient.
>    Meanwhile, we can continue to make the argument, as you do well, that
> knowledge about language will help students do better on the test. The test
> makers make our argument harder by not requiring it.
>
> Craig
> ________________________________________
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [
> [log in to unmask]] on behalf of Karl Hagen [[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Tuesday, December 20, 2011 4:15 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: SAT question
>
> Craig,
>
> That hasn't changed, but this question type is explicitly about error
> identification. Here are the official instructions for this question type:
>
> "The following sentences test your ability to recognize grammar and usage
> errors. Each sentence contains either a single error or no error at all. No
> sentence contains more than one error. The error, if there is one, is
> underlined and lettered. If the sentence contains an error, select the one
> underlined part that must be changed to make the sentence correct. If the
> sentence is correct, select choice E. In choosing answers, follow the
> requirements of standard written English."
>
> Felicity can enter into some of the other question types. The instructions
> for sentence revision refer to "correctness and effectiveness of
> expression." "Effectiveness" is potentially a vague catch-all, but in
> practice, the test makers seem to have specific things in mind, such as
> wordiness or information flow.
>
> I would not completely agree that the SAT "asks" for intuitive decisions.
> It is structured to _allow_ such decisions. You certainly don't need to
> know what to call a dangling modifier is as long as you can flag it as a
> problem. You don't need to be able to explain subject-verb agreement as
> long as you can look at a verb and say, "That's wrong." But there are many
> problems on the SAT that will confound most students who rely on intuition
> alone. Every problem I've ever seen on the SAT is reducible to an explicit
> grammatical principle, and can be analyzed as such. Some are easier to
> teach than others, but explicit grammatical knowledge is of direct benefit
> to anyone taking this test.
>
> Karl
>
> On Dec 20, 2011, at 11:49 AM, Hancock, Craig G wrote:
>
> > Karl, et. al.
> >     I haven't looked at the SAT in  a year or so but I think I remember
> questions about the most felicitous choice (not just error.) Has that
> changed?
> >    One problem with calling this sentence "awkward" is that we have
> taken it out of its discourse context. In this form , the fact that Beth
> outperforms her sisters in games is placed in the main clause AND in
> sentence ending prominence.  The fact that we are told that  they practice
> equally hard seems to me to show the author is setting this up to declare a
> different reason for Beth's game performance, perhaps greater talent or
> grittiness or heart.  The sentence seems very reasonably structured for
> those purposes. It's very common in journalism and academic writing to
> start with  attribution. What follows has a somewhat independent syntax
> (almost like a projected clause in a direct quote.) "Their high school
> coach said, "Although Beth and her sisters practice equally hard, Beth
> outperforms them in games."In that form, I don'rt think it would raise an
> eyebrow.
> >    My main problem with the SAT's is that they purport to test knowledge
> about language, but are afraid to do so directly. It seems to me that most
> high school students wouldn't understand the dynamics of this sentence
> sufficiently well enough to have a conversation about it. John's students
> may be an exception. For the most part, the SAT asks for intuitive
> decisions.
> >    If you are directly teaching grammar and want to test for that, you
> would ask very different kinds of questions. In the current environment,
> very few students would do well.
> >
> > Craig
> >
> >
> > ________________________________________
> > From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [
> [log in to unmask]] on behalf of Karl Hagen [[log in to unmask]]
> > Sent: Tuesday, December 20, 2011 1:18 PM
> > To: [log in to unmask]
> > Subject: Re: SAT question
> >
> > I'm going to defend the SAT here, on several levels. First, I agree with
> the SAT writers. There's no error in this sentence. In terms of pedagogy, I
> see several issues:
> >
> > 1. Your students have an overly simplistic notion of modification. I
> doubt they really believe that modifiers always must modify what comes
> immediately to their left. Perhaps they are over-generalizing from
> instances of so-called squinting modifiers, where the modifier might apply
> either to the clause to the left or to the one to the right. Merely being
> adjacent to something, however, doesn't necessarily create an ambiguity.
> There needs to be a plausible semantic situation where the modification
> could make sense, and in this case, there isn't one. I often notice
> students who have been taught about grammatical ambiguity tend to
> over-generalize and tend to claim ambiguity based on mere proximity rather
> than any sensible interpretive issue.
> >
> > 2. Your students are focused on a single word, "although" and saying
> that it's misplaced, but if, hypothetically, we accept this as an error,
> it's the entire subordinate clause that would be misplaced, not a single
> word. On a purely pragmatic level of SAT strategy, this CANNOT be the
> error, as the rules of the game clearly state that any error will be
> entirely confined to the underlined choice, meaning that there must exist a
> fix for the problem that can be executed only by changing that one part.
> Moving the whole clause is disallowed under the rules of the game. More
> importantly, that your students are focused on the word shows they are
> thinking of grammatical relationships only on the level of individual
> words, but it's very important to stress that many relationships exist at
> higher levels--phrases and clauses. Grammar is not a one-word-at-a-time
> affair.
> >
> > 3. It may be fair to call opening with two modifiers that have different
> "ranks," as Bruce puts it awkward, but I want to defend its inclusion here,
> both pedagogically as a subject for in-class discussion, and as an
> appropriate structure of a high-stakes test.
> >
> > The task in this section is error identification, not stylistic
> judgment. If we identify the sentence as awkward, so what? Awkward
> according to whose lights? It's not how I would normally write, but that's
> not a sufficient criterion for rejecting the sentences inclusion on a test.
> There is a fine line (and perhaps a slippery slope too) when we start
> rejecting sentences like this for awkwardness. Academic authors do use this
> sort of opening reasonably often. We might not consider it ideal, but if we
> reject it, what do we say to students who find, say putting a that-clause
> in a subject to be awkward? (Few of them write such clauses--they much
> prefer the extraposed version.) It's easy to reject constructions you're
> not used to as awkward, and do we really want students to use "it sounds
> funny to me" as a criterion for correctness?
> >
> > Given that we're asking students to look for grammatical errors,  it's
> important that students be able to parse complex, highly embedded syntax to
> say, "there is no error here." So rather than talk about awkwardness and
> condemn the SAT makers for being bad writers, I prefer to say that this
> sort of double left-branching opening imposes a significantly heavier
> interpretive burden on readers than a more simply constructed sentence, and
> that is a good thing for a test. We want some test items that will
> distinguish students who can deal with complex syntax from those who cannot.
> >
> > I'm not arguing here for the appropriateness of the writing section as a
> whole. But given it's inclusion, I think that such syntax is appropriate in
> some questions.
> >
> > Karl
> >
> > On Dec 20, 2011, at 6:30 AM, John Chorazy wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> Good morning... Your opinions of the SAT and its methods may vary, but
> I'd like to ask your thoughts on this particular question:
> >>
> >> According to (a ) their high school basketball coach, (b ) although
> Beth and her sisters worked
> >>
> >> equally hard in practice, Beth (c ) tended to outperform them both (d )
> during games. (e) No error
> >>
> >> My11th graders decided that b is the correct answer with the following
> logic - the relationship between the clauses "Beth and her sisters worked
> equally hard in practice" and "Beth tended to outperform them both during
> games" should established by "although" between them. However, "although"
> is misplaced since "According to their high school basketball coach"
> doesn't modify "although Beth and her sisters worked equally hard in
> practice". I can see how both clauses might work to modify "Beth tended to
> outperform them both during games," but it's an awkward sentence. Maybe not
> necessarily grammatically flawed, but awkward.
> >> SAT suggests that (e), no error, is the correct answer. My students
> disagree. I'd appreciate your thoughts and comments.
> >> Thanks as always...
> >>
> >> John
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> John Chorazy
> >> English III Honors and Academic
> >> Pequannock Township High School
> >> 973.616.6000
> >>
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-- 
John Chorazy
English III Honors and Academic
Pequannock Township High School
973.616.6000

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