I almost hesitate to utter a word here, I've been scrambling so to get
caught up after THE job hunt (successful! am moving to Virginia), but I've
a question about Judy's suggestion regarding a minimalist guidelines
document. She wrote that such a document could name

">some of the tensions between perspectives that have been brought up
>on this list -- to let teachers know that there are different
>descriptions of language, that the description they
>choose should be useful for their pedagogical purposes
>(it should provide the meta-language teachers want to share with their
>students for talking about the subject of the course, which could be
>language itself).

>In other words, give teachers some options. Let them elaborate
>the guidelines with extra materials as they see fit.

It is surely true that giving the teachers options is very important, but
at this point in the state of the discipline, I wonder if that could add
further bafflement to an already confused situation. Think about the deep
frustration we hear from teachers who feel direly unprepared to teach
grammar. In that context, options that they evaluate and choose from hardly
seems like a help.

I am NOT SAYING to present ONE way, as there surely is not one.

What I am wondering (and surely this goes beyond the guidelines document)
is whether a "top 25  (or 50 or 75...) grammar issues" with illustrative
examples, and alternative ways of handling them could be useful to the K-12
teachers who feel so at sea. In that context you could build in different
frameworks, as different ways of handling the issues, rather along parallel
tracks (see the blue section for such and such a school, etc.  These
workbooks would surely need to be relativized to particular grade spans.

I guess that's a huge job. It would take years.

On the schools of analysis, I confess to being very torn about this.
Trained at Chicago in linguistics, I've worked in what, at least we saw, as
a relatively theory neutral mode of describing language structure. I find
that pretty clearly reflected in Max Morenberg's DOING GRAMMAR (though I
know that Johanna has some real hesitation about Morenberg's book, a point
she and I have not yet explored). Morenberg talks about structure/function
pairs at the sentence level (Noun Phrase functioning as subject of the
sentence; Adjective clause functioning as predicate adjective, etc.).

This is an approach which I found very successful, taking students who had
been unable to find the verb in the sentence, and 7 weeks later, at the end
of the summer quarter were successfully identifying reduced relative
clauses (excited -- as in 'the excited dog', which is reduced from "the dog
who is/was excited").

So, do you think there is a place for workbook style treatments of the
top-X grammar issues relevant to particular grade spans? I would see such
workbooks as pedagogical tools for school teachers, to help them concretely
handle the most common issues/analyses that recur.


:)
rebecca




by the way,Judy, I LOVE your Blake quote...

>Eternity is in love with the productions of time - Wm Blake



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Rebecca S. Wheeler, Ph.D.       [log in to unmask]
1201 University Circle
Department of English           office phone:     (801) 626-6009
Weber State University          office fax:       (801) 626-7760
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