Gretchen,

No apology needed. I wrote a lengthy response last night only to
have our unspeakably kludgy Groupwise Webaccess serve cut me off
and delete the whole thing before I could send it. So I'll give it
another try.

I think we're talking about two different sets of problems, using
the same vocabulary but meaning
different things, which is one of the impressions I got from the
discussion on the middle school list.

For example, my point about Quirk was not that we should all go
out and buy that gougingly expensive book, as excellent as it is.
I don't even ask my graduate students to buy it, although I
encourage them to ask for it as a birthday present. My point
rather was that we and our respective ilks don't read the same
stuff. We've heard of each other's sources and probably read some
of them, but the ones we each go to when we need to figure
something out are clearly not the same.

The implications of this are, I think, important to this
discussion, because we need to recognize up front that we aren't
always talking about the same things, even when we use the same
words.

When you cite the experts you read as convincing you that
"teaching grammar in isolation doesn't
work to improve writing," I can only agree heartily. That's why I
made my smart-aleck references to math, social studies, etc. Why
should it improve writing and why should that be the reason for
teaching grammar? But here again, I'm using "grammar" in one way,
and, I suspect, you're using it as another. For you, grammar is a
set of minilessons that you slip in when they are useful. For me
grammar is a systematic study like these other disciplines. I find
it strange that we graduate kids from high school expecting them
to know something about US and world history, math,
government, science, literature, human biology, etc., but we don't
expect them to know anything at
all about the one capacity that distinguishes us as a species.
Rather, we allow ignorance of
language to spawn and support language-based prejudices, and our
society even encourage these prejudices. We continue to teach as
truth an incredible array of nonsense about language that no other
discipline would tolerate for a moment.

However, I also know that if language is going to be taught as
subject matter, it's going to be taught by language arts teachers
like you, which is as it should be, but you've made the point well
that you already have an overflowing curriculum that you really
can't fit grammar as system into. But here in Indiana,
middle-school language arts teachers are going to have to find a
way, because the new standards mandate extensive coverage of
grammar, to a degree that can't be achieved without a systematic
approach. I don't know how they're going to do it, but I do know
that as a college grammar teacher who helps to prepare these
teachers I have a responsibility to equip them
appropriately--and I need for them and for language arts faculty
who teach their methods courses to help me to see what they need
from linguistics.

I'm not pushing for a middle school linguistics course, although
that's been done successfully and it works very well. Rather, let
me suggest a three-way division that might help place approaches
to language in some perspective. The minilesson approach you
currently use is a way of making sure that children learn and
follow the canons of prescriptive grammar. These are fundamentally
social conventions of the same sort as table manners and
appropriateness of dress. And they have to be taught if children
are to learn to function successfully in a wider world. The kind
of grammar I'm talking about is what comes out of the scholarly
tradition called traditional grammar. This is frequently mixed
with and confused with prescriptive grammar, but they are
different. Traditional grammar deals with formal written English
but deals with it as a systematic study. Two of the giants in the
field, in the 20th c., are Otto Jespersen and Sir Randolph Quirk,
not to mention Quirk's coauthors. They and scholars like them have
produced high quality, relatively theory-neutral, in-depth
descriptions of how formal standard written English works. This is
the kind of grammar that I think ought to be taught in the
schools.

Linguistics, the third division, is a science that investigates
what human language is and how it
works. Linguists attempt to deal systematically with
cross-linguistic differences and similarities and to explain why
these things are so. Some of us get formal to a degree that would
make a mathematician purr, and others of us deal with aspects of
language that don't formalize quite so well. As a discipline,
linguistics probably doesn't belong in the middle school
curriculum, although linguistic enrichment activities can, I
think, be very useful and exciting. Take a look at the Linguistic
Olympics site to see examples of this. The Linguistic Olympics
presents simple problems of linguistic analysis in a wide variety
of languages and dealing with a wide range of linguistic topics.
These problems are kept at a level appropriate to middle and high
school problem solving skills, and they can be very entertaining
and insightful. You can look at them at
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~tpayne/lingolym/.

But finally, we have to work together:  middle-school language
arts teachers, language arts education faculty, and linguists, to
figure out what teachers need to know and to do in order to teach
grammar that is the intellectual peer of the literature and
writing they teach.

And yes, I'd love to see the math teachers squirm!

Herb

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