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Ed,
At 14:44 18.12.1997 -0500, you wrote:
 
>     Perhaps part of the problem here is that we are
>thinking in terms of different audiences. Could you tell
>us what you teach, and to whom?
 
Let's begin at the beginning.
 
I've taught English (as a foreign language) to Grammar School and Secondary
Mod students (sorry, I'm not familiar with the American terms) and the
lowest school type of our German tripartite system. I found that the less
gifted a learner is the less grammar should be taught. Grammar is an
additional subject and only the most gifted learners are able to learn both
- the language and a model about the language. What is quite obvious on all
three levels is that grammar teaching does not help to learn the USE of
language (but we've discussed this before).
 
I have also taught German as a mother tongue to Grammar School students.
Again this is a different subject from teaching writing and reading and so
on. And again I found that their writing did not benefit at all from
grammar teaching.
 
I also found - and this bears on our present discussion - that the younger
students asked questions in grammar lessons which I was not able to answer
- the reason was that they were still thinking logically, which is a
natural gift (!), and school had not yet destroyed it at that point. Older
students have had to learn that logic isn't what teachers want, teachers
want their students to learn what they tell them, however absurd it may be,
so they learn to not think but be quiet. The questions set me thinking. And
I soon realized that the students were right, and that my original answers
("that's just the way it is" or "wait till you're older" and more such
crap) were not answers at all, but just an easy way out - it only showed
that I had not understood grammar myself. So I started to apply what I had
learned in my literature courses at university, to think about poetry
creatively and with my own brain, to apply all this to language. And in no
time I realized that what I had hitherto thought as an unquestionable truth
to be learned unthinkingly was no truth at all but just the result of other
people's thinking and sometimes quite obviously of rather superficial
thinking and even absurd thinking, and sometimes copied from other people's
work centuries old.
 
At university I had never done any grammar, neither in English nor in
German, with the exception of one lecture, which was ever so boring and
ever so demotivating and I didnt understand a word  - grammar, the lecture
confirmed, was something that could not be understood.
 
And then I was a teacher, and the first English grammar lesson I had to
give was on gerunds. I hadn't the foggiest, so I studied grammar books. And
again found it utterly confusing - gerunds there were, and gerundivums, and
verbal substantives and participles (although, when all is said and done,
there are just simple ing-forms ...). That was after I had learned that I
could use my own brains on German. So I looked at what the grammar book
said and tried to find a way to simplify things in such a way that my
students might understand the whole thing. That took a lot of courage,
though, because my 'mentor' was extremely strict and was not wont to
tolerate any deviation from the 'book'. (He took it quite nicely, however,
until today I do not understand why I was so lucky.)
 
Anyway, that was the beginning, and then soon I realized that trying to
simplify grammar books was not what was called for but that we had to look
at language itself, and that this was not only fascinating, but the only
way to arrive at grammatical categories that could be comprehended  - by
myself, by my young students, and nowadays by my teacher trainees, who need
grammatical knowledge as a tool to devise exercises and lessons in general
that make sense and help the (school) students to learn to use the foreign
language and also make them like the foreign language and thus the language
lessons, and thus, hopefully, foreigners (which, as y'all know, is a
problem for part of the populuation in any country). [Nowadays, as you can
see, I teach at a 'teacher training college' or 'College of Further
Education' as my colleagues prefer to put it.]
 
To cut the long story short, I'm not a linguist hovering in the sky, far
from the reality of teaching, celebrating some kind of special linguistic
unrealistic  logician's 'logic'. 'Real' linguists wouldn't call me a
linguist at all, I fear, but that's their problem. All I have been trying
to do is to take my young and older students and their problems with
grammar seriously and find a way to solve the problems in such a way that
they can understand them. And this is best done by using the same kind of
logic and the same kind of thinking we use in real life and the sciences in
general, and not the messy kind that many teachers use the moment they
enter the classroom (which is a great 'tool', though, for repressing the
students - sorry, but I have seen too much of this in 'my time' not to be a
little bitter about it, and no offense meant to anyone reading here).
 
> By the way, I just finished the semester working
>with a fairly intelligent, older student in a grammar
>course. She did fairly well, but still has tremendous
>problems distinguishing an adjective from a noun.
 
That's just what I mean, isn't it ...
 
Season's greetings,
Burkhard Leuschner
 
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Burkhard Leuschner - Paedagogische Hochschule Schwaebisch Gmuend, Germany
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