Geoff,
Useful treatment you seem to do. I'm wondering what text you use to back up your
approach.

As for me, having tried Klammer and Schultz, Analyzing English Grammar for a
year, and finding their treatments both too detailed for my students and their
statement of sentence types imperspicuous, I'm returning to my favorite,
Morenberg's Doing Grammar, accompanied by his The Writer's Options: Lessons in
Style and Arrangement, in order to anchor the work closer to the writing
process.  I like Morenberg's treatment of sentence types and his exposition on
relatives, noun clauses, infinitives etc.

Further, I have discovered that my department tells students to take Advanced
Grammar IN ORDER to improve their writing... gad.... so... I'm hoping that the
Writer's Options book will help me anchor more in the uses of grammar in writing.

ciao,

rebecca wheeler




Geoff Layton wrote:

> At 01:44 PM 2/14/01 -0600, you wrote:
> >It seems to me that the neglect of the discipline of grammar tends to
> reduce speech and writing to > a collage of direct quotations, as in "He
> was all like 'Think 'different,'"'
> >instead of, "He suggested that I think in an unconventional manner.'
> >Grammar is the study of the rules by which we generate new statements of
> >our own.
>
> Let me respond as a former believer in the purity and sanctity of grammar,
> but one who has since undergone the baptism of fire in the secondary school
> classroom.
>
> I think the point that the most members of the list would make is that
> knowledge of the rules of grammar have no bearing on the ability of
> students to create meaning from language - either through writing or
> through reading.  For example, knowledge of the definition of an appositive
> does in no way guarantee that a student can use the form correctly.  (I
> didn't even know what it meant until I came across it in a grammar book
> after I started to teach grammar, and I've been speaking the King's English
> for over 50 years!)
>
> Therefore, the struggle is to find the means (a) to teach students how to
> grow in their ability to create meaning and (b) to convince the "powers
> that be" that this should be the goal rather than knowledge of the specific
> rules of grammar.
>
> In my classroom, I have begun to teach a structure of usage that seems to
> work.  Instead of making students identify grammar constructs, I show them
> how to use the tools of grammar to create meaning.  For example, they can
> use an infintive phrase to express "where" or "when" - and then, create a
> different kind of meaning in a different way using a dependent clause.  At
> no time does the student need to learn the definitions. Just so long as
> they know how to use them!
>
> Therefore, most people who have come to the same conclusion that I have are
> not neglectful of grammar discipline - just concerned that students study
> what they need to know to learn something really useful in life.
>
> Does this help?
>
> Geoff Layton
>
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>
> Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/

--
*******************************************
Rebecca S. Wheeler, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Christopher Newport University
1 University Place
Newport News, VA 23606-2998

Editor, Syntax in the Schools
The Journal of the Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar (ATEG), an
assembly of the NCTE
http://www.ateg.org/

phone: (757) 594-8891;  fax: (757) 594-8870
email: [log in to unmask]

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