Bill,
   I have pretty much used phrase structure diagrams for my own purposes,
which means "predicate phrase" rather than verb phrase, and heavy
functional labelling. In fact, I tell my students that we can put as
much information as we want to into the diagrams. I ask my classes to
do them for the basic clause, and after that, I use them to show
various new concepts, but some students like them enough to keep on
using them on their own. My optional final is a passage for them to
interact with, using whatever seems appropriate from their own
knowledge base, and last time through at least a half dozen students
diagrammed all the sentences.    >
   Diagrams are somewhat analytical, but so is syntax. It helps, I think,
to convince them that they are bringing to consciousness what they
already know about the sentence. You can set up problems, like
prepositional phrases in the predicate that may be adjectival or
adverbial, prepositions that may go with the verb or with a following
noun phrase, and so on. So the diagram is a solution to a riddle. I
have given a list of abbreviations and told them not to worry about
memorizing those; it's just a way to have conversation about your
perspective on the sentence, nothing more.
   I loved Reed/Kellog diagrams when I was in what we then called "Junior
High." Maybe that explains myt life-long love of grammar, but phrase
sgtructure diagrams just seem to reflect a deeper understanding. Phrase
structure diagrams force them to think of the phrase as a basic unit
(of one or more words) and they leave word order intact. No one owns
the copyright on them, so we can use them very flexibly.
   The main point, and I think we agree on this one, is that they are
never ends in themselves.

Craig
> I have tried various ways to incorporate diagramming in my college
> grammar classes, always with mixed results. The most serious difficulty
> I've noticed is a tendency for students to focus on, or panic about, the
> diagrams as if they were the sole content of the course, a problem Brown
> alluded to earlier. I'm tossing in some comments below; apologies for
> the list format, but I can't think of a more coherent way to organize
> these:
>
>
> *	Almost all of my students are English majors. Many typically
> come in with the firm notion that they are "bad at math and science,"
> and to them, if it's a diagram, it's science. Students who have a strong
> negative emotional reaction to diagrams aren't going to learn much from
> them, so the pedagogical issue for me, with those students, is how to
> get them past their reactions (and, of course, get myself past my
> reaction to their reactions - I'm a bit angry at an educational system
> that gives students the idea that if they find a domain of knowledge
> difficult, the best way to cope is to scream and run from it).
>
> *	I've had some success with having students first fill out a form
> with questions about a sentence (e.g. "What is the subject?) and then
> turning that into a diagram. All I'm trying to do with that is make sure
> they think about the diagram as an alternate way of presenting
> information, and maintain focus on the information itself. This seems to
> help some of the students, but some still panic.
>
> *	RK and Tree diagrams are each good for different things. Tree
> diagrams more transparently indicate constituency - the way parts make
> up bigger parts. RK diagrams more clearly indicate statements about what
> the subject is, what the direct object is, etc. If you view Tree
> diagrams as a pedagogical device, rather than as a notation for a
> specific theory, though, you can incorporate information like "subject"
> or "direct object" into the tree simply by labeling the nodes (I'm
> making the comment about theory because in some of the theories that use
> trees, it's important *not* to label the nodes like that). Students who
> have had no diagramming at all find RK and Tree diagrams equally
> frightful, so it's not like you're scaring them any more with a Tree
> diagram than you would with an RK one.
>
> *	Showing students multiple types of diagramming (during a part of
> the class where you're making it clear they won't be tested on their
> ability to use all those) helps them see diagrams as metaphors, rather
> than as "correct technology." You can make sentence models with
> spray-painted tinker toys, for example (yes, I teach college - but who
> doesn't like tinker toys? I've seen something similar with cardboard and
> colorful pipe cleaners).
>
> Bill Spruiell
>
> Dept. of English
> Central Michigan University
>
>
>
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