Dear Lawrence:

Of course you can further the cause:  You can join us at our ATEG
conference in Minneapolis in July.  We missed you last year.  And by all
means, present your method to us on the program.  I know that Dave Sawyer
would love to hear from you.  We old timers will enjoy seeing you again.

Martha


>        A recent posting from Joanna Rubba requested input on grammar teaching
>from "the K-12 crowd." At our private boys school we admit into 7th grade
>boys from many different school backgrounds. Since some have studied
>grammar and some have not, we have to start from scratch.
>        I begin by pointing out that you need two things to make a sentence:
>something you're talking about and what you're saying about it. I point
>out how exciting it is that we have this power to join two ideas
>together–"fuse" them–in this way, and that there are an infinite number of
>ways of doing it. We start by finding this pattern in two-or-three-word
>sentences. As we expand sentences–always making them interesting and when
>possible choosing them from their own writing or from literature they are
>reading–they see how subject and predicate can acquire modifiers, whether
>single-word or prepositional phrases, and how, depending on the kind of
>verb (intransitive, transitive, linking), they can be filled out
>("complemented") with direct and indirect objects and subject complements.
>Then come the verbals: gerunds, present participles and infinitives. By
>the end of the first trimester, the students are comfortable diagramming
>simple sentences, including sentences with prepositional and participial
>phrases of all kinds. Their eagerness to put diagrams on the board and the
>intelligent questions they ask about the logical relationships between
>parts of a sentence is exciting to see and belies the notion that grammar
>is dull.
>        We use a British form of diagramming in which the major sentence
>units–subject, verb, direct object, indirect object, subject complement,
>adjective and adverb modifiers, are placed in boxes and joined with
>appropriate lines. This method is simpler, less sprawling than the line
>diagramming of Warriner's and most American textbooks. It allows the basic
>architecture of the sentence to stand out clearly. When students see how a
>word in the adjective box can suddenly acquire a direct object because it
>is a present participle, they say "Wow!" They are intrigued by the way the
>hybrid parts of speech (verbals) expand the possibilities of including
>information in a sentence without the need for any new grammar principles.
>        Since the sentences in exercises in many grammar textbooks are often
>too
>contrived, uninteresting, or few, I collect my own from novels, stories,
>student writings. I sometimes have students imitate these sentences by
>creating their own sentences on the same pattern. This helps them "try on"
>styles of writing they might never have used on their own, expanding their
>repertoire. Seventh graders are capable of writing sentences rich in
>participial phrases, inversion, variety of length and structure, absolute
>constructions, etc., though I would not claim this as a direct result of
>grammar study except insofar as the latter raises consciousness of options.
>        In the second trimester of 7th grade we move on to complex sentences.
>Since subordinate clauses are used as a single part of speech–adjective
>(relative clauses), noun (usually direct object), or adverb (8 kinds)–and
>since the pattern of verb-subject recognition has become automatic by this
>time, they easily spot clauses. All they need now is to learn the typical
>introductory words (conjunctions or pronouns) for each kind of clause. By
>the end of the trimester they can diagram any kind of sentence, including
>some quite challenging ones like these:
>        • There are people who don't want to hear what you have to say unless
>it
>is what they have already said to you.
>        • He said it was all up with him because if he did get saved, whoever
>saved him would send him back home to claim the reward. (Twain)
>        • Prackle had several blond sisters of whom he was so proud that he had
>on occasion caused a commotion when he thought they had been insulted.
>(Steinbeck)
>        Again we use a simplified form of diagramming, writing each clause in a
>rectangle followed by the Kind of clause (Adjective, Noun, Adverb, Main)
>in a second (adjoining) rectangle, and its relationship to the rest of the
>sentence (direct object, modifying a noun or verb, etc.) in a third. The
>students feel proud that they can understand how such sentences are put
>together since many college students cannot do that.
>        Somewhere along the line we throw in compound sentences, which are easy
>since they are simply two or more simple sentences joined together, and we
>learn the different methods of joining. They like to show off their use of
>the semi-colon, which always provokes a discussion about how the parts on
>either side of the semi-colon are related to each other, and whether the
>semi-colon is or is not more effective than a period and two sentences.
>Some of the authors we read in 7th grade use a rich variety of sentence
>structures. We practice identifying simple, compound, complex,
>compound/complex sentences in books and stories by Robert Louis Stevenson,
>Twain, London, S. E. Hinton, Lessing, and others. Students come to see the
>nobility of a finely constructed sentence that accomplishes several things
>at once. In high school the tools they have learned to use in 7th grade
>can be applied to ever more varied and developed texts as a way of
>appreciating style.
>        I agree wholeheartedly with most of the contributors to this list that
>contextualizing grammar (seeing it in connection with thought and its
>expression) is the way to rescue it from the doldrums where it has
>languished so long. It is an insult to children's intelligence to assume
>they cannot be interested in how ideas are related and how the sentence
>mirrors or embodies this relationship.
>        Thank you all for reading this. If I can further the cause in any way,
>please let me know! Bon courage.
>        Fr. Laurence Kriegshauser, O.S.B.
>        Saint Louis Priory School
>        500 South Mason Road
>        St. Louis, MO 63141