I'll weigh in on the comment about middle/high school teachers and grammar.
Some days I feel as if I am banging my head against the wall when I try to
convince my colleagues that it is essential to teach grammar to our high
school students.  Students are hungry for grammar.  In the end-of-the year
reflective essays, students in my classes often write about how much they
learned about English grammar and how that knowledge has made them more
aware of their writing choices.  A frequent lament from students is that
they never learned grammar.  I'm pretty sure that other teachers teach
grammar, but as we discussed at this summer's ATEG conference, the
teacher-preparation programs are not teaching teachers how to teach grammar
or even how to talk about it.  One of my colleagues says students don't
need to know grammar.  He grades with a red pen and points out errors in
student writing but doesn't help them to recognize the errors and correct
them.  (Students tell me that he calls me the Grammar Queen behind my
back---as if that is a bad thing.)

Last year, my department chair asked me to do a mini-lesson on teaching
grammar.  When I wrote a routine exercise on the board and asked my
colleagues to identify various elements of the sentence, most of them
didn't have an answer.  As I began talking about the subject and predicate,
I saw some of their eyes widen in panic.  They literally had no idea what I
was talking about.  When I explained about the different types of verbs,
using Martha's sentence patterns as a guideline, I totally lost them.  I
had approached my mini-lesson with the assumption that my fellow English
teachers understood grammar, but I was obviously mistaken.  They know
literature, but grammar is a foreign concept.  Those of us who grew up in
the pre-Chomsky era learned how to diagram a sentence.  It opened our eyes
to the various ways we could arrange words for greater effect.  I cringe
when I see some of the sentences my students write using text-shorthand. 
We certainly have our work cut out for us.

Dee


> [Original Message]
> From: DD Farms <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: 12/12/2008 6:31:36 PM
> Subject: Re: Clause or Phrase
>
> At 03:46 PM 12/12/2008, richard betting wrote: . . .
> >I would bet that the majority of middle school/high school English
> >teachers would not be able to define and explain the terms that have
> >been discussed, to say nothing of doing so from the perspective of
> >more than one grammatical approach. That is not to criticize the
> >teachers themselves so much as to ask about the educational process
> >shat enabled them to get where they are without an adequate knowledge
> >of the English language that they spend so much time teaching. In
> >order to have an ADEQUATE (minimal) background in English, what
> >courses should/must all language arts teachers have? Could we agree on
> >the required courses? Do current textbooks (for teachers) meet the
> >content requirement we might create? Is anyone still working on scope
> >and sequence? . . .
>
> DD: Very salient questions and comment. I teach Latin. [ Don't get 
> caught in the Latin lists' cross fire on Grammar, Translating, 
> Understanding, reading in Latin, Speaking, language learning in 
> general, or whatever*.]  I suspect that the pre college level English 
> teachers are not teaching or talking much about grammar. The students 
> I get learn the parts of speech (et al.) from me, using Dr. John 
> Traupman's, "Conversational Latin for Oral Proficiency," mostly. What 
> they do in English class, I wot not. Well, it appears to have naught 
> to do with formal definitions or rules of grammar. Being a Nosey 
> Parker, I have very discretely probed.  "Parse" is an unknown 
> word.  I sort of gather from comments on this list that there are 
> still some English Grammarian troglodytes that care. Consensus on 
> texts we probably could have. Would they have a ghost of a chance of 
> being adopted for teacher certification courses? That I misdoubt. 
> Onward comrades, it is a glorious battle we wage. "Thump! Thump! 
> Thump!" Do I hear the classic cue to the audience of impending doom?
> *Well the ones on Graffitti are fun.
>
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