Kathleen, Paul, and others,
    I have returned to terminology, but in the context of a metocognitive
approached reinforced by color-coding.  I am pleased to see students becoming
more self-confident as they are able to hook up terms they have heard with the
reality of the sentences we cover.  It is all labor-intensive, this modeling of
sentences with everything marked and their building sentences of their own based
on these models or on tranformations or combinations that lead to these models,
but it is time well-spent.
    I start with action-based sentences and the question, "What word tells what's
happening?"  We underline it in red.  "What word tells who or what ______(and I
use the word already underlined in red)?"  We underline it in blue.  Under the
colors, I mark "subject" and "verb."  I ask whether the werb is present or past
and mark the answer above.  I ask whether the subject is a who or a what and
write that above.  Then, I ask what subject pronoun takes the place of the
subject.  Students have absolutely no automaticity in this.  In introduce subject
pronouns.  We move to the question, "Does anything tell to whom or what
__________ ___________(and I use the words underlined in blue and in red)?"  We
underline that in yellow, write "direct object" below, establish whether it is a
whom or a what, write it above along with the object pronoun, that we also
review.  It used to be that with the adjectives, I would ask, "Does anything tell
which, how many, or what kind of things are involved in what's happening?"  But
now, before I do that, I ask, "What words tell who or what _________(again,
finishing off with the word underlined in red)?"  I underline the entire noun
phrase, serving as the subject, in blue.  Then I ask, "Which of these words
identify the thing, itself, that _________?"  At this stage, I underline that
word twice with blue and automatically, below the blue,  underline all the other
words in green to signify that they are adjectives.  But I do not mark that term
below the words.  I am trying to show sentences types.  Above each adjective we
write whether it tells which, how many, or what kind of thing the subject is.
Naturally, the same is done for the direct object, where the noun phrase is all
underlined in yellow and identified as the direct object, where the word that
identifies the thing, itself, is double-underlined in yellow, and where all other
words have a green line marked below the yellow line.  For adverbs, I ask, "Does
anything tell how, how often, when, where, why, or in what context _________
_________ __________ (using the words underlined in blue, red, and possibly
yellow).  We underline these words in orange.  I start with one word, located at
the end of the sentence.  In the next sentence, the same or a similar word is at
the front.  With the next, I pile in words, clusters, and phrases that answer
these questions.  Here, I do not break things into small increments.  If "three
times" tells how often, we write that above.  If "early in the morning" tells
when, we write "when" above.  In the same way that students have no automaticity
with subject and object pronouns, with verb tense, and with the questions
adjective answer, they do not readily know which questions are answered by each
set of adverbs underlined in orange.  What we have here is a metacognitive
approach to grammar that surfaces the fact that students can read sentences yet
have little idea what questions the words inside those sentences are answering.
It seems that this is the place to start.  We have a grammar for comprehension.
The labeling of parts is introduced with subject, verb, and direct object.  This
helps give purpose to the picture made with color-coding.  But, it is a secondary
consideration.  Meaning always comes first.  Otherwise, students sense we do not
have our priorities in place.
    Given this method, I add above the words whatever information that I want to
teach.  We move from "which" to "determiner."  We add "active" and "passive" to
our verbs.  We place "phrase of agency" and "phrase of instrumentation" above
those words underlined in orange that otherwise tell how something happened to
someone.
    Once we have covered the action-based sentence sufficiently (I do this before
introducing the indirect object and the passive voice), we look at the verb as
the key word defining the relationship of the subject of interest to the rest of
the sentence.  That relationship is defined by what that thing does, what is has,
and what it is.  Now, we can change our order of questions to, "What words
connect the subject of interest to the rest of the sentence?"  With "have" I
introduce transformations involving "with" and possessives.  With forms of "to
be" I show how we can define a specific subject according to a category and its
particular attributes.  Complements, involving predicate nominatives, are
underlined in purple with green below that for the descriptors.  Then, we remove
the noun and determiners and quantifiers, leaving just the qualifiers.  Using a
sentence like "The door was closed," I ask whether "closed" tells what happened
to the door or whether it tells something about the door itself.  By changing it
to its expanded form "The door was a closed door," we see that we had a
complement that was a predicate adjective.  One curious thing I have discovered
with the metacognitive approach where I ask, "Does anything tell who or what
_________ __________?"  is that what would be a "who" as a subject sometimes
changes to a "what" as a complement.  In "The captain of the team is John" the
word "who" would go above both the subject and the complement, in that "John"
identifies "who" the captain is.  But, in the sentence "John is captain of the
team," the phrase "captain of the team" tells "what" John is.  As intricate as
all this might sound, it is easily picked up by students because it is colloquial
at base.  In other words, a metacognitive grammar draws on the colloquial nature
of language acquisition and uses it to organize students' thinking about the
formal aspects of writing.  Thus, they become naturally analytical.
    I, personally, see this approach as a delivery system for cognitive grammar.
Obviously, it has the elements of a phrase-structure grammar because sentences
operate through phrases rather than the itty-bitty bits that make up those
phrases.  It uses Chomsky's generative grammar as a basis for transforming and
combining sentences.  This we do as if we were doing jumping jacks and push-ups
to prepare ourselves for a football game.  Instead, we are preparing ourselves to
write essays.  The intent is to limber up the brain.
    In all of this, the terminology is important.  It gives focus and form to
what students do with questions and colors.  Both reinforce each other and give
meaning to what the students are learning.  By having students create their own
sentences, following various models and transformations, we get them to create
synapse paths that would not be in place were we to rely alone on reading or on
identifying parts of speech or parts of sentences to build such connections.
Once students interact with words in building their own sentences, they can
accommodate the instruction that goes along with it until their experience is
sufficient to assimilate the process within their brains.
    I teach high school.  This approach works with resistant learners and with
ESL.  It is a grammar-based writing approach that takes students from the ground
up.  I think it addresses the questions you have about teaching function and
form.  I have googled thought-based grammar but have yet to read what I have
copied.  I suspect that, once I do, I will find that others have taken this more
meaningful approach to teaching grammar.  Because we are driven by intention,
meaning must come first and it must relate to our own lives.  That's the
hook-up.  I find it works--at all levels.  I'd be curious to hear what others
think of this apporach.
        Sincerely,
        Gregg Heacock

"Kathleen M. Ward" wrote:

> This is the question I have been asking all my (teaching) life.  No one
> has ever come up with an answer.
>
> Kathleen Ward
> On May 8, 2005, at 6:42 AM, PAUL E. DONIGER wrote:
>
> > This is all very logical and interesting, but I have a question that
> > remains unanswered: How do we teach function without teaching
> > terminology? I don't see how we can talk about, for example, the
> > Known/New idea behind making sentence structure choices without
> > reference to things like 'subject' or 'verb' or 'clause' or maybe even
> > 'adverb'! That's grammatical terminology, isn't it?
> >  
> > Paul
> >
>
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