John,
     I agree very much that Hillocks et. al. is part of the problem.  Following that, teacher ed programs have tended to counsel minimalist intervention with as little metalanguage as possible. Grammar is something acquired, not something that needs to be UNDERSTOOD. The SAT seems to enable that position by not asking for direct knowledge. The best we can do, I guess, is look for the direct knowledge that best supports doing well on these tests, and it seems as if you are doing exactly that. I would love to see an article on that for the ATEG Journal: something like "Knowledge about Language as Support for the SAT."
     We all have difficult choices to make in the absence of a coherent scope and sequence position by NCTE. It seems to me that you are doing heroic work in a very trying environment. If students have to jump through a high stakes hoop, then they will be hungry for the advice that will help them do that well.  I would be delighted if one of your students showed up in my college classes. There would be something very solid there to build on.

Craig

From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of John Chorazy
Sent: Tuesday, December 20, 2011 6:05 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: SAT question

Karl, Craig, and all - thank you for your responses.

The SAT does include questions that pertain to usage issues that cannot be pinned down to a survey of high school grammar instruction. That's a separate issue, I suppose. Karl - in many cases with sentence corrections, the subject seems somehow out of place and not, as you notice, a modifier (or a single word in the case of my original model). Here's another:

Although criticized by a few for her daredevil aviation escapades, most people viewed Amelia Earhart as a skillful pilot.
(a) most people viewed Amelia Earhart as a skillful pilot
(b) most people viewed Amelia Earhart to be a skillful pilot
(c) a skillful pilot was what most people viewed Amelia Earhart as
(d) Amelia Earhart was viewed by most people as a skillful pilot
(e) Amelia Earhart, a skillful pilot in the view of most people

Can we name the exact and explicit grammatical principle? It's not a misplaced modifier, since according to the question the subject and predicate is the underlined issue. What would you call that, in a certain, specific term? What would Warriner's call this?

As far as an error being confined to the underlined choice, a question such as the one below defies that suggestion:

Given her strong sense of social justice, Burns vehemently protested over her party's failure to support a tax decrease.

Only a part of the underlined phrase "protested over" needs correction - the elimination of "over". What's the explicit grammatical principal? Is wordiness grammatical, or stylistic?

Craig - your students need those terms from you because teachers at the High School level believe Hillocks et al since their college professors in Methods courses tout Hillocks et al. And then they come to department meetings and share articles from NCTE that tout Hillocks et al. Many students come to me, a teacher of 11th graders, not knowing that an adverb modifies a verb, and not knowing what it means to modify at all, frankly. That they are being exposed to these discussion is huge for them - yes, I do let them read your collective responses. And if they and their understandings are overly simplistic, as Karl suggests, it's because school teaches them 1+1=2 and the SAT gets you into college and the world teaches them that if you can sing well, run fast, look pretty, or the like then you can probably make a whole lot of money. You might be surprised, but 17 year old humans like to see things very clearly, especially if their teachers tell them so: Tiger Woods cheated on his wife and deserved what he got; War is bad and so was Bush; the "Nucleus" is that large oval body near the center of the cell, and other facts. They like formulas because they're constant and because you can use them on the test. When they take the SAT at 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning, they're thinking one thing - how can I do this and pass with a score good enough to get me into my first choice college? It's not a conversation, it's a performance.

Grammatical ambiguity on the SAT would be a lovely thing to assess, if teachers actually talked about it and also assessed student understanding of grammatical ambiguity in specific cases. I posed my initial question to the list because I found it interesting and because my students - young, impressionable, and actually willing to talk about things that others have labeled over their heads - wanted to know more. I believe they made a fair argument from their knowledge base, though I told them (as suggested in my first message) how they sentence was technically "correct." I'm not in the business of either critiquing or defending the SAT - my role is to get them ready for Craig.

I thank you again for your help and for these wonderful conversations.

John






On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 4:57 PM, Hancock, Craig G <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
Karl,
     Your response is very clear and useful.
     My experience has been that most progressive teachers believe that grammar is largely an intuitive system that most students will acquire while the attention is on other things. I teach a new group of college freshmen every year,and most will say that their teachers wanted them to learn "literary elements," but not anything substantial about grammar. I usually give my incoming students a list of terms that include "phrase," "clause," "subordinate clause," "sentence fragment." "run-on sentence," and so on, and it is very rare to get even one thoughtful answer in a class. For "fragment" and 'run-on," they have very soft answers like "a run-on sentence runs on too long." For "clause," and "phrase," they have no clue. I don't know if that holds true outside of New York, but it has been true of my students for many years.
   The SAT's, as currently constituted, don't challenge that assumption. If they asked for knowledge about language directly, then teachers would have a direct incentive to teach it. Since we don't test for it, teachers can continue to assume that intuitive knowledge is sufficient.
   Meanwhile, we can continue to make the argument, as you do well, that knowledge about language will help students do better on the test. The test makers make our argument harder by not requiring it.

Craig
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