I sent this to Martha Kolln and, at her suggestion, I'm posting this to the
ATEG list.

To:  ATEG Committee on Scope and Sequence
From: Janet Castilleja		
Email:  [log in to unmask]
Date: February 12, 1999


English teachers face the dilemma that the public, administrators and
frequently other English teachers seem to expect students  to become better
writers if they are taught grammar.  By this, most people mean clause-level
grammar, taught either traditionally or linguistically.  One of the problems
with teaching grammar, especially teaching grammar with the objective of
helping students become better writers, is that clause-level grammar is
abstract and fairly difficult to understand (not to mention being difficult to
teach effectively!).  This creates a situation in which students may
concentrate so hard on learning grammar that they don’t have the time or
energy to learn to be better writers.  Even if they learn quite a bit about
grammar, it may not transfer to their writing.  At the same time, teachers may
spend so much time trying to teach grammar that writing falls by the wayside.

However, when students fail to become better writers, many seem to feel that
we should teach even more clause-level grammar. I would like to propose that
the failure of explicitly taught grammar to help students become better
writers stems from a too-narrow view of grammar.  Both traditional and
linguistically-based grammar fail in this respect by concentrating too heavily
on grammar within clauses and ignoring or shortchanging the grammar among
clauses, sentences and paragraphs. It has become apparent to me that there are
two vital strands within grammar, one of which deals with clause-level grammar
and another which deals with discourse-level grammar.  Any discussion of scope
and sequence is going to have to take these strands into consideration and is
going to have to address the issue of exactly what it is we want students to
know about  grammatical roles and at what level.


Clause-level grammar deals with the role of verbs within clauses. Within
clauses, verbs are all-powerful.  Verbs control the way sentences can end, the
tense, mood and aspect of the sentence, even which words can be the subject.
The role of verbs in discourse is essentially horizontal and syntactic; verbs
control the way sentences are constructed across the page.  I find that this
is the strand that I concentrate on with my teacher education students,
because I believe that teachers should know their way around an English
independent clause.  Teachers should be able to produce and recognize written
sentences that other readers recognize as complete English sentences. However,
I find that the difficulty with abstractness becomes increasingly apparent
when I concentrate on this aspect of grammar.

By concentrating on verbs, it is possible to teach students to produce and
analyze grammatically correct clauses.  But there is much more to connected,
written discourse than error free sentences. In addition to functioning within
clauses, grammar also functions between clauses and among the larger elements
of written texts.  The way that grammar functions in extended discourse
involves the second grammatical strand: the role of  nouns, pronouns and
shortened forms.   These forms work both within and among sentences to provide
flow, unity and cohesiveness.  Without the effective use of nouns, pronouns
and shortened forms, connected discourse hardly exists.  It can seldom be more
than lists or strings of disjointed ideas.  The role of nouns, pronouns and
shortened forms is essentially  vertical in nature. These forms control the
flow of ideas within connected discourse up and down the page.  In my
experience, students find these ideas less abstract and easier to grasp.

Even though I spend a lot of time working on clause level grammar with my
students, I am leaning towards the idea that the characteristics of good
writing (clarity, simplicity and unity) stem from the functions of nouns
rather than verbs.  I also think that these functions could be taught earlier
in students’  careers than the technical functions of verbs.

My idea of an effective grammar sequence would be as follows.  Students would
be taught very early (first grade?) to pay attention to words and phrases that
help the reader understand the story.  These will frequently be nouns,
pronouns and shortened forms.  As children’s repertoire of linguistic
strategies grows, they can be taught to identify increasingly more complex
structures and to use more sophisticated terms.

At about the sixth grade level ( to correspond with Piagetian cognitive
levels, although I have some questions about the validity of these), clause-
level grammar can be introduced as a separate discipline.  Understanding
clause-level grammar is not really about writing. Rather, it is an abstract,
metalinguistic discipline which  should be valued for itself, as logic and
algebra are, rather than being presented simply as a means to an end: becoming
a better writer.   In other words, if we want to teach students to write, we
need to work on writing, and on the grammatical concepts that enhance writing.
If we want to teach students about grammar, then we need to work on grammar.
When we decide to teach students about grammar, we need to be clear about what
we mean by grammar and what we hope students will gain from it.