Herb,
   This is in response to your earliest message. I think I've responded to many of your questions, but I would note here that there might be a possibility that the early resistance to grammar was also a resistance to confusing terminology * especially in the teaching of English since the early grammar books were based on Latin grammars.
    I'd also suggest that we have major differences in perspective. Like most members of this list, you discuss what you teach in your classes. Students in K-12, however, have different teachers, and, as has been noted many times on this list, many of the teachers are lost in current grammatical terminology. I'm arguing for one (or several) clearly labeled set(s) of grammatical terms such that the terms (and underlying concepts) do not change on the teachers or their students from one year to the next. Within a set, for example, it should be clear that subordinate clauses either do or do not function as parts of main clauses.
Ed

>>> [log in to unmask] 9/28/2005 12:05:18 PM >>>

Ed,You've given some good reasons for why grammar is poorly taught, but you're omitting one of the most important, that those who control teacher education have been persuaded, largely by NCTE, that grammar is either unimportant or harmful.  As to student attitudes towards grammar, David Mulroy's book shows students detesting grammar all the way back into Classical times.  Students, with notable exceptions, tend to detest that which demands rigor, unless it's very well taught, as your KISS courses and some of the others mentioned on this list seem to be.I disagree that variation in terminology is the critical problem.  There has been varied usage in terminology for as long as grammar has been taught in the Western tradition.  It can be irksome, but in my classes I tend to use the terminology use by the text I've chosen, and I choose texts in part for the traditional use of grammatical vocabulary.  Currently, for example, I use the Greenbaum Oxford English Grammar, which students find quite readable.  I like it in part because it's corpus based and so it doesn't mess with made-up examples.  That means that we spend some time working through some of his sample sentences because they're not always simple.  But students can learn, and need to, that terminology about language varies just as it does in any other major sphere of activity.  Of course, exposing them to some of the more abstruse arguments, terminological and otherwise, that we get into on this list wouldn't be very helpful.Herb        No, Martha, my students do not need a "lesson" on "be" verbs. They were told weeks ago, orally and in writing, that "is," "are," "was," and "were" are always finite verbs and are thus always underlined twice. They just don't pay attention. They have been poisoned by the crappy instruction in our schools which has made them believe that the study of grammar is confusing and ultimately useless.
     In 1983, Bill O'Rourke's "'Lion Tamers and Baby Sitters': First-Year English Teachers' Perceptions of Their Undergraduate Teacher Preparation" (English Education, Feb. 1983, 17-24) noted that the second major complaint of practicing teachers was that their education had not prepared them to teach grammar. The situation has not changed much, at all. Does anyone on this list want to guess whom I hold responsible for that?
    Yes, in part I blame the students; but most of the blame goes to those who teach teachers to teach grammar. Grammar could be the most motivating, most important subject in the curriculum. Instead it is a rotten corpse, perhaps even partially responsible for why many students hate school.
     Have a nice day,
Ed

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