Scott,
   Those are the million dollar questions. Current tests, including the 
grammar test for the SAT, test behavior and not knowledge. The studies 
which purport to show that grammar doesn't carry over look at written 
product, not knowledge about language, and they are holistically 
assessed, with some care not to assign much importance to mechanics. (In 
the Graham /Perin meta-study, I believe mechanics was discarded from 
criterion referenced studies.)
   If we believe it is important for students to be able to recognize 
relative clauses, then I agree--we can devise a program to teach that 
and then measure out how well the teaching has taken hold.
   At the moment, we simply do not have an agreed upon theory of how 
knowledge about language might carry over into both reading and writing. 
If we did, then we could measure the acquisition of knowledge as a 
separate step.
   Minimalist approaches tend to emphasize that language is "acquired." 
They measure what people do, not what they know, because they feel 
knowledge is not essential, even of dubious value. The testing 
approaches reflect that bias.

Craig

Scott Woods wrote:
> Listmates,
> Are there any studies of the effects of grammar learning rather than 
> instruction?  That is, do any studies look at what students have 
> learned of the grammar of a language and how well they have learned 
> it, especially in relation to changes in their writing and reading 
> skills, rather than at grammar instruction, what the teacher did and 
> asked them to do?  It seems to me that we should be concerned with the 
> effects of instruction, measurable by what students learn, and with 
> the effects of learning, measurable by what students can do with what 
> they have learned.  If we jump from instruction to measuring the 
> effects of learning, without measuring the learning, we would seem to 
> be making an invalid logical inference by assuming that learning took 
> place.  Are their existing standardized tests to measure grammar 
> knowledge, including both accuracy and rate?
>  
> Scott Woods
>
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