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Hello!  It's nice to get an answer to my questions.  You're
asking for the same things--understanding homonyms, understanding
punctuation--that our English dept. grapples with on a daily
basis and with which I struggle in my business writing course.
 
But is this really grammar?  Of course, punctuation becomes
clearer when students understand the ways sentences hang
together and what joins them, and in fact next quarter, as
I teach my grammar course again, I am going to work punctuation
into the syntax we study.
 
Recently our local high schools asked our dept. for a college
teachers' "wish list":  What do we want h.s. students coming
to college knowing?  Right up there with understanding what
a thesis is, what paragraphs look like, and what a library is,
we listed PUNCTUATION.  But surely high school must be doing
something about punctuation?  And I know we do.  Somehow it
just doesn't sink in.  It needs a context.  Students' writing
seems to be the obvious choice, but I think that until they
understand what constitutes a sentence, they won't understand
how and why we join clauses and phrases with punctuation;
those rules will remain mystifying and decontextualized.
 
I'll let you know how it goes!
 
Kathryn Gunderson
Department of English
California State University, Hayward
Hayward, CA  94542
Office Phone:  510-885-3245
EMail: [log in to unmask]
 
 
> [This message  was originally submitted  by [log in to unmask]  to the ATEG
> list]
>
> Future teachers of English need to know some basic elements that, I'm
sorry
> to
> say, many of them do not know.  For example, please make sure they have
the
> homonyms straightened out --their, there, they're; its, i'ts; your,
you're,
> etc.
> They also should have some idea about correct punctuation, particularly
> commas
> and the poor misunderstood apostrophe.  Undrstanding agreement
> (verb/subject
> and pronoun/antecedent) and correct pronoun use would be helpful.  Truly
> many
> of the usage problems we see everyday we see in new teachers.  I
sometimes
> wonder if we're beating a dead horse here.  After all, these new teachers
> are
> college graduates; maybe their misuse and lack of understanding of the
> language is not such a big issue in the "real" world.  Don' t you wonder?
I
> do
> feel like a dinosaur sometimes.
> Mary Ann Black
>