Dr. Veit,

Thank you for your response!  I for one will consider carefully the approach you have taken to making GT-grammar understandable to the lay person.  Let me tell you that I think you are doing a great job.  

Bruce

>>> [log in to unmask] 02/28/01 03:42PM >>>
Generative grammar, as generally presented, is complex, abstruse,
formula-intensive, and forbidding to lay persons--not surprising since much
of the work is done by math types who are strangers to clear writing.

We shouldn't assume, however, that the subject is closed to others. I teach
a required college grammar course to education and English majors, and the
model we use is generative. Many, if not most, students enter the class
with low expectations (often with outright dread). On the first day I
always enjoy "betting" my students that at the end of the course they will
write on the anonymous course evaluations that the course was fun for them.
In the great majority of cases, I win my bet. To their surprise, students
find they like the course, say they learned a lot, give high evaluations,
and develop a love for grammar.

One strength of a generative approach is that is tries to create a model
not just of sentence structure but also of how we actually produce those
sentences. Because the available generative texts didn't meet my students'
needs, I wrote my own. The book's approach is generative, but with
methodology taking a back seat to content: learning the grammar of English.

As a former primary and secondary teacher, I've always believed a
generative approach is adaptable to high schools and even the lower grades.
I've had a long-term goal of creating a high school text, but other book
projects and administrative duties have always intervened. I hope someone
else creates such a text. It wouldn't be for everybody, but grammar
teachers would benefit from a choice of approaches.

Dick Veit
University of North Carolina at Wilmington

Discovering English Grammar, 2nd edition:
    http://www.uncwil.edu/people/veit/DEG/ 

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