A recent posting from Joanna Rubba requested input on grammar teaching
from "the K-12 crowd." At our private boys school we admit into 7th grade
boys from many different school backgrounds. Since some have studied
grammar and some have not, we have to start from scratch.
        I begin by pointing out that you need two things to make a sentence:
something you're talking about and what you're saying about it. I point
out how exciting it is that we have this power to join two ideas
together–"fuse" them–in this way, and that there are an infinite number of
ways of doing it. We start by finding this pattern in two-or-three-word
sentences. As we expand sentences–always making them interesting and when
possible choosing them from their own writing or from literature they are
reading–they see how subject and predicate can acquire modifiers, whether
single-word or prepositional phrases, and how, depending on the kind of
verb (intransitive, transitive, linking), they can be filled out
("complemented") with direct and indirect objects and subject complements.
Then come the verbals: gerunds, present participles and infinitives. By
the end of the first trimester, the students are comfortable diagramming
simple sentences, including sentences with prepositional and participial
phrases of all kinds. Their eagerness to put diagrams on the board and the
intelligent questions they ask about the logical relationships between
parts of a sentence is exciting to see and belies the notion that grammar
is dull.
        We use a British form of diagramming in which the major sentence
units–subject, verb, direct object, indirect object, subject complement,
adjective and adverb modifiers, are placed in boxes and joined with
appropriate lines. This method is simpler, less sprawling than the line
diagramming of Warriner's and most American textbooks. It allows the basic
architecture of the sentence to stand out clearly. When students see how a
word in the adjective box can suddenly acquire a direct object because it
is a present participle, they say "Wow!" They are intrigued by the way the
hybrid parts of speech (verbals) expand the possibilities of including
information in a sentence without the need for any new grammar principles.
        Since the sentences in exercises in many grammar textbooks are often too
contrived, uninteresting, or few, I collect my own from novels, stories,
student writings. I sometimes have students imitate these sentences by
creating their own sentences on the same pattern. This helps them "try on"
styles of writing they might never have used on their own, expanding their
repertoire. Seventh graders are capable of writing sentences rich in
participial phrases, inversion, variety of length and structure, absolute
constructions, etc., though I would not claim this as a direct result of
grammar study except insofar as the latter raises consciousness of options.
        In the second trimester of 7th grade we move on to complex sentences.
Since subordinate clauses are used as a single part of speech–adjective
(relative clauses), noun (usually direct object), or adverb (8 kinds)–and
since the pattern of verb-subject recognition has become automatic by this
time, they easily spot clauses. All they need now is to learn the typical
introductory words (conjunctions or pronouns) for each kind of clause. By
the end of the trimester they can diagram any kind of sentence, including
some quite challenging ones like these:
        • There are people who don't want to hear what you have to say unless it
is what they have already said to you.
        • He said it was all up with him because if he did get saved, whoever
saved him would send him back home to claim the reward. (Twain)
        • Prackle had several blond sisters of whom he was so proud that he had
on occasion caused a commotion when he thought they had been insulted.
(Steinbeck)
        Again we use a simplified form of diagramming, writing each clause in a
rectangle followed by the Kind of clause (Adjective, Noun, Adverb, Main)
in a second (adjoining) rectangle, and its relationship to the rest of the
sentence (direct object, modifying a noun or verb, etc.) in a third. The
students feel proud that they can understand how such sentences are put
together since many college students cannot do that.
        Somewhere along the line we throw in compound sentences, which are easy
since they are simply two or more simple sentences joined together, and we
learn the different methods of joining. They like to show off their use of
the semi-colon, which always provokes a discussion about how the parts on
either side of the semi-colon are related to each other, and whether the
semi-colon is or is not more effective than a period and two sentences.
Some of the authors we read in 7th grade use a rich variety of sentence
structures. We practice identifying simple, compound, complex,
compound/complex sentences in books and stories by Robert Louis Stevenson,
Twain, London, S. E. Hinton, Lessing, and others. Students come to see the
nobility of a finely constructed sentence that accomplishes several things
at once. In high school the tools they have learned to use in 7th grade
can be applied to ever more varied and developed texts as a way of
appreciating style.
        I agree wholeheartedly with most of the contributors to this list that
contextualizing grammar (seeing it in connection with thought and its
expression) is the way to rescue it from the doldrums where it has
languished so long. It is an insult to children's intelligence to assume
they cannot be interested in how ideas are related and how the sentence
mirrors or embodies this relationship.
        Thank you all for reading this. If I can further the cause in any way,
please let me know! Bon courage.
        Fr. Laurence Kriegshauser, O.S.B.
        Saint Louis Priory School
        500 South Mason Road
        St. Louis, MO 63141