Scott,

 

As the sentences get longer, repeating the same word more and more
times, they become curiosities that I, at least, find too cumbersome for
use in class, although I've used such sentences just to demonstrate the
curiosity of them.  In that way, they became a part of language play,
the idea that it can be both creative and fun to play around with
linguistic structures and see what the language can be made to do.  It
takes a bright, creative student to pursue such a challenge, but doing
so exercises a lot of grammatical knowledge.

 

A sentence like 

 

The policeman the boy the dog bit called came.

 

is useful for teaching the role of function words in making meaning
clear.  Inserting "that" in one or two places makes a huge difference in
the interpretability of the sentence.

 

Sentences like

 

The horse raced past the barn fell.

Red pencil marks easily erased covered the page.

 

help students work carefully through grammatical roles and options.

 

And sentences like

 

The chicken is ready to eat.

Sylvia rolled up the carpet.

 

focus their attention on ambiguity and how to explain it.

 

Granted, these sentences are not as dramatic as a whole herd of buffalo
or eleven hads, but there is a useful pedagogical role for sentences
that we might otherwise prefer that students not write.

 

Herb

 

 

 

From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Scott Woods
Sent: 2008-04-19 22:59
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: A punctuation challenge/What's the point?

 

Dear Listmates,

 

Beyond being fun for grammarians and linguists, are sentences like
"Buffalo buffalo..." useful in teaching English grammar?  How do
teachers use such sentences instructionally?  What is the purpose of
such instruction? What do students gain? 

 

Scott Woods

 

 

________________________________

Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try
it now.
<http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=51733/*http:/mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62
sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ%20>  To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please
visit the list's web interface at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave
the list" 

Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/ 


To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"

Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/