I have tried various ways to incorporate diagramming in my college
grammar classes, always with mixed results. The most serious difficulty
I've noticed is a tendency for students to focus on, or panic about, the
diagrams as if they were the sole content of the course, a problem Brown
alluded to earlier. I'm tossing in some comments below; apologies for
the list format, but I can't think of a more coherent way to organize
these:
 
 
*	Almost all of my students are English majors. Many typically
come in with the firm notion that they are "bad at math and science,"
and to them, if it's a diagram, it's science. Students who have a strong
negative emotional reaction to diagrams aren't going to learn much from
them, so the pedagogical issue for me, with those students, is how to
get them past their reactions (and, of course, get myself past my
reaction to their reactions - I'm a bit angry at an educational system
that gives students the idea that if they find a domain of knowledge
difficult, the best way to cope is to scream and run from it). 
 
*	I've had some success with having students first fill out a form
with questions about a sentence (e.g. "What is the subject?) and then
turning that into a diagram. All I'm trying to do with that is make sure
they think about the diagram as an alternate way of presenting
information, and maintain focus on the information itself. This seems to
help some of the students, but some still panic.
 
*	RK and Tree diagrams are each good for different things. Tree
diagrams more transparently indicate constituency - the way parts make
up bigger parts. RK diagrams more clearly indicate statements about what
the subject is, what the direct object is, etc. If you view Tree
diagrams as a pedagogical device, rather than as a notation for a
specific theory, though, you can incorporate information like "subject"
or "direct object" into the tree simply by labeling the nodes (I'm
making the comment about theory because in some of the theories that use
trees, it's important *not* to label the nodes like that). Students who
have had no diagramming at all find RK and Tree diagrams equally
frightful, so it's not like you're scaring them any more with a Tree
diagram than you would with an RK one.
 
*	Showing students multiple types of diagramming (during a part of
the class where you're making it clear they won't be tested on their
ability to use all those) helps them see diagrams as metaphors, rather
than as "correct technology." You can make sentence models with
spray-painted tinker toys, for example (yes, I teach college - but who
doesn't like tinker toys? I've seen something similar with cardboard and
colorful pipe cleaners). 
 
Bill Spruiell
 
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University 
 
 
 
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