Bill McCleary responded to Ed Vavra's interesting, though troubling post,
with the following suggestion:

>. I looked in vain for someone to tell Susan to sit
> down with her son and a draft of the paper, go through about half of it
> with him to show how punctuation should be corrected, and challenge him to
> correct the rest on his own. Then she can check over the rest, discuss the
> corrections with her son, and go from there. (Or, if she regards this as
> giving her son too much help--a form of cheating, perhaps--she could work
> with final drafts that have already been graded by the child's teacher.)

But Bill also rightly notes that:

> This approach is labor-intensive but probably will work if there is a
> decent amount of rapport between child and parent--or student and teacher,
> as the case may be.

And here lies the heart of the problem for most of us. With many 6-12
English teachers lavishly loaded with 100-120 students on average (some with
more ... in my first year, I had 160 students in five classes, Mon-Fri!),
the 1-on-1 conference approach becomes almost impossible. Add to this the
requirement to "cover" an overweaningly large umbrella-curriculum (you know,
writing, literature, vocabulary, listening, speaking, and even the dreaded
"g" word), and you can take take the word 'almost' out of my previous
sentence. Most of us are also required to spend a good deal of time and
energy on preparing our students for standardized, high-stakes tests, like
the SAT (here in Connecticut, we have the CAPT, which is now big business
and entrenched in the system). Now add one more ingredient to this
hash-recipe: we get a mere 40-45 minutes a day (on average) to teach these
materials to (often jaded) students who are already overwhelmed with four or
five other academics and 2-3 electives. This sort of prescription leaves me
amazed when I find that some students actually DO learn; some even become
excited about one or two subjects, too. How can anyone assess the value of
teaching grammar under these conditions, however?

I would also add, as I have said before, that the improvement of writing
skills is NOT the purpose of grammar instruction, anyway. Research studies
that focus on grammar in such a small context make me very suspicious. What
about the potential value of grammar instruction on improving reading
skills? What about the study of grammar to improve critical or creative
thinking skills? What about it merely as a discrete study of language for
its own sake? The research studies in question do not begin to address these
issues.

Paul E. Doniger

P.S. Incidently, I do sincerely agree with Ed and Bill that the traditional
"work-sheet" or "kill-and-drill" approach stinks. I just don't think that
we've really focused on the best reasons FOR teaching grammar yet -- let
alone how best to teach it.

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