Ed,

Where do you get those examples?  No wonder your kids love grammar
lessons.  These are as good as The Transitive Vampire!

C.W. Pollard

-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Edward Vavra
Sent: Thursday, September 23, 2004 3:11 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Indirect objects

     As an instructor of Freshman comp at the college level, I found
this thread on indirect objects very interesting, especially since I
have also been struggling with the teaching of grammar for almost a
quarter of a century. What interested me most is that I literally tell
my students that I do not care if they label indirect objects as direct.

     As many contributors to this thread noted, students enter our
classrooms with almost no formal knowledge of grammar. As some
contributors noted, indirect objects give students few, if any,
practical problems. Meanwhile, many students have problems with
subject/verb agreement because they cannot identify verbs. (Two-thirds
of my students enter the course unable to identify "is," "are," "was"
and "were" as verbs.) Thus, to me, it seems absolutely senseless to try
to teach them to identify indirect objects.
     I must admit that, in trying to develop a consistent, systematic
approach to teaching grammar (KISS) that begins in grade three and ends
in grade eleven, I have for several years been working in neutral in my
own courses. I had material that I used with my students, but I
considered abandoning the teaching of grammar because it was not working
to my satisfaction. In end of course evaluations, however, my students
overwhelmingly voted that I should not abandon it; instead they wanted
more examples and explanations. I have therefore been revising that
material. See:
http://home.pct.edu/~evavra/ENL111/Syntax/50Lessons/index.htm

   The new approach is costing me a lot of time, and it has been
driving the tutors in our Tutoring Center crazy, but more students seem
not only to be getting it, but also to be appreciating it. (Of course,
some students simply don't do the work, but there is little I can do
about that.) What I want to suggest here, however, is that students
appreciate it because we begin with the psycholinguistic model, not with
grammar. The approach also focuses on analyzing real, randomly selected
sentences, and not on learning definitions of grammatical terms. Thus
students are studying how their minds, and the minds of their readers,
are processing sentences. The most interesting, and most important work
involves clauses. The Fifty exercises are not yet complete, but if you
look at them, you will see that we get into questions of clause-boundary
errors, style, and logic fairly quickly. This is what catches students'
attention and makes the grammar meaningful to them. They are
particularly fascinated when they see that the errors they have been
making (such as comma-splices) can be resolved in a number of different
ways (colons, dashes, semicolons, subordinate conjunctions), each of
which changes the focus of the sentence.

     As with the KISS Grammar site, anyone is free to use, adapt, etc.
the materials I have on the web, and suggestions are always welcome.
Ed V.

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