Ed,

Clearly we need to get beyond the two camps discourse.  In my undergrad grammar course, which, because of my current assignment as director of graduate programs I probably won't get to teach again before I retire, students learn, and are examined on, funtional categories like subject, predicate, object (direct, indirect, prepositional); complement, modifier, structural categories including parts of speech that are empirically defensible, noun phrases, adjective phrases, adverb phrases, and the subordinate clauses that can fill these structures and functions; and information changing structures like passive and extraposition.  They study these topics in their own writing and real writing that they bring in from newspapers, blogs, fiction, textbooks, and poems.  They analyze verb patterns and sentence structures in sonnets and in prose genres, and they do exercises in which the information structure of a passage they are writing must meet certain expectations, so that they have to choose sentence reorderings like passive.  And in addition to this, they learn word structure (morphology), how sounds and spellings are similar and different, and they confront some of the major myths of language that are current in our culture.  It's a fairly full course.

And, by the way, I use linguistic argumentation throughout so that they understand that descriptions meet certain standards.  I don't cover much in the way of sociolinguistics in this course because we cover that in a separate required course.  However, I do include some historical information.  Things like who/whom/that are easier grasp if they understand the historical roots of the problems.  And I use readings like the superb section from Mencken's The American Language on pronoun case problems.

As Johanna said, grammar has to be motivated linguistically or it's just so much more cant.  It has to be and be seen to be intellectually substantive.

What we lack, and not for want of trying on my part, is a grammar methods course.  Our English Ed folks aren't interested and claim that there's no time for such a course, and I haven't been able to convince them otherwise.  Grammar, beyond correctness and usage, just isn't very important to them.  So I incorporate a little bit of methods in my own teaching styles and in some of the topics we deal with, but I'm not a methods person, and so I don't know that I do that particularly well.

Herb


 
Herb,
    More explanation * I'm being critical of you, and of most of the members of this list. O'Rourke taught "about" grammar. He did not teach his students how to identify subjects, verbs, clauses, etc. Johanna, the only member of this list who has recently said that she is trying to teach her future teachers to identify subjects and finite verbs, has noted that she can only test them on relatively simple sentences. But in their classrooms, these teachers will have to deal with much more complicated sentences written by their students. The members of this list (an in-grown group) believe that sociolinguistics, morphology, et al. are important. Most of my colleagues in English departments think that linguists are crazy. Personally, I would have no trouble with teaching future teachers basic linguistics * after the future teachers were able to identify subjects, finite verbs, clauses, etc. Attempts to teach sociolinguistics before the teachers can do so are "silly" and "misguided." 
     Let's get the priorities straight. Teachers will be marking fragments, comma-splices, etc. in their students' writing. But if the teachers themselves cannot understand sentence structure, many of the markings that they make will be wrong. Years ago, my students in a grammar-for-teachers class noted that they would have marked the following sentence as a comma-splice:
 
The plane crashed three miles from here, its tail pointed at the sky.
 
Marking as errors things that are not errors is the most damaging thing that any English teacher can do. The primary responsibility of those of you who are teaching teachers should be to prepare those future teachers to do no harm. An entire course on sociolinguistics is not going to affect the attitudes of the teachers unless the teachers are given a basic understanding of sentence structure. 
     As another example, many of the comma-splices and run-ons in students' writing appear at places where more advanced writers will use a colon, semicolon or a dash to join main clauses. Teachers who mark these "errors" and then tell students to punctuate them with a period and capital letter are, in effect, telling students to hide the logical connection that the students themselves sensed, but were not taught how to punctuate.
      Do those of you from the "linguistic ivory tower" have something to contribute? I don't know. Thus far, all I have seen from the linguists on this list is basically "I think we need to teach X, Y, and Z because it is important." I have seen little evidence that it is, in fact, important, especially in the way that it appears to be being taught. Students (and teachers) do not need a course on morphology to understand prefixes, suffixes, and roots. 
Ed
 


>>> [log in to unmask] 10/17/2005 4:23 PM >>>

Ed,You make a lot of the right moves and promote the teaching of useful grammar in worthwhile ways, and then you make obscure charges that would be worth a bit more explanation.  Addressing the general public through newspapers and, I would suggest, blogs is very important to changing attitudes towards grammar.  But then you refer to sociolinguistics for language arts teachers as "silly" and "misguided".  I would argue that much of the content of a sociolinguistics course, as it deals with dialect variation, standard language, language attitudes, and national language policy, is critical content for teachers.  However, it should be in addition to relevant grammar instruction, not in place of it.  I'm not sure if you're being critical of Bill O'Rourke or complementing him.  Certainly the content he includes is worthwhile, again, as long as relevant grammar and grammar methods are taught.  The appreciation we want teachers to have of language includes history, variation, policy, as well as grammar.  A focus on linguistic analysis for linguistic purposes is pretty clearly inappropriate to such a context, although it's also clear that such discussion is useful to language teachers, as we have found on this list.  But grammar that isn't based on sound linguistics is also inappropriate.  We shouldn't be making teachers into theoretical linguists or manipulators of formalism, but we need to give them vocabulary to talk about what's going on in language, and concepts like morpheme, affix, derivation, and inflection are part of that, even if the wide range of theories called up by the terms aren't.I suspect we disagree on scope more than on substance.  As a linguistic researcher and college teacher I'll defer in most cases to your experience and judgment as to what works pedagogically in the K12 classroom, but I think those of us from the linguistic ivory tower have something to contribute in the area of content.Herb



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