For those of you interested in this issue, my "The New SAT and Fundatmental Misunderstanding of Grammar Teaching" is about to appear in _English Today_ published by the Cambridge University Press.  I have copied a portion of it below.  You can contact that journal or myself for the full articile.  

Phil Bralich

EXCERPT To Appear _English Today_ July 2006.  

Traditional Grammar, as we all know, has been on the wane in education for the last 25 to 50 years in the face of more interactive classrooms, more exotic developments in transformational grammar, and research suggesting it may not play an effective role in improving student’s writing.  Recently, however, there has been a resurgence in the interest in teaching some of the fundamental concepts of traditional grammar.  This new interest in teaching grammar has taken on a much more imperative force as secondary schools and to some extent primary schools are beginning to feel pressure to teach basic grammatical concepts in order to prepare students for the 35 minute multiple choice grammar and usage questions on the new SAT.  Teachers and schools who cannot pass this section of the test will be held to account by politicians, school administrators, and parents, all of whom tend to believe traditional, formal grammar instruction is the best means to this end.  Teachers who send their students off to the new SAT without this training will have some serious questions to answer if those students scores are too low.  
This refocus on teaching grammar has raised many old arguments and much of the same confusion that caused grammar to be taken off the curriculum in many schools in the first place,  confusion which even led to the remarkable and, to many, reprehensible decision by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) to make a resolution in 1985 stating, “…[the NCTE] urge[s] the discontinuance of testing practices that encourage the teaching of grammar…”  While many educators, parents, students, and politicians have all along been in favor of the teaching of grammar in spite of claims by the NCTE and others, their voices have largely been ignored or drowned out through the years of what David Mulroy, a classicist at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, has named The War Against Grammar in his book of that title.  
As a Professor at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center in Monterey, CA, charged with the responsibility to prepare students for Foreign Language study in a wide variety of the world’s languages, I can attest that basic grammar knowledge is the most important factor in reducing attrition and enhancing student success rates.  I have a Ph.D. in theoretical linguistics with a focus on theoretical syntax.  I have taught traditional grammar to native speakers, ESL grammar to non-native speakers, and composition to both.  I have never found any of the anti-grammar articles or positions to be convincing.  In fact they have always struck me as more of a political movement than as a reasoned position taken in the face of convincing evidence –  a political movement rooted in the profits, short hours, and world travel to be had in the years of the ESL boom in the 80’s and 90’s, profits eyed by those who did not know grammar.  Since that time the only tangible results of that policy have been a significant lessening in American Foreign Language skills and Foreign Language program enrollments, significantly increased need for remedial reading and writing programs at colleges and universities across the United States, and complaints from business, academia, and government about the lack of verbal skills in those who have turned up on their doorsteps since grammar teaching has fallen out of favor.  Thus, rather than the leap forward for language arts that proponents of the anti-grammar attitude might have expected, there has only been a lamentable and evident decline in language arts skills.  
These last few decades of the War Against Grammar have left serious gaps in the understanding of what constitutes a proper curriculum in English Grammar.  Thus, while there is a stronger interest in grammar and in preparing students for the new SAT, there are many, many educators who simply were not trained in grammar and do not know where to begin.  In particular, some rather deeply rooted misunderstandings about grammar have grown up and stand in the way of the educator wishing to address this need and the politicians and parents wishing to evaluate the attempts to address this need.  I wish to address seven of them here in order to provide the parent, the politician, the student, and the otherwise concerned a rubric by which they can evaluate grammar teaching and grammar teachers and get a sense that the grammar movement is valuable and the new SAT is not insurmountable.  
Misunderstanding #1:  All grammar rules are equally as distrusted  and untrustworthy as, “Don’t end a sentence with a preposition,” “Don’t let modifiers dangle,” and “Don’t split infinitives.”  Nothing could be further from the truth.  People routinely accept almost all the rules of grammar and often even find a certain elegance in them.  However, even though each of the three rules cited here is an actual rule of grammar, they form a group as the grammar rules that are often cited as unnecessary or cloying.  Fortunately, they are about the only rules of grammar anyone really complains about.  I suspect that most people who don’t know their grammar find it easier to memorize one of these handy and well-known rules for grousing about grammar than going to the trouble of actually working through a few grammar exercises.  This is like knowing to quip, “Freud had a mother problem,” as a means of escaping the responsibility to actually reading Freud.  
Misunderstanding #2:  Parts of Speech, Parts of Sentence, and Sentence Types are three not two sets of terms.  This misunderstanding is a little more complicated then the previous one or the next two, but it is the most important to know if you want to create or evaluate a grammar course or textbook.  In beginning your approach to the language arts the first thing anyone needs to know is the taxonomy of the field and that that taxonomy is based on first the identification of words and kinds of words which are then made into phrases and those themselves phrases being made into sentences.  In short, we need a set of terms for each of words, phrases, and sentences.  The main thing that confuses people about these terms is that most books fail to point out that parts of speech and parts of the sentence form two distinct sets with the term “verb” common to both.  
Dividing the three steps in building a sentence (word, phrase, sentence) into three sets of terms and laying them side by side as below demonstrates two things: 1) that there is a lot less to learning grammar than there is to learning other subjects like math, chemistry, geometry, home economics, or auto mechanics; and 2) that there really is a fixed and bounded body of knowledge that can be mastered underlying the grammar of a language.  There are only 27 terms here, but this is rather complete, at least it is more than sufficient to get you through the New SAT or most any foreign language or language arts course.   You should also note how the top four items of each column are actually widely known and are not particularly difficult, thus, leaving the teacher with a challenge with less than fifteen terms.  This is clearly much less than algebra, geometry, or astronomy.  

Parts of Speech	Parts of Sentence	Sentence Types
Noun	Subject	Declarative
Verb	Predicate	Interrogative
Adjective	Verb	Imperative
Adverb	Object (indirect, direct, of prep.)	Exclamatory
Preposition	Complement (subj. obj)	Simple
Conjunction	Noun Phrase	Compound
Comparatives	Verb Phrase	Complex
Noun Morphology (-s, -es, ‘s)	Adjective Phrase	Compound/Complex
Verb Morphology (helping verbs, -ing, ed, etc.)	Adverb Phrase	Relative Clauses / Reduced Clauses

Misunderstanding #3:  There is a standardized vocabulary for referring to grammatical functions.  There are several places in the set of traditional grammar terms where different books and different traditions use different terminology.  This is unfortunate and should be addressed.  The NCTE for example should be establishing a set of common, recommended terminology in these areas rather than trying to eliminate the teaching  of grammar.  There aren’t that many more than you see here, but these are particularly confusing. 

Main Clause		=	Independent Clause
Subordinate Clause	=	Dependent Clause

Participial Phrase	=	Reduced Adjective or Reduced Adverb Clause
Bare Infintives		=	Reduced infinitives, small clauses

Subject Complement	=	Predicate Adjective or Predicate Nominative

What is particularly troubling about this is that if you know any one of the above sets the other terms sound like they must be nuanced versions of something in grammar that you don’t yet know.  Grammar books or at least the NCTE need to settle on one set, but they should also point out in a foot note that the other terms also exist for the same phenomenon.  It is confusing if, after you’ve mastered the concepts of main and subordinate clause, you hear someone talking about independent and dependent clauses and wondering what is the difference.  Worse yet, are the terms predicate nominative and predicate adjective to refer to the two kinds of subject complement.  The problem of course is that the students are never sure when they are done until these terminological overlaps are pointed out to them.  
Misunderstanding #4: The word gerund.  The term gerund is often dropped in grammatical circles the way some drop Kennedy in political circles.  If you know what it is, it marks your knowledge of grammar as learned.  If you don’t know what it is, you are likely to be marked as illiterate or at best one of the semi-literate dharma-bum sort who can only do flow of consciousness writing and are incapable of the introspection that grammar requires.  However, both the pride and the shame that come with the word gerund are unjustified as the word gerund is itself somewhat ill-formed as a grammatical term.  A gerund as many of the readers of this publication will know is a present participle used as a noun.  However, what most people fail to note is that an infinitive can also be used as a noun but no one has bothered to make a whole new term for it.  For example, we can call a present participle used as a  noun, a present participle used as a noun or we can call it a gerund.  An infinitive used as a noun, however, can only be called an infinitive used as a noun, there is no special word dreamed up for this case.  The word gerund therefore is a complete and utter waste of grammatical terminology in that it is unbalanced and it makes you wonder why a present participle used as a noun should be singled out for the honor of an extra term while the infinitive used as a noun is ignored utterly in this.  If you are new to grammar, it also makes you wonder if there isn’t some difference between a present participle used as a noun and a gerund.  It makes a student of grammar feel that there must be something else going on.  Without adding a special term for infinitive used as a noun, the word gerund should be dropped as it is unnecessarily confusing, and it could lead to elitist pretenses to knowledge of grammar obscuring real knowledge of grammar.   Thank god past participles are never used as nouns.  
	Misunderstanding #5:  Modern linguistics has obviated the need for traditional grammar.  No syntacticians worth his salt is going to get very far without an understanding of all the basic concepts and terms of traditional grammar.  What theoretical syntax has done is to add many more nuanced and complicated terms to that basic set, but it has not obviated the need for any of them.  It has also not replaced any of them.  However, in its search for greater and greater generality, theoretical syntacticians does seem able to avoid the use of a few terms like predicate, predicate nominative, and predicate adjective.  They tend to make due with “verb phrase,” “a verb and its arguments” or “a verb and its complement.”  Naturally, however, these would not be discarded but left for more traditional treatments of sentence structure.   
	Misunderstanding #6:  Writing and language arts are the only fields in the world that are somehow better off without a taxonomy.  Not teaching the parts of speech and parts of the sentence in a writing class or language arts class is like not teaching abstractions such as meat, poultry, and baked goods in an economics class.  The parts of speech, parts of sentence, and sentence types described above form a largely complete set and demonstrate that there is not much to traditional grammar in the first place: eight parts of speech, eight parts of the sentence, and eight sentence types – this is not rocket science.  It is also not algebra, geometry, home economics, or even auto mechanics.  It is far simpler than all of these which is why colleges generally only offer one term of it rather than a major in it.  Even that one term is generally limited to two credits and even then it has to be liberally mixed with paragraph and essay writing to actually generate enough work to fill a whole semester.  Traditional grammar is far simpler than all of that.  If you are as baffled as I am in looking for an explanation for how this training was ever dropped from the curriculum or how it ever became vilified by the NCTE, you too might agree that perhaps a political explanation is one that might work.  Perhaps Jack Kerouac-like, stream of consciousness writers, who likely did not know their grammar wanted to remove that burden from their teaching.  Perhaps adjunct writing teachers greedy for the extra hours ran the grammar teachers out and raised the writing requirements.  Perhaps grammar just provided a convenient scapegoat for teachers of a number of disciplines looking to vent their spleens outside their own classrooms and departments.  Perhaps several of these ideas teamed up to spell the demise of traditional grammar teaching.  However, whatever the political motive may have been it was never able to alter the fact that what was under attack is the basic taxonomy of all the language arts, the “periodic table” of language.  
	Misunderstanding #7:  Grammar needs to be taught in context.  Well, seeing grammar on the hoof so to speak is not such a bad idea; it is just a tremendous waste of time.  For example, you could find a beautiful use of a future perfect progressive or a past passive modal in a delightfully pertinent article on-line.  Or, you could collect several dozen such sentences, put them into an exercise and have students practice them, and then put one or two “in context” on the web.  Teaching grammar in context is slow and cumbersome, though in many cases it can be quite elucidating.  The misunderstanding here is to lose perspective and miss the value of working through 10 or 15 of the best examples you can find in an exercise before (or after) seeing the examples in literature, on-line, in the press, or wherever else the particularly illustrative example was found.  A particularly good example of the wealth of contextually contrived and valuable examples that can be found over and over again throughout the exercises of a grammar book is the Betty Azar's series of ESL grammar books.  Page after page of representative and meaningful exercises where each sentence cues the student into the wide possible uses of particular grammatical structures. If you have not seen these books, these exercises are a treat for those who like grammar in context as well as for those who like a series of well chosen and meaningful examples in each exercise.  

In sum, with the New SAT here and unavoidable, high school students are going to have to know more grammar and high school teachers are going to have to teach more grammar.  For the parents, the politicians, educators outside of English departments, and students, awareness of the above seven misunderstandings about grammar will take them a long way toward evaluating their own skills and of those charged with the responsibility to get students through that test and through their post-secondary education.  Hopefully, armed with this knowledge, the NCTE position will be removed, grammar teaching will begin in earnest again, and students will pass their new SATs, foreign language skills and attendance will increase, and politicians and business men will once again respect the institutes of higher education from whence they are choosing their rank and file.  


-----Original Message-----
>From: "Eduard C. Hanganu" <[log in to unmask]>
>Sent: Jul 19, 2006 11:36 AM
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Traditional Grammar
>
>Craig,
>
>There is no need to get defensive here. Constructive criticism is the 
>need of all academic endeavors, and should be invited and appreciated 
>in this forum. There are some problems which need to be addressed in 
>order for things to move forward, because:
>

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