Carolyn,
Your plea resonates richly with a lot of us. Let me address just the education part of it, because I'm just now involved in a debate with our English Education faculty in the English Department on whether our undergraduate requirement for all English students should be eliminated for EngEd students. The requirement is that everyone take either a Language and Society course or an English Linguistics course, the latter covering a lot of English grammar. Education faculty claim that they have too many other things to cover to be able to sacrifice the time for a grammar course. They're right that they have very little flexibility in their programs, which I see as a problem in their curricula. But they also argue that they cover grammar in their classes. What they do, in fact, cover is a small amount of prescriptive grammar--very little of the sort of knowledge we have been discussing as essential for the writer to think critically about her writing. In their own training they've received very little training in grammar or linguistics, and they tend pretty unanimously to buy into the older NCTE position on the teaching of grammar.
I've drawn a good bit from our recent discussions that I will use when the issue comes up for debate in the department faculty meeting. What EngEd wants to do is counter to the direction that grammar training is moving, counter to the direction the NCTE is moving, and certainly counter to the wishes of school boards and parent organizations, however ill-conceived their notions of grammar may be.
Good luch with raising the status of grammar at WVSU! We need it too.
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Carolyn Sturgeon
Sent: Sat 11/18/2006 8:23 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: grammar instruction before and during college
Cynthia raises a critical issue, that of grammar knowledge and college
students. How do students who don't understand the most basic issues of
grammar (such as identifying the subject and verb in a sentence)
successfully finish k-12 to arrive at college? Almost all of my college
students can tell me a noun is a person, place, or thing (or an idea for the
younger students), but few can identify the nouns, let alone the subject in
a simple sentence such as The cat sat on the table.
As a university English teacher with an interest in teacher education and a
doctorate in composition studies, I tend to teach middle and upper level
writing and language courses, and I teach courses required for the education
and English education students. I am terrified to see the fear, confusion,
and ignorance many of these students have in grammar.
We are fortunate enough to have a basic grammar course offering in the
department, but it's not required by the education department for its
students. (I believe the criminal justice department is the only department
on campus wheich requires its students to take this course.) To be fair,
education students have such distribution requirements that they literally
have only one or two free electives, but, in my experience, education
students desperately need help with their grammar, as do almost all of our
students.
Speaking for myself, I always include as much grammar in class lessons as I
can, and I always comment on grammar in writing assignments, but grammar is
not a stated general education or course goal in our courses for anything
but the intro and advanced grammar courses. In truth, I'm lucky to steal one
class day out of about 31 for grammar. I also address grammar when I return
papers to show students what worked in their syntax and what didn't.
How can k-16 teachers work together to address this problem? How can 12-16
education and English professors work together on this problem? Any ideas
out there?
Carolyn Sturgeon
West Virginia State University
>From: Cynthia Baird <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
><[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: NCTE conference
>Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2006 17:15:36 -0800
>
>Since you are preparing to present at NTCE, and your presentation includes
>teacher preparation, I thought I would take the time to share with you my
>recent experience with student-teacher grammar instruction.
>
> I currently have a student teacher from my local college here in rural
>south-central Colo, and I am dismayed at her lack of grammar knowledge. In
>Colo, a secondary language arts license allows one teach 6-12, so I would
>think that some grammar knowledge might be beneficial to anyone wanting to
>teach at least at the middle school level. My student teacher's grammar
>knowledge is abysmal--she can't even explain to my students the simplest of
>concepts such as pronoun case or pronoun-antecedent agreement. She doesn't
>know what a comma splice is, nor can she explain such punctuation errors to
>my students. I do not think the fault lies within my student teacher--the
>college simply does not incorporate secondary grammar instruction
>prepartion anywhere in the English degree.
>
> I know this is just one isolated example of teacher preparation, but if
>your presentation at the NCTE conference can in any way impress upon this
>influential organization the need for better grammar preparation amongst
>teachers, then I, along with many parents and students, would be most
>grateful. If colleges are not even providing prospective teachers with any
>grammar knowledge, what does that say for the future of teaching English
>grammar?
>
> thanks
>
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