I am posting this from Richard Betting as he has had difficulty getting it
posted.

  Ron Sheen asked about teaching  transformational grammar  "as a means of
improving grammatical competence and writing skills."  After an introduction
to TG grammar in 1965, I used some of the practical applications in a
university English methods class that I taught. Some high school English
teachers actually used the Roberts programmed learning text. I still have a
copy of "The Roberts English Series: A Linguistic Program, Complete Course"
(Harcourt, 1967). Chapter 14 of the text, for example, includes Purity by
Prescription, the Possessive Transformation, the Morpheme -ory. Other
chapters include Anybody Can Learn to Write, the Indo-European family, and
Latin borrowings, as each chapter contains syntax, sounds, history,
morphology and usage. I also used Postman and Weingartner's Linguistics: A
Revolution in Teaching" (Delta, 1966) in methods classes.

Most English teachers failed to find TG grammar compatible-for many reasons.
It seems to me that English teachers who used TG found little if any
transfer of  grammar information to 'improvement in writing skills.' Even
though English teachers might not have found any transfer of traditional
grammar information to use either, many continued to teach it anyway, in
spite of NCTE condemnation.

At any rate, TG grammar did not survive. Neither did the idea of linguistics
and all of the language information that came with it, a terrible result, it
seems to me.

Dick Betting

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