Dear Colleagues,
This post is in response to recent questions not only about what to
teach but also about what we mean by linguistic grammar. These, of
course, are big questions: This is only the beginning of an answer.
First, let me explain that my own experience as a student of
traditional school grammar back in the 1940s was a positive one, as
far as I can recall these decades later. (Maybe I'm just remembering
the pleasure of diagramming, which I assumed all of my classmates
shared--which of course they didn't.!) I'm quite sure our
instruction was not based on error correction and error avoidance, as
current practice appears to be. And I don't remember being warned
about splitting infinitives or avoiding end-of-sentence prepositions
and all those other "don't's" and "nevers" that seem to dominate our
students' memories of grammar classes. I do recall lots of
memorizing--a method by no means limited to language arts. (I can
still recite the formula for photosynthesis I had to memorize for
biology class; the states and their capitals for geography, etc.)
And, in fact, I'm quite sure the purpose of our grammar lessons was
not tied to writing; it was, of course, tied to understanding how
language works. (I'm also quite sure that "writing" class in those
days meant "penmanship," something we spent a great deal of time on.)
But I wish that one of my English teachers had taught me some of the
language lessons I teach my grammar students. Here are two of my
wishes:
l. I wish my teachers had told me, back in junior high, that I was a
language expert. In fact, I was an expert when I started
kindergarten--let alone by sixth grade.
Our job as grammar techers is to help students bring to a conscious
level the grammar they know subconsciously, innately, as native
speakers, as humans. (Nonnative speakers must recognize that they
too are experts in the grammar of their home languages. Their
learning of English will be somewhat different from that of native
speakers.) A good demonstration of innate grammar expertise is our
automatic use of pronouns; another is the production of
tag-questions, which students will come up with in an instant. (Mary
isn't here today--is she? Pete will wash dishes tonight, won't he?
Jack and Jill aren't coming, are they?) Note that the tag-questions
not only include automatic pronoun usage (she, he, they), but the
recognition of auxiliaries. And if students are having trouble
finding the main verb in their sentences, as teachers sometimes
mention, simply have them substitute a pronoun for the subject noun
phrase: It works every time!
2. I wish my teachers had told me that those "eight parts of speech"
were not created equal! That's something I never knew. Nor did they
tell me that those so-called definitions of Nouns and Verbs and
Adjectives and Adverbs were not very accurate. For example, they
didn't tell me that lots of words other than adjectives modify nouns.
(And "interjection" as one of the eight!?!)
They never told me that those four parts of speech were in a class by
themselves--a "form class," as we call it. You can often recognize
the categories by their forms (you can even define them on that
basis). And my teachers certainly didn't mention that those eight
categories were based on Latin rather than English, that perhaps some
of them have been classified in error. (For instance, they didn't
tell me that articles aren't really adjectives--i.e., words that can
be made comparative and superlative, that can be qualified by "very,"
etc.) When I peruse the books at an NCTE or 4Cs convention that
purport to include the latest good stuff on grammar, I always check
the index for "determiner." If it's not there, that grammar
description is not linguistic grammar. It is not based on the
premise that students are already experts, that they automatically
include a determiner with a singular countable noun--every time!
Those then are two lessons we didn't know about back in
"pre-structural grammar" times. So I can't, and don't, blame my
teachers for not passing them, and many other important lessons, on.
I might add that in the section of Grammar Alive called "An Overview
of Linguistic Grammar," which I wrote, I described the "parts of
speech" in this "new" way (not really new anymore--50+ years old!).
I also included a section on sentence patterns. In my classes and my
books I use sentence patterns as the framework to help students
organize and build their knowledge of sentence structure. As a
visual tool, the patterns--and their traditional diagrams--provide a
place for students to store all of the details of sentence expansion
as they encounter them.
This, then, is the beginning of my answer.
Martha
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