Scott,
Your query is why I eventually leave off trying to hammer parts of speech into students--the parts just wiggle every which way. I tend to center on syntax--larger parts of the sentence.
I am replacing a former teacher who apparently focused on parts of speech. When we diagram sentences every once in a while my students are at a loss when I don't ask them to identify each and every part of speech in the sentence. I feel that such an exercise will only frustrate them because they have been taught that "my," for example, is a pronoun but in the sentence it is actually functioning as an adjective, which will only confuse them horribly. The same can be said of nouns and adverbs. So, I simply leave off trying to peg down words as consistent parts of speech. Some knowledge of parts of speech is helpful, but since most words can jump ship, so to speak, the whole idea becomes confusing for students. Most of us know that function is what counts, but students often cannot make that jump. When it comes to creating sentences, aside from choosing forms of words that fit grammatically into certain sentence slots, parts of speech don't really into enter into the
consciousness of most writers. That's my opinion, anyway.
"Spruiell, William C" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
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Scott:
I think 7th-graders are easily able to handle the basic notion of a form/function distinction – after all, kids have a lot of practice doing things like taking an old burlap sack and deciding to use it as second base in a baseball game. “It’s basically X, but we’ll use it as a Y” isn’t too much of a problem if it doesn’t get bogged down in too many technical terms. Pronouns are lexical chameleons anyway – they show up for noun jobs, and they show up for determiner jobs. Nouns usually do noun jobs, but they can fill in for adjectives as needed, etc. You don’t say that someone who is a plumber isn’t one anymore if s/he mows the lawn.
The problem I’ve seen with traditional approaches is that when they conflated form and function, they’d create contradictions – if a pronoun is a part of speech, and an adjective is a part of speech, then pronouns can’t be adjectives. But adjectives modify nouns, and “my” modifies nouns, but “my” is a pronoun and…. (at this point, if the teacher were an android, we’d have a “smoke coming out of ears” scene).
Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Scott Woods
Sent: Wednesday, February 20, 2008 5:02 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: possessive adjective/determiner/pronoun
Does anyone have any thoughts on teaching the distinction between pronouns and possessive adjectives/determiners/pronouns to bright 7th graders?
Is this a useful distinction to make?
Does it matter down the road?
Is it better to treat them the same now and to make a distinction later?
What decision processes do others use when making decisions about what to teach about language/grammar?
Scott Woods
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