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From Bill Murdick:
 
I'd like to respond to some of Martha Kolln's statements in her
response to my short statement opposing "programs of instruction"
in grammar for secondary schools. I teach a grammar and usage course to
junior
and senior English education majors in college, and I agree with
Martha that once students have consciously learned a comprehensive
system, or more correctly, a "model" of human grammar, they
possess a vocabulary and a set of facts and notions that are useful
in examining simple things like punctuation and very broad issues of
style (branching, emphasis, combining, etc.).
 
But my students struggle with the grammar portion of their course,
including the traditional grammar. They remember little to nothing
from their secondary experiences with grammar instruction. Martha asks
why we shouldn't teach grammar terminology just as we do the terminology
of other academic subjects, but in fact we do not teach the terminology
(the abstract concepts) of subjects that we do not feel students are
ready to learn. We don't teach nuclear physics to 9th graders, nor do
we teach the terminology of that science to them. It was our German
colleague, Burkhard, I believe, who used the word "linguistics" in
this discussion. If we start using that term instead of "grammar,"
the issues of difficulty and appropriateness become clearer.
 
We are all familiar with Nocuchi's clever attempt to construct a
limited grammar, but it is easy to demonstrate that in order to learn
something as "simple" as a noun phrase requires one to learn the whole
model of grammar (the noun and its immediate constituents--pre-determiner,
determiner, quantifier, particularizer, adj., adjunct--can be preceded
or followed by every other phrasal and clausal structure in the model).
Because of that, grammar study (linguistics) can take over English
courses like that 1950's monster, the Blob.
 
Bill McCleary warned us about the need to be specific when arguing
ponderous questions like "Should we teach grammar?" At the very start,
we need to be specific about what we mean by "teach." Martha Kolln
asks, When do we tell students about appositives and "...when do we
tell students that nouns are words that can be made plural...."?
And so forth. Well, if Chomsky and his colleagues are right,
students are born knowing what a noun is in a practical sense. If
Roger Brown's famous study, _A First Language_, is accurate, the
plural morpheme is one of the first acquired (at about age 2, with
no instruction). When researchers observe children's speech, they
notice that even very young children are, without instruction, using
almost every structure named in traditional grammar (including
appositives), and many that aren't.
 
Because children possess that practical knowledge of grammar, we can
help them become effective readers and writers by
creatively engaging them in those activities, provided the curriculum
hasn't been devoured by the Blob.
 
I agree with Eric Crump that our success without linguistics has to
be addressed by those who feel that grammar instruction is somehow
crucial to helping children with language development.
 
Let me present a set of questions to be answered by those who want
to become specific in regard to what they advocate:
 
1] Besides teaching linguistics to grad and undergrad English majors,
who(m)
else do you want to teach linguistics to?
 
2] For each group mentioned in [1], what linguistics (content) would you
teach?
 
3] For each content in [2], what would be your purpose?
 
4] For each purpose in [3], how would you know if you achieved those
purposes? (What are your pre-test/post-tests?)
 
5] How will you handle Blob Control? (How will your program retain
reading and writing as the main activities of the English curriculum?)