Julia,

I'm retired now, for three years, but I've used a variety of texts in undergraduate grammar courses.  I used Silva's text a long time ago, when it first came out, but that was about the time I was tiring of textbook approaches to the class.  That said, I like Craig Hancock's Meaning-Centered Grammar very much, in both its coverage and its orientation.  It takes a successfully discourse-based view of grammar and seems to me particularly relatable to college writing and to reading literature.  Before I used Silva, I used Morenberg's Doing Grammar for a number of years.  I found that one of the most successful textbooks I've used.  It's quite systematic and rigorous, and the approach is strongly syntactic, although it pays a lot of attention to grammatical function in ways that few texts, besides Craig's, succeed in doing.  I had students coming back years later to ask about trees that they'd drawn using Morenberg's approach, and it was obvious they'd learned how to work out in some detail the structure of some pretty complex sentences.

My own approach, in my last few years of teaching, was to use a standard reference grammar.  My choice among them was Greenbaum's Oxford English Grammar.  My reason for making this fairly radical switch was that I thought my students, who would go on to become professional users of English, needed a reference work they were familiar with that covered the English language in considerable detail.  I was looking to their professional futures, and I explained that to them.  The reasons I chose Greenbaum included the fact that it was comprehensive but still manageable, unlike the dated but invaluable seven volume Jespersen A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles, or the modern, encyclopedic grammars by Quirk et al. and by Huddleston and Pullum (Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.)  It was also available in hardback for around $50, used copies for less, much less expensive than the more compendious grammars.  Another reason I chose it was that it presented students exclusively with actually English examples, drawn from some of the large corpora available in the late 90s.  Finally, the chapters had a useful outline structure, and I trained my students in "top-down" reading, starting with the chapter intro, going on to the intros to the subheads, and then either directing them to or letting them choose subheads that they would read in more detail.  I wanted them to learn to use a reference grammar and to recognize that it was not a book one read from beginning to end.  I'll have to admit that my approach was only partially successful.  Some students took to it readily, and others had a very hard time with a work that wasn't straightforwardly pedagogical and that they didn't read straight through-and one that they really couldn't read straight through with much benefit.  I structured the course around the major topics of the book, and brought in other real texts from newspapers, the internet, and from English literature of various periods.  One of our final tasks was a grammatical analysis of a 17th c. sonnet by Sir Philip Sydney.  They found that they could not read the sonnet with full comprehension without doing some grammatical analysis.  If I were to go back now and teach the course, I think I would still do something similar, but I would also focus their attention more precisely on certain sections of the grammar so that they would get a better feel for how to work with the finer details of English grammar while still gaining a broader overview.

I'm not sure if this is helpful.  A lot of us, myself included at other periods of my career, have preferred textbook treatments for good reasons.  Not having to come up with all one's own exercises and assignments is just one of those.

All the best!

Herb

Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN  47306
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