Judy Diamondstone and I agree on a great many issues.  She is absolutely right
about the value of  Mina Shaughnessy's Errors & Expectations: A Guide for the
Teacher of Basic Writing.

I agree with the following:

> To ward off any misunderstanding, I want to clarify my position.
> I am certainly not suggesting that grammar should never be taught
> explicitly; I prefer to set up activities/problems that highlight
> grammatical features before making those features explicit. It
> can't always be done and it doesn't always work,

I don't quite understand the following:

> but it shows
> students the relevance of grammar to social life, to their
> primary educational project, which is undertstanding themselves
> and their world, and that makes my educational responsibilities, which
> are to enlarge the world that students understand, possible.

Most teaching of explicit knowledge of grammar, it seems to me, is to be able to
control standard English.  This is an expectation our society has for an educated
person.

I know of no research which suggests that a person who speaks a dialect of English
that does not have the agreement -s marker is unable to understand sentences with
that marker.

The grammar which students don't understand is mostly unteachable or just not taught
explicitly.  (Sesame Street seems to have some very interesting language exercises
on comparison, antonyms, etc. I don't think that is what we mean by teaching
grammar.)

For example, we know that most 8 and 9 year old kids do have the adult understanding
of the following sentence:
    1) The doll is hard to see.
Their preferred meaning is that the doll can't see and not that the doll can't not
be seen.  Is this non-adult understanding every taught?

I do know that a lot of the freshmen I teach at my regional university have
difficulty with texts that use grammatical constructions that are rare in the spoken
language, expecially heavy subject NPs and certain transitional structures that
orient the reader to the writer's claims.  They are sometimes unable(?)/unwilling(?)
to use their knowledge about how English works to figure out how an author explains
difficult concepts.

Bob Yates, Central Missouri State University