Re Ed Vavra's post --
 
It's funny how, when you ask people about the basic assumptions that
justify teaching grammar, they think you are against teaching grammar. I
do in fact strongly support grammar teaching, and am engaged in it right
now, in a college-level course. I just want to be clear on what we think
we are teaching and why we think students need it.
 
I definitely believe teachers need to know grammar (and a lot  more about
language) in order to be effective teachers on a variety of fronts. And I
also believe that grammar of some kind should be taught as part of
language arts in the schools. Some questions I am currently trying to sort
out in my own research are:
 
-- when are children developmentally ready for metalinguistic activity?
The research I am reading suggests that many children are not ready for
this until about age 8. This suggests that language arts teaching before
this age should concentrate on lots of practice USING language
meaningfully, not talking about it. Yet California's newly-developed
statewide standards demand some metalinguistic activity in first and
second grade.
 
-- Once we begin cultivating metalinguistic knowledge, how do we envision
it being applied? Much past research and many personal anecdotes suggest
that the traditional approach to grammar teaching fails to help a lot of
people in either improving their writing or knowing how language works.
The main result seems to be self-consciousness about use of language and
feelings of inadequacy as a language user.
 
-- How can we incorporate text-level considerations into grammar teaching?
Many, if not most, sentence-level grammar decisions are made to satisfy
text-level needs. But most grammar-teaching materials don't talk about
this.
 
Hope this clears things up a bit. I'm certainly interested in input on any
of the above questions (by the way, I'm aware of the sentence-combining
work, Martha Kolln's work with rhetorical grammar, and Noguchi's basic
grammar for teaching writing. These are steps in the right direction, so
far as I am concerned).
 
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Johanna Rubba   Assistant Professor, Linguistics              ~
English Department, California Polytechnic State University   ~
San Luis Obispo, CA 93407                                     ~
Tel. (805)-756-2184  E-mail: [log in to unmask]      ~
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