Jeff Glauner wrote

>Still, many
>students arrive in my college classrooms lacking mastery of the grammar of
>standard written English.  The number of problems is small.  Noguchi lists
>them in a few lines:  subject/verb agreement, pronoun antecedent agreement,
>fused sentences/comma splices, unwanted sentence fragments.  Not many more.
>I would add a few punctuation problems that reflect lack of grammatical
>mastery (e.g., the comma after a fronted subordinate clause).
>


Is this indeed true?  I must say my first response to the paragraph
above was entrail-roiling envy.

Perhaps I've now been in California too long, but I rarely get a
class--of any type--that does not have a sizable minority of
non-native speakers.  Their problems are often much more complex.

Increasingly, too, I find students who are native speakers who have
trouble with assigning verbs to the wrong subcategorization, using
prepositional phrases in subject positions, verb tense and aspect
errors, and other more difficult-to-deal-with errors.

Maybe it's just me?

Kathleen Ward
University of California, Davis

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