Bill,
    This is the kind of material I would choose if my main goal were to
give students a practical way to understand grammar and put it to use.
 KI just worry about how misleading this might be since it is not the
prevailing view of things.  What is our obligation, for example, to
let students know the arguments for minimalist approaches to grammar.
They may, in fact, be teaching in a school system that expects them to
teach as little grammar as possible, but deal with student error as it
arises with as little meta-language as possible, which would be, I
think, the prevailing "progressive" view toward grammar at the present
time. I think that approach is a terrible failure, but am I doing a
disservice to my students if I don't at least take time to explain
those positions and their history? It would seem to me important, too,
to talk about why grammar and composition have been at such terrible
odds with each other over the last few decades.
   I think I did Amanda's post a great disservice by moving too quickly
toward a description of what I thought it is missing.  The point I was
trying to make, and I think now I did it clumsily, is that there's not
enough room in a single semester to do what needs to be done.  The
ideal would be to take the wonderful syllabus Amanda presents, with
background on language acquisition, respect for language communities,
the different needs of non-native speakers, and the like, and then
follow that up with a second course that does what you outline, giving
a practical understanding of grammar with a special concentration on
those functional aspects that are so central to the creation of
effective text.
    I may just be saying what has been said so many times, that teacher
preparation programs don't spend nearly enough time on grammar.  As
someone now being asked to propose a course, I am faced with difficult
choices. when I used the term "enablers" I'm afraid it may have come
across as a direct criticism of what Amanda is doing.  What I hoped to
convey is that we as a group can support the status quo if we don't
speak up more forcefully about how broken the system is. In other
words, it would be possible to teach such a class with a focus on how
badly we are doing in addressing this problem. We could also teach the
class without ever raising that concern. We can prepare teachers to
teach in the system as currently set up, or we could raise serious
alarms about our current failures.
   If we expect students never to have to teach a comprehensive grammar,
then it is easier to choose not to teach them one when you only have a
semester to work with. We then continue the pattern of putting teachers
in place who are prepared to teach writing and literature, but not
grammar, at least as a body of knowledge.
    I have been paying some attention to what's going on in Australia,
where genre is the central focus. It is inherently connected to both
reading and writing, and it gives us a way to deal with grammar that
tucks neatly in with other goals.
    I think Bob may be right, that students have a natural desire to be
cohesive.  As Nancy Sommers points out in her research on reactions to
teacher comments, students often get sidetracked from trying to be
meaningful and, instead, try to meet the expectations of the teacher. 
to the extent that those are dysfunctional or merely formal, cohesion
is lost as a goal.
    Genre gives us a way of understanding that a student writer is largely
unpracticed in doing certain kinds of work with language. I believe
there's great value in conversation about these attempts, and that
conscious awareness of how these genres work is an enormously useful
part of that conversation.  Awkwardness is inevitable as the writer
tries new things.

Craig


Craig:
>
> We have a course here at Central that *overlaps* with what your proposed
> course focuses on, but is not right on target. It deals with applied
> linguistic methods for describing/analyzing texts. There are a couple of
> things I would draw from it that might be useful for inclusion in the
> course you're talking about:
>
> (1)                 Dealing explicitly with the relationships between
> grammar and genre, with the latter term applying more specifically than
> simply "fiction" or "poetry." Recipes, for example, are a genre, as are
> assembly instructions - but the two are different, and the difference is
> partly manifested through grammatical choices. Being able to "write like
> a professional" entails mastering the conventions of the particular
> professional genres, and that includes using the right constructions. We
> use John Swales's work as a basis for some of that. Biber and Finnegan
> are also useful (there are, of course, quite a number of Systemic works
> in that area, but I wasn't sure if you'd want to make the course
> "theory-specific"). An added benefit of using genre as an avenue into
> discussions of grammar is that it lets you tie in a good bit of
> sociolinguistic information rather naturally, especially if you start
> discussing who produces and consumes the texts.
>
> (2)                 Looking at the grammatical and lexical correlates of
> "cohesion"; for example, pronoun/antecedent relations, noun/noun
> relations that function rather like pronoun/antecedent relations ("NCLB
> legislation.....this law.....the requirements..."), use of linkers,
> choice of what to make theme, etc. Approaching those as cohesive devices
> allows you (ironically, I suppose) to tie together a number of important
> but otherwise disparate elements.
>
> We expect any piece of good writing to "hold together" as a text, and to
> be recognizable as fulfilling the functions that readers expect that
> type of text to fulfill in a way they can process (and, one hopes,
> like). A lot of that has to do with grammatical choices - and (partly
> contra Yates, here) they're the type of grammatical choices that go well
> beyond what we normally think of as instinctual knowledge of language.
> Native English-speakers know to put "the" before a noun, not after, and
> know implicitly how to make passives, but they frequently don't know
> whether using one or not is the best idea in a particular paragraph.
>
> Bill Spruiell
>
> Dept. of English
> Central Michigan University
>
>
>
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