Craig,
I use short pieces of published writing as well as student writing to
illustrate the analysis and behavior of verb forms. I include both
prose and poetry in this. As to including things like passive, I have
found that students don't really hear it when I tell them there's
nothing wrong with passive voice, not until they see how the structure
works and see examples of it competent writing. We also look at some
bad examples to see how the misuse either conceals information or
confuses topic continuity. But that's another example of giving reasons
for why structures exist, not just teaching about structures.
If you're thinking about teaching and measuring more than behaviors,
you're running against a powerful and in many ways unfortunate current.
We're at the point now where the Council on Higher Education is
encouraging graduate programs to do the same sort of unit assessment
we've been implementing at the undergrad level, which is heavily
behaviors and outcomes oriented. If you can't count it, it don't exist.
Herb
Herb,
I think your article is a marvelous example of balance between form
and
function, a clear presentation of the verb system with an introduction
to how these "forms" add nuances of meaning in practice.>
I'm curious about how you would approach this in a teacher-training
course. Should students be able to break down all verb forms
encountered? There's a difference, I think, between adding complexity
and acknowledging complexity within the language itself. My experience
has been that students complain mightily at first, but get pretty adept
in about a week, and that paragraph long passages are a nice way to
show how these forms work in practice. The only reason for covering
complex combinations of tense, aspect, passive voice, and so on, is
that they actually occur and create nuances of meaning when they do.
The big question seems to be whether we value conscious
understanding
or back off from it when the issues become complex. Isn't our main
problem right now that English teachers think it's more important to
keep things simple than it is to be accurate, that how students
"behave" is much more important than what they know? Of course, we
need some sort of way to "scaffold" knowledge in. In a project like
our Scope and Sequence, these are suddenly very relevant questions.
What do we cover, how do we make sure that it is connected to real
language use, including reading and writing, and how do we layer it in
over time?
There aren't easy answers, but if I push you I suspect I'll get a
thoughtful one.
Craig
And you can add to this sort of lesson some of the content of the
> article on teaching tense that I did in SIS last year. It turns out
that
> distinguishing between tense and aspect and distinguishing auxiliary
> from main verbs make it much easier to talk about how different verb
> structures are used in different kinds of writing. This also is
> something that needs to be taught in high school. However, a
> traditional approach, with its catalog of a dozen forbidding tense
names
> (Future Perfect Progressive Passive, well "Passive" increases the list
> to two dozen), simply can't provide the necessary tools or concepts to
> do this.
>
>
>
> Herb
>
>
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Martha Kolln
> Sent: Tuesday, February 07, 2006 3:15 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: What is Linguistic Grammar?
>
>
>
> Christine,
>
>
>
> There are many ways in which the new descriptions of grammar--some
> gleaned from transformational and some from structural--make so much
> more sense than traditional. Take the description of verbs. I have
on
> my shelf grammar books that list pages of so-called verb tenses--of
this
> variety:
>
> Singular present
>
> I eat
>
> you eat
>
> he eats
>
>
>
> Plural present
>
> we eat
>
> you eat
>
> they eat
>
>
>
> Singular past
>
> I ate
>
> you ate
>
> we ate
>
>
>
> Plural past
>
> we ate
>
> you ate
>
> they ate
>
>
>
> And on and on, filling pages with Future (I shall eat, you will eat,
> etc.)Present Perfect (I have eaten); Past Perfect (I had eaten);
Future
> perfect (I shall have eaten); Future perfect progressive (I shall have
> been eating)--and all labeled as if verbs had the feature of number,
as
> nouns and pronouns do.
>
>
>
> You get the picture. When you add all the possibilities, including
the
> passive, and take each through all the subject pronouns, the array
looks
> formidable for kids. And, of course, all of these are called
"tenses,"
> when, in fact and in form, English verbs have only two forms that
> designate tense: present and past.
>
>
>
> No one told us that verbs in English are amazingly simple: a mere
five
> forms (except for be, which has eight). Check out that past array:
> ate in every case! And except for the -s form (the one used with
> singular 3rd person pronouns), the present in every case is the base
> form, identical to the infinitive.
>
>
>
> It's true, of course, that there are nuances of meaning that occur
with
> the auxiliaries--including such modals as should and could and might
and
> may. But for native speakers, with a few exceptions, the system is
> close to automatic. Even nonstandard dialects (He don't; they wasn't,
> etc.) involve very few verbs--and in every case I can think of, the
> verbs are simply irregular ones being regularized.
>
>
>
> In Understanding English Grammar, I have a chapter on verbs that
> includes the "verb-expansion rule" that underlies all of those pages
of
> so-called verb conjugations. It looks like this:
>
>
>
> Main Verb = T (M) (have + -en) (be + -ing) V
>
>
>
> That's it! It takes a bit of explanation, of course--but it makes
very
> clear, for example, that when the main verb is the -ing form, it
ALWAYS
> has a form of be as an auxiliary. And it's easy to relate to the
> traditional labels: If you choose have + -en as auxiliary, you're in
> the "perfect tenses"; if you choose be + -ing, you're in the
> progressives; pick both and you've created "perfect progressive."
>
>
>
> The passive voice becomes a very simple concept: That's when the
> auxiliary be is NOT followed by -ing, but rather by the -en form (the
> past participle).
>
>
>
> There are just so many neat things to know about verbs--and they're
all
> right there! This explanation probably doesn't belong in junior high.
> It's not necessarily one of my "wishes"--but I'm glad I know about it
> now.
>
>
>
> And lots of other stuff too.
>
>
>
> Lessons of this kind are the reason that grammar should be included
the
> high school curriculum.
>
>
>
> Martha
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Martha, please post more of what you wish you had learned!!
>
>
>
>
>
> Christine in Baltimore
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________
>
>
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Martha Kolln
> Sent: Monday, February 06, 2006 5:08 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: What is Linguistic Grammar?
>
>
>
> Dear Colleagues,
>
>
>
> This post is in response to recent questions not only about what
> to teach but also about what we mean by linguistic grammar. These, of
> course, are big questions: This is only the beginning of an answer.
>
>
>
>
>
> First, let me explain that my own experience as a student of
> traditional school grammar back in the 1940s was a positive one, as
far
> as I can recall these decades later. (Maybe I'm just remembering the
> pleasure of diagramming, which I assumed all of my classmates
> shared--which of course they didn't.!) I'm quite sure our
instruction
> was not based on error correction and error avoidance, as current
> practice appears to be. And I don't remember being warned about
> splitting infinitives or avoiding end-of-sentence prepositions and all
> those other "don't's" and "nevers" that seem to dominate our students'
> memories of grammar classes. I do recall lots of memorizing--a method
> by no means limited to language arts. (I can still recite the formula
> for photosynthesis I had to memorize for biology class; the states and
> their capitals for geography, etc.) And, in fact, I'm quite sure the
> purpose of our grammar lessons was not tied to writing; it was, of
> course, tied to understanding how language works. (I'm also quite
sure
> that "writing" class in those days meant "penmanship," something we
> spent a great deal of time on.)
>
>
>
> But I wish that one of my English teachers had taught me some of
> the language lessons I teach my grammar students. Here are two of my
> wishes:
>
>
>
> l. I wish my teachers had told me, back in junior high, that I
> was a language expert. In fact, I was an expert when I started
> kindergarten--let alone by sixth grade.
>
>
>
> Our job as grammar techers is to help students bring to a
> conscious level the grammar they know subconsciously, innately, as
> native speakers, as humans. (Nonnative speakers must recognize that
> they too are experts in the grammar of their home languages. Their
> learning of English will be somewhat different from that of native
> speakers.) A good demonstration of innate grammar expertise is our
> automatic use of pronouns; another is the production of tag-questions,
> which students will come up with in an instant. (Mary isn't here
> today--is she? Pete will wash dishes tonight, won't he? Jack and
> Jill aren't coming, are they?) Note that the tag-questions not only
> include automatic pronoun usage (she, he, they), but the recognition
of
> auxiliaries. And if students are having trouble finding the main verb
> in their sentences, as teachers sometimes mention, simply have them
> substitute a pronoun for the subject noun phrase: It works every time!
>
>
>
> 2. I wish my teachers had told me that those "eight parts of
> speech" were not created equal! That's something I never knew. Nor
did
> they tell me that those so-called definitions of Nouns and Verbs and
> Adjectives and Adverbs were not very accurate. For example, they
didn't
> tell me that lots of words other than adjectives modify nouns. (And
> "interjection" as one of the eight!?!)
>
>
>
> They never told me that those four parts of speech were in a
> class by themselves--a "form class," as we call it. You can often
> recognize the categories by their forms (you can even define them on
> that basis). And my teachers certainly didn't mention that those
eight
> categories were based on Latin rather than English, that perhaps some
of
> them have been classified in error. (For instance, they didn't tell
me
> that articles aren't really adjectives--i.e., words that can be made
> comparative and superlative, that can be qualified by "very," etc.)
> When I peruse the books at an NCTE or 4Cs convention that purport to
> include the latest good stuff on grammar, I always check the index for
> "determiner." If it's not there, that grammar description is not
> linguistic grammar. It is not based on the premise that students are
> already experts, that they automatically include a determiner with a
> singular countable noun--every time!
>
>
>
> Those then are two lessons we didn't know about back in
> "pre-structural grammar" times. So I can't, and don't, blame my
> teachers for not passing them, and many other important lessons, on.
I
> might add that in the section of Grammar Alive called "An Overview of
> Linguistic Grammar," which I wrote, I described the "parts of speech"
in
> this "new" way (not really new anymore--50+ years old!). I also
> included a section on sentence patterns. In my classes and my books I
> use sentence patterns as the framework to help students organize and
> build their knowledge of sentence structure. As a visual tool, the
> patterns--and their traditional diagrams--provide a place for students
> to store all of the details of sentence expansion as they encounter
> them.
>
>
>
> This, then, is the beginning of my answer.
>
>
>
> Martha
>
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>
>
>
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>
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