Martha,

    What a wonderful start.  I agree with both these basic points, that
our Scope and Sequence recommendations MUST include respect for the
language expert in all of us and must include a re-examination of
traditional "parts of speech." To me, a structural grammar is also a
phrase structure grammar.  We need to look at what happens when words
expand into phrases and phrases build into clauses.  Traditional parts
of speech doesn't predict much of it. You can't just jump from word to
sentence without serious problems.  >
    There are huge implications from both of these positions, some of
which have bolstered opposition to grammar for some time.  If language
is acquired, rather than taught, then perhaps we ONLY need to teach
those aspects of use that violate standards. (Many on the list seem to
take this position, you and  not included.) If the parts of speech
don't carry over well into actual practice, perhaps that explains why
teaching them doesn't have much effect on error. (The infamous Hillock
report, which never considered whether grammar had to be accurate3
before it could be useful.) And so on.  Many writing teachers, myself
included, encourage freewriting and relaxed first drafts in part to
free students up from fear of error and allow a natural grammar to
flow through.  If so much attention to error makes us distrust our own
language expertise, then grammar should be shuttled aside during
"important' writing stages. (That's very true if error is all you
associate with grammar.)And so on. When a student believes there is
something fundamentally wrong with their language, they become the
writing equivalent of speechless. Their language is much too complex
for us to teach, how are they to precede if they are expected to park
it at the door? Trust is everything, and good writers seem to
routinely testify for it. A writing voice (voices) must grow from what
the writer already knows.  Everything else is a prescription for
failure.
    As you know, one of my quarrels with Grammar Alive (in addition to the
missing Scope and Sequence)is the failure to acknowledge functional
grammar. Systemic functional grammar has had a huge influence on
movements to reintegrate grammar in other countries.  It is the least
elitist of the linguistic grammars, having been concerned with
practical application from the start. Generative grammar, in contrast,
has never been intended for the public.  It has influenced education,
but no one has advocated that it should be directly taught.
    When most people complain about 'grammar" today, they complain about
behaviour. Even the standardized tests seem to fall into this. People
want us to clean up the messiness of speech and the terrible
influences of family and neighborhood (as they see it) and want us to
do it quickly and neatly. The progressives tell us, with some
justification, that this doesn't work.  Both sides have a highly
reductive understanding.  To quote Laura Micciche:  "grammar has a
range of referents (ie, prescriptive, descriptive, rhetorical)that
describe very different kinds of intellectual activities, differences
that matter tremendously.  These differences evaporate, reducing the
issue of grammar instruction to a rather simple rejection of a banal
practice, when we fail to specify just what kind of grammar we're
rejecting" (College Composition and Communication, June 2004, p717).
     So I agree wholeheartedly that teaching grammar means bringing a
highly complex unconscious system to conscious light. The system
already includes a grammar; we use the same term (grammar)to name our
understanding of it.  Grammar participates in the making of meaning
in ways that remain unconscious if we choose to leave them so.
Conscious understanding can help us help students use language much
more effectively. It is difficult to sell that idea to people who
don't know enough to understand what you are talking about and may
already be entrenched in comfortable ideas. Scope and Sequence will
allow us to go ahead and present an approach to those, however few
they may be, who are curious and open-minded enough (like the school
system you have been working with in Maryland) to give it a chance.
    I hope all that makes some sense.

Craig



 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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