Rebecca,

My interest in grammar teaching is what happens with native speakers of 
English, not English learners. ESL (I use this out of habit; one can 
easily understand that it might be a third or fourth or half of 
someone's first language ... ) teaching is already pretty well informed 
by linguistics. I loved using the Azar grammars when I taught ESL, and 
there is another one that is very good, but I don't remember the 
author.

My point about futile exercises was those which are no challenge at all 
to native speakers. In my college structure-of-English class, I have 
begun giving the students review tests and practice tests from a 
7th-grade public school book and one from 9th-grade as well. I do this 
at the beginning of the term to make several points about grammar and 
teaching (including to frighten them, because nearly all will be 
responsible for teaching the same stuff someday). Some of the tests 
require the students just to "choose the correct form", and others 
require them to find things like direct objects and reflexive pronouns. 
They inevitably do just fine on the former, and lousy on the latter. 
That's because they are speakers of standard English already. They have 
no trouble identifying the "correct" past participle form of an 
irregular verb in a sentence. Their intuition tells them that "I have 
taken" is correct standard English, and "I have took" is not. But they 
don't know what a direct object is, so they are stumped when asked to 
find one. (They don't do so well on points of standard English that are 
changing, such as the loss of "fewer" in front of count-noun plurals. 
They don't know that that's an issue at all, but it was a sample 
question from the CA high-school exit exam. And they don't have a clue 
where to use "whom".)

Native speakers don't need to be told where a noun is in a sentence; if 
they're taught the noun signals, they can find them on their own. In 
the Jabberwocky line "all mimsy were the borogoves", for instance, 
"the" and the plural "-s" on "borogoves" are enough to tell them that 
"borogove" is a noun. The signals are not always that clear-cut, but 
you start with easy examples and move on. I don't object to exercises 
in principle; but the exercises should be good ones. I have a lot of 
exercises in the book I'm working on. I also don't think all "rote" 
work is bad; but it can't all be rote work. There's a lot of room for 
creativity and incorporating real texts.

Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
Linguistics Minor Advisor
English Department
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel.: 805.756.2184
Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba

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