Martha, please post more of what you wish you had learned!!
Christine in Baltimore
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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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