Edith,
You have me. My list isn't complete. Neither is Noguchi's. But the list
is finite and, more often than not, it is more practical at the college
level to remediate without winding our way through formal grammatical study
to reach our goal. This is not of my choosing. I love it when I can go
directly at a grammatical problem by talking grammar with an informed
student. However, reality strikes. Each semester, I teach a course in
grammar for teacher candidates. It takes the entire semester to bring the
students to a level where we could begin to remediate using grammatical
metalanguage.
My point? We have to get efficient and effective grammatical metalanguage
instruction into the elementary and secondary schools. I'm pretty sure my
teacher candidates are going into the field with the right grammatical
knowledge and some practical and effective means of teaching it. I hope some
of them succeed. Pretty difficult, though. They, first, have to subvert
the systems of their schools. Then they have to teach without textbooks.
Jeff Glauner
Associate Professor of English
Park University, Box 1303
8700 River Park Drive
Parkville MO 64152
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http://www.park.edu/jglauner/index.htm
-----Original Message-----
From: Wollin, Edith [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, February 15, 2001 4:53 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Deep thoughts
Jeff, do you really find that all students come to you ready to use all of
the structures of written English? Most of the teachers that I know have
students who sometimes attach adverb clauses in strange ways, who misplace
relative clauses, who can't keep parallelism going, who don't use participle
phrases, appositives, appositive adjectives. Well, you know that the list
goes on. I have found that conscious grammar work and sentence combining do
help these problems. They give the students syntactic choices that they did
not have before because they had not mastered the grammar unconsciously.
Edith Wollin
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