From: [log in to unmask]>Ed Vavra

To: [log in to unmask]>[log in to unmask]

Sent: Saturday, December 30, 2000 4:53 AM

Subject: So many interesting questions!

The end of the semester rush, combined with the need to develop a new multicultural course on literature, made me unable to keep up with this list for the last several weeks. Several interesting discussions have been going on, and rather than making multiple  posts, I'm going to try to cover everything in this one.

1. A separate list for middle school teachers?
    I have serious reservations about that. First, if college types, myself included, are allowed to join, the odds are that most of us would -- and we would probably bring all our theoretical baggage with us. Second, can practice really be separated from theory? I realize that some people may feel overwhelmed, but it is not that difficult to push the delete button (or set up a filter).  If we do decide to set up multiple discussions, might I second the idea of multiple guest books set up in something like FrontPage? (I am already planning on something like that, but it is intended just for the discussion of the KISS Approach. (See: http://www2.pct.edu/courses/evavra/GB.htm) I note the example because I think it would allow people to switch from book to book rather easily, and it would (unless edited, as mine will be) maintain a searchable record of all the comments that are posted.

2. Those "simple?" questions
     I want to second (or sixteenth?) the response of those members who have invited members of the list to post ANY AND ALL questions about grammar. If I see that someone else has already responded as I would, I don't usually respond, but that is because I try to keep my posts as infrequent as possible. My main objection to making Syntax a "refereed" publication was that I felt it would discourage contributions (both questions and explanations)  from teachers in K-12. Please don't do that to this list as well. (I much prefer those simple questions to the diatribes about the state of education -- most of which are deleted before being read.) I've also noted that many of these questions are preceded by apologies about what the poster doesn't know because they were never taught it. The apologies are not needed. Those of us who have been with this group for any length of time know that most teachers (often including the ones we ourselves have taught) are poorly prepared to teach grammar. No one on this list, in my memory, has ever criticized anyone for asking such a question, and, as the responses about a second list have shown, even those of us at the college level are eager to hear and respond to them.

3. Resistance to instruction in grammar.

     Paul Doniger noted that  "the resistance to grammar that we meet from our students is not very different from their resistance to poetry, reading of any kind, algebra, geography, or chemistry." It is a point well-made,  but it overlooks the fact that most of the resistance comes from the teachers, not the students. And that resistance, in turn, results from the poor preparation that teachers have been given. This was noted at the last ATEG conference held in Williamsport -- several years ago, and it was also reflected in the summaries from the NCTE middle school list. I had hoped that the ATEG 3S committee would have been able to address this problem by providing a clear sequence and curriculum, but thus far I haven't seen that. (A large part of the problem is that members of this list have very different concepts of grammar, use terms in different ways, etc., all of which confuses teachers who simply want to know what they should do on Monday.)

4. Noun Absolutes -- The Definition of

     I appreciate the contributions to this thread, and agree with most of them. I do, however, disagree with Martha's way of explaining them, and I note this because it reflects my basic disagreement with all of the "grammarians" on this site. Martha gives a rather extensive list of possibilities -- which is not needed. A noun absolute is simple a noun plus a participle. If they were taught using the KISS Approach, students (at KISS Level Five) would easily be able to identify all of them -- plus, perhaps, others.
     I would also suggest that the noun absolute actually appears frequently as a direct object. I make this claim not on the basis of grammar books (I don't care, anymore, what they say.), but rather on the basis of logic and a grammar based on meaning. (And it was a student who pointed it out to me.) The sentence "They saw the soldiers departing." does not mean "They saw the soldiers," nor does it mean "They saw the departing." The meaningful direct object of "saw" is the noun absolute, "soldiers departing."

5. Noun Absolutes -- The Teaching of

     First, I want to thank Fr. Laurence for noting that the absolutes he collected were from seventh graders who were "good readers." That still, however, does not answer my question about how long it took to collect them. Put another way, what I want to know is what percentage of the class contributed them?  One of the mistakes that we frequently make is that we note what some students are doing without thinking about the class as a whole. Loban's work really made this apparent to me, but as a specific example, let me refer to my own research. Such research is time-consuming, so thus far I've only been able to analyze the work of fourth graders, but it should make my point. If you look at the web page at http://www2.pct.edu/courses/evavra/ED498/R/1986/W4/W4Stats_Sum.htm
you will find a summary of statistics on ten fourth graders' writing. The column I am interested in is near the middle -- TSC/MC. Unfortunately, this research is usually reported in averages, but the averages hide the differences among the students. Note that the four writers averaged 22 subordinate clauses for every 100 main clauses. But one of the writers averaged 42, and another 38. At the other end, one writer averaged only six, and still another only 2! I cannot, of course, repeat all the ideas in Teaching Grammar as a Liberating Art here, nor can I summarize all of the work of Hunt, O'Donnell, and Loban. The conclusion, however, is that rushing instruction, whether it be in clauses, participles, or noun absolutes, probably harms those students in the lower stages of natural syntactic development -- precisely those students who most need our help. And, in the lack of any convincing evidence that "premature" instruction has any lasting effect, I see no reason for teachers doing it.
     My reasons, however, go beyond the possible harm. Brock (Thank you again, Brock) has noted (as have others), that at the college level they are still trying to get students to learn how to identify subjects and verbs! (And, if they cannot identify verbs, they cannot identify participles or absolutes.) It would, in my opinion, be much better to give students a thorough, conscious grasp of clauses before teaching them about participles and absolutes. That leads me to my next topic --

6. The KISS Approach and "explicit" and "implicit" instruction

     There are, apparently, misconceptions about the KISS Approach. I realize that many of my comments on this list relate to specific constructions  -- and to how to get students to be able to identify them. But remember that I am proposing a curriculum for grades 3 - 11, not just for one year. Essentially, that curriculum is:

3rd Grade -- Prepositional Phrases & Compounding, Adjectives & Adverbs; Ellipsis
4th, 5th, & 6th Grades -- Add Subjects, Verbs, and Complements;
7th, 8th, & 9th Grades -- Add Clauses (Main and Subordinate)
10th Grade -- Add Verbals
11th Grade -- Add Seven Additional Constructions

This curriculum would, for example, include three years during which time "explicit" instruction would be limited to the study of subjects, finite verbs, and complements. During those three years, teachers could and should use a wide variety of implicit instruction -- including  fill-in-the blanks, analysis exercises, sentence combining (and decombining), sentence modeling, etc. But at the end of those three years, students should be able to identify ALL the subjects, finite verbs, and complements in any passage that they read or write. This would mean that they would not have to be retaught this every year through high school and into college, especially since the next level of KISS, clauses, (as does each following level) USES that knowledge of S/V/C patterns. Notice that, if they had been taught with the KISS approach, Gretchen's students would not have had the problem she notes -- "my sixth graders can't recognize
some of the structures that require commas in their own writing.  The difference between
two independent clauses (however you define them!) joined by a conjunction
and a sentence with a compound verb seems to be as big a mystery as it was
before we started." The problem, I will say again, is that most members of ATEG are looking at their own classes, and not looking at an integrated curriculum within which they could build on what students had already learned. The KISS Approach actually advocates tons of implicit instruction which will reinforce the limited explicit instruction at each level.

7. The Research

    I am, by the way, disappointed by the reactions within this group to research which, it appears, has not been read. That research not only clearly shows that specific constructions blossom at specific times (subordinate clauses in grades 7-9, and participles, appositives and absolutes after that), but in TGLA I have also proposed a psycholinguistic explanation of why development occurs in that sequence. And that leads me to my next point.

8. O'Donnell's concept of "formulas"
 
     Edith noted "I know that my children used subordinate clauses before they were
5 and relative clauses around 6. That was in speaking." The question is, where they true subordinate clauses, or were they formulas. O'Donnell describes formulas as strings of words which students learn whole, often with possible substitution. An example of my own is the young child's "When we get home." Children hear "when ___ get(s) ___" hundreds of times, and O'Donnell suggests that this construction is not a true subordinate clause. We saw, by the way, an example of the creation of a formula in Pam's question about "The idea being that ..." The students simply pick up the phrase. Formulas, of course, also raise questions about the noun absolutes noted by Fr. Laurence (and others) in their students' writing. In order to know for sure, we need to look at specific examples.

9. The "zone of proximal development"

     It's getting late (or I should say early), so I can't go into detail, but there is evidence that the syntactic zone of proximal development is domain specific. We can see examples of that when those of us who teach writing complain that our students do o.k., or even fine, in writing narratives, but their writing falls apart in expository essays. The KISS sequence, by the way, is heavily dependent on the zpd, which is one of the reasons that I question teaching appositives, participles, and noun absolutes to sixth and seventh graders. The more advanced students can use the instruction, but for the rest of the class ...? Can anyone offer real proof that these constructions are in these students' zdp? (Remember that the research has to make the original writing available for inspection so that we can check for formulas.)

10. P[aula?] Hostmeyer's 24 patterns.

     I too would like to know more about these patterns, but I would note that she? was working with junior high students (grades 7-9). That is precisely the right time for explicit and implicit instruction in clauses. (I'm still not so sure about the participles, and I'm not sure that we need to teach gerunds and infinitives).

11. Francis Christensen

     Don Stewart asked about Christensen. My problem with Christensen is that he advocated modeling (and combining?) exercises intended to move students toward developing right-branching subordination (after the main subject and verb). Why can't we teach students what these constructions are, and then let students decide for themselves whether they prefer  right-branching, or mid-branching, or left-branching? (Walker Gibson suggested that left-branching reflects a more organized mind.)

12. And finally

      Thank you if you have read thus far. I'm sorry if I overlooked anyone's comments, but I have already spent over four hours on this. (I log my time.) I would like to note that Peter Feely, the K-12 Acquisitions Editor for NCTE, has asked me to submit a TRIP book proposal on KISS. He apparently took my proposal before the Board, and they expressed tentative interest. He has also more or less promised to help me write the thing such that it is acceptable to NCTE. It will, however, still be subject to approval by readers, etc. (I have my doubts that it will be accepted.)
     TRIP stands for "Theory and Research into Practice." Thus part of the book will be based on the theory and research in TGLA, but I want to devote as much of the book as possible to practical exercises, including lots of "implicit" instruction. Although he tells me that we cannot pay contributors, we certainly can acknowledge them. I will certainly appreciate any help that anyone wants to offer, and I am especially interested in grade-level appropriate passages that demonstrate the connections between syntax and style. I remember, for example, a teacher at a conference who demonstrated the noun absolutes (again!) in a passage from Twain.

I didn't get to wish everyone a Merry Christmas, but I hope you all have a safe and happy New Year.
Ed V.