Edith, I understand what you are saying, but I think the problem may be in student attempts to mimic academic voice and wrestle with meaning rather than issues of grammar. I'm not sure I'm going to say this right, but the problem with voice and meaning may show up as problems with grammar, so the issue either goes deeper than we think or it is shallower than we think, depending on our perspectives. What I may be saying (see, I'm constructing meaning here) is that the issues may be more rhetorical than grammatical. Students sense that academic voice is different. At the college level they have some limited experience with academic voice but they struggle. And as they struggle with voice they may throw their knowledge of certain syntactic structures out the window. Mina Shaughnessy noted something along this nature, didn't she? And it certainly fits with cognitive theory that as we wrestle with one concept we are apt to temporarily lose hold of previously learned concepts. I sometimes dig out my papers from my freshman year in college. They are dreadful. Not only could I not make an argument, it seems I could hardly write intelligible prose, at least classroom situated prose. I was pretty good at writing when I didn't have to play the "quess what the professor wants" game. I was a good writer as a kid, but it sure didn't show up in those fyc papers. I sort of hate to admit it in this crowd, but I don't know an aspect from a hole in the ground. Way back when I was an undergrad at Michigan State, I was required to take a transformational grammar course. This was back in 1972. I was probably one of those students who made my professor shudder and wonder what the new generation was going to do with his world. I had had 12 straight years of direct and isolated grammar instruction in public school, back in those golden years. Those years did not help me make sense of transformational grammar. The argument that good writers employ a conscious knowledge of grammar (I'm defining that word more traditionally) doesn't quite hold up unless you can argue that the study of grammar would automatically turn those who employ their conscious knowledge of grammar into good writing. But that isn't true. A knowledge of physiology doesn't turn a person into a good athlete. And here's where constructivism (which is not another term for discovery learning, by the way) may come into the discussion. Constructivists believe that we learn whole to part. So a gift for athletics and the chance to test that gift in many different situations comes before any specific knowledge of kinesthesiology of physiology. And it creates a connection and a desire to learn those specific kinds of knowledge. Constructivism is all about making connections. (sorry, couldn't help getting that little plug in.) Nancy Nancy G. Patterson Portland Middle School, English Dept. Chair Portland, MI 48875 "The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumberable centers of culture." --Roland Barthes [log in to unmask] http://www.msu.edu/user/patter90/opening.htm http://www.npatterson.net/mid.html To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/