I thought that the following comment needed a response:
>I would also add, as I have said before, that the improvement of
writing
>skills is NOT the purpose of grammar instruction, anyway. I just don't
think that
>we've really focused on the best reasons FOR teaching grammar yet --
let
>alone how best to teach it.
So why, then, are many grammarians still consumed with the belief that
grammar can and will improve writing skills? Perhaps because it's
difficult to believe otherwise.
When I taught formal grammar, I lived the frustrating truth of the
research results about the futility of teaching it. Then I hopefully
tried sentence combining, and the students hated it! It's like trying to
second guess somebody else's writing, and there seems to be very little
opportunity to produce original student writing - just rewriting somebody
else's (boring?) writing.
Even after those experiences, I still felt that grammar has a role in
helping people write better, and that's when I started to teach grammar
as a tool for creating meaning. If students are presented with the
simplest of sentences - for example, "The baby cried." - their unanimous
and unambiguous conclusion is that the sentence, although correct, is
sorely lacking in meaning. Even the least capable student realized that
the sentence required a lot more information to be "interesting" - or, in
the language of the academy - "to create meaning."
This is the basis of an approach that I call "sentence stuffing" - adding
information to a basic sentence to create meaning. As soon as I took
this approach, every student became an instant
expert in dependent clauses. Not one student failed to create a unique
dependent clause to tell why the baby was crying. This same approach -
to create meaning rather than to reconstruct meaning (sentence combining)
or to ignore meaning (grammar disconnected from writing) - can be used
for every part of grammar imaginable.
The purpose of grammar, then, really can be the improvement of writing
skills, but like everything else can be learned only with practice. The
issue with drill and kill - or "practice" - is not the process but rather
the nature of the exercises themselves. Practicing - or "drilling" -
grammar is like practicing turning a power tool on and off and never
understanding what it's used for.
Drilling the creation of meaning through writing dependent clauses (or
any other grammar tool), however, teaches not only the technique but also
the purpose.
In the example of the dependent clause used to explain why the baby
cried, the students could study dependent clauses all day long and never
know their purpose. "Sentence stuffing" is a method that starts with
purpose and then shows method, rather than starting with method and never
even getting to purpose.
The other beauty of this approach is that it can be used in a class of
students of widely varying abilities because each student is always
working at their own level. Also, for those teachers who do not want to
include formal grammar instruction - in other words, having students
learn names and definitions of grammatical constructions - it is never
necessary for students to learn that the technique they used to describe
why the baby cried is called a dependent clause. Or, conversely, if a
more formal study of grammar is desired, then students can learn more
about about the nature of exactly what it is that they have created.
Geoff Layton
PS: For an example of grammar used well in literature, try the first 18
lines of the Canterbury Tales - "When in April"
etc. - perhaps the longest and most graceful complex compound sentence
ever created. Also, my prize for the best overall use of rhetorical
devices of all kinds goes to the Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass. I had students of very middling
abilities understanding literary apostrophes and creating their own
filled with great power and beauty after they read Douglass' apostrophe
to the ships in the Chesapeake Bay.
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