To all Reading this Stream:

  A thought from a 7th-8th Grade English Teacher in the trenches.

 

  There are many different arguements presented:  Enlgish teachers who hate grammar - why?, how writing composiiton does or does not affect grammar knowledge and vice versa, what grammatcial knowledge is important, how to teach, what to teach....

 

 

 

Very plainly:

  I teach in New York and must have my students meet the standards that the state has put forward. 

 

  I have always valued grammar as a structure that helps my students to understand what they read and to state their written messages more clearly. 

  I teach myself grammar through the instruction that I provide my students.  I use old and new text books and DOL (Daily Oral Language) exercies to help me in my endeavors.  My students begin every day with a discussion of grammar, correcting mistakes and explaining why.

  I do not have time for theoretical discussions that the linguists enjoy simply because I am using my students innate knowledge of grammar from their native language to promote understanding.

 

 How do you help the teachers, like myself, that do promote grammar for daily usage?  How do we simplify the language used teaching grammar so that there is consistency on ALL levels.  Do we recognize that the eight parts of speech and their BASIC usage in a sentecne is probably more that my seventh graders can handle as there is no thread for grammar from the elementary schools??? 

 

Here is the light at the end of the tunnel.  As the states implement some sort of grammar test on their NCLB testing, the individual school districts will examine some kind of grammar program.  My question is who will be in the lead of the implementation movement????  THe text book companies to who the schools turn for some kind of immediate implementation, or the ATEG???

 

Just food for thought.

Linda

Bill, Craig, and Tim have defined the problem pretty well.  The question is how we work to change a position so deeply rooted in the profession, its research, its ethos, and its curricula.  We have to remember that in the absence of using grammatical knowledge as a tool for critiquing texts composition specialists have developed a significant body of research on the nature and teaching of writing.  We don't want to even appear to dismiss the very real progress that has been made in this field. 

 

That said, I think it would be useful for us to look closely at the English language arts standards in our states and to see just what sort of linguistic and grammatical knowledge those standards prescribe and presuppose.  I have done this with Indiana's, and I've been as surprised and gratified by the depth and variety of content required as I have been dismayed by the extent to which the English teaching profession in the state ignores those parts of the standards and spends its time on non-linguistic and non-grammar requirements.  Preparing content and methods courses to meet those standards and presenting them as such at state professional meetings may move us towards greater acceptance, since we don't have to introduce new standards.  We're simply implementing what's already been mandated.  Of course, we are also expecting teachers to learn and implement something that's new to th! em and that takes time away from the things they've been taught to value.  This last may be the biggest hurdle.  What we want them to add, at the expense of some of what they are doing, is precisely and perniciously what they have been taught should not be added at the expense of what they have been taught to teach.

 

Herb

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