I'm already staying tuned...thanks for an uplifting, inspirational message!

Linda Comerford

"Hadley, Tim" wrote:

Hi Bill,

Bill,

Well, actually, I think both Braddock and Hillocks state that it is “formal grammar” that they are opposed to. But they don’t always define what they mean very clearly, and I don't think there is any doubt that Braddock's statements (and later Hillocks's as well) were understood by many to include the condemnation of much more than just formal, drill-based grammar.

However, I probably should have explained better what I meant by "incorrect conclusions."

It's really fairly simple: Harris misrepresented his own 1962 dissertation by claiming that his "non-grammar" group studied no grammar, when in fact they did--they studied what we would call "functional grammar." This has been pointed out in articles by Bamberg (1978) and Tomlinson (1994). Further, the non-grammar group was coached in avoiding the errors that would be looked for on the posttest analysis, in effect seriously compromising Harris's research. So, the results Harris claimed for his research were at best tainted, if not completely non-valid. This point was also made, in slightly different terms, by Martha Kolln in her 1981 article "Closing the Books on Alchemy."

Braddock then took Harris's claims and built an entire anti-grammar empire on them. I still read articles that cite how Harris "once and for all" proved that teaching grammar is harmful to students. These statements are not being made by people who have read Harris's dissertation, but by people who have read Braddock's one sentence. But Mellon (1978, “A taxonomy of compositional competencies”) strongly disputes the contention that taking time away from writing practice to work on grammar is harmful to students' writing. And there are many other studies that suggest that increasing the frequency of writing does not improve the quality of students’ writing, all suggesting that Harris’s secondary conclusion as well was incorrect.

So my question is, if Harris's claims were based on compromised research (and they were), and if subsequent studies have invalidated his conclusions, how much faith can we have in them? That is what I meant by “incorrect conclusions.”

Now, having said that, I agree about the superiority of functional, contextual grammar teaching over non-contextual, drill-based grammar teaching, and am not suggesting a return to drill and kill. I understand, and agree with, the need for an emphasis on writing in the composition classroom. But why can there not be both? It is being done here at Texas Tech, for instance, where students in freshman English write more than they probably do in almost any other program anywhere--about 50 documents (roughly 3-4 per week) during the semester, including 12 major drafts, all totaling (the 50 documents) about 20,000 words, give or take--and grammar is taught as a part of every classroom session. Students write a lot _and_ they get some grammar instruction. Does it help their writing? Well, that's the subject of my dissertation. Stay tuned . . .

Tim

Tim Hadley

Research Assistant, The Graduate School

Ph.D. candidate, Technical Communication and Rhetoric

Texas Tech University

-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of William McCleary
Sent: Sunday, October 02, 2005 11:48 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Hostility toward grammar teaching

Tim,

Which incorrect conclusions of the Braddocks and Hillocks report are 

you talking about? Their main conclusion, that teaching grammar has 

no beneficial effect on composition, still seems valid to me. It is 

true that the grammar being taught was usually old-fashioned, taught 

in isolation from the actual practice of composition, or focused more 

on usage and mechanics than basic grammar, but that was how 

composition was often taught in those days.

It is their second comment, that teaching grammar may be "harmful" to 

students, that receives the most complaints from proponents of 

grammar. But even here the complaints are not all that justified. 

What they actually said was that the time spent on grammar was taken 

away from the actual practice of writing and for that reason might be 

harmful to students' progress in learning composition.

As for why some college composition teachers are so opposed to 

grammar in the composition classroom, you need to go back to what 

used to be done in many composition classes and, indeed, in some 

entire composition programs. That was the intense focus on errors in 

composition and the related attempts to use the teaching of 

grammar-as-syntax and grammar-as-correct-usage. We had a long battle 

to get rid of that approach to composition and to focus attention on 

actual writing instead. If you even suggest that you are interested 

in going back to grammar, those who remember the battles are bound to 

look at you with horror. You would need to explain pretty quickly 

that you are not proposing to go back to the old methods but to try a 

modern approach.

The same unhelpful use of "grammar" was, by the way, also the main 

approach to teaching composition when I began teaching secondary 

English in 1961. I did it for 3 years (if I remember correctly) until 

personal observation led me to conclude that this was going nowhere. 

I have never gone back. I have occasionally tried introducing some 

lessons on both kinds of grammar, because it does, after all, seem 

intuitively obvious that some knowledge of grammar or some lessons on 

the mistakes students make would work, but I quickly rediscovered why 

I had abandoned them in the first place. One often forgets that what 

is intuitively obvious (the world is flat) often turns out to be 

untrue. As someone pointed out earlier, you do not need to teach any 

formal lessons in grammar (of either type) to teach composition 

successfully.

Bill

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