Herb,

     The course you describe sounds interesting. Do you have a copy of the syllabus that we could see — and copies of tests and final exams? If you can do all that you describe, and do it effectively in a single course, then you have solved the entire problem.

Ed

>>> [log in to unmask] 10/17/2005 11:27:11 PM >>>

Ed,

Clearly we need to get beyond the two camps discourse.  In my undergrad grammar course, which, because of my current assignment as director of graduate programs I probably won't get to teach again before I retire, students learn, and are examined on, funtional categories like subject, predicate, object (direct, indirect, prepositional); complement, modifier, structural categories including parts of speech that are empirically defensible, noun phrases, adjective phrases, adverb phrases, and the subordinate clauses that can fill these structures and functions; and information changing structures like passive and extraposition.  They study these topics in their own writing and real writing that they bring in from newspapers, blogs, fiction, textbooks, and poems.  They analyze verb patterns and sentence structures in sonnets and in prose genres, and they do exercises in which the information structure of a passage they are writing must meet certain expectations, so that they have to choose sentence reorderings like passive.  And in addition to this, they learn word structure (morphology), how sounds and spellings are similar and different, and they confront some of the major myths of language that are current in our culture.  It's a fairly full course.

And, by the way, I use linguistic argumentation throughout so that they understand that descriptions meet certain standards.  I don't cover much in the way of sociolinguistics in this course because we cover that in a separate required course.  However, I do include some historical information.  Things like who/whom/that are easier grasp if they understand the historical roots of the problems.  And I use readings like the superb section from Mencken's The American Language on pronoun case problems.

As Johanna said, grammar has to be motivated linguistically or it's just so much more cant.  It has to be and be seen to be intellectually substantive.

What we lack, and not for want of trying on my part, is a grammar methods course.  Our English Ed folks aren't interested and claim that there's no time for such a course, and I haven't been able to convince them otherwise.  Grammar, beyond correctness and usage, just isn't very important to them.  So I incorporate a little bit of methods in my own teaching styles and in some of the topics we deal with, but I'm not a methods person, and so I don't know that I do that particularly well.

Herb