Ed,
I can send you the syllabus. I use homework and analysis projects as a
basis for grading, rather than exams, which I find a waste of class time
and am senior enough to get away with not using. As to effectiveness, I
don't expect students to nail down everything we cover in a semester. I
try to get them started on doing sound grammatical analysis of real
language, knowing that as they continue doing this over a number of
years more of what we've covered will come alive. I've had students
come back several years later to tell me that things they weren't
entirely clear on during the course have become clear as they continued
teaching grammar, and I had this experience myself when I started
teaching. This is something that we forget about how learning works,
and something that standards-based teaching and testing makes more
difficult, namely, that we are helping young people to learn to think
within their discipline and we shouldn't confine ourselves to what some
significant percentage can grasp in a couple of tries. If all these
future teachers will ever know about grammar is what they get taught in
one class, we might as well all teach something else. We have to trust
that teachers go on learning, at least the better ones.
Herb
Subject: Re: Grassroots efforts
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
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