Dear Colleagues,

This post is in response to recent questions not only about what to 
teach but also about what we mean by linguistic grammar.  These, of 
course, are big questions: This is only the beginning of an answer.

First, let me explain that my own experience as a student of 
traditional school grammar back in the 1940s was a positive one, as 
far as I can recall these decades later. (Maybe I'm just remembering 
the pleasure of diagramming, which I assumed all of my classmates 
shared--which of course they didn't.!)   I'm quite sure our 
instruction was not based on error correction and error avoidance, as 
current practice appears to be.  And I don't remember being warned 
about splitting infinitives or avoiding end-of-sentence prepositions 
and all those other "don't's" and "nevers" that seem to dominate our 
students' memories of grammar classes.  I do recall lots of 
memorizing--a method by no means limited to language arts.  (I can 
still recite the formula for photosynthesis I had to memorize for 
biology class; the states and their capitals for geography, etc.) 
And, in fact, I'm quite sure the purpose of our grammar lessons was 
not tied to writing; it was, of course, tied to understanding how 
language works.  (I'm also quite sure that "writing" class in those 
days meant "penmanship," something we spent a great deal of time on.)

But I wish that one of my English teachers had taught me some of the 
language lessons I teach my grammar students.  Here are two of my 
wishes:

l.  I wish my teachers had told me, back in junior high, that I was a 
language expert.  In fact, I was an expert when I started 
kindergarten--let alone by sixth grade.

Our job as grammar techers is to help students bring to a conscious 
level the grammar they know subconsciously, innately, as native 
speakers, as humans.   (Nonnative speakers must recognize that they 
too are experts in the grammar of their home languages.  Their 
learning of English will be somewhat different from that of native 
speakers.)   A good demonstration of innate grammar expertise is our 
automatic use of pronouns; another is the production of 
tag-questions, which students will come up with in an instant.  (Mary 
isn't here today--is she?   Pete will wash dishes tonight, won't he? 
Jack and Jill aren't coming, are they?)   Note that the tag-questions 
not only include automatic pronoun usage (she, he, they), but the 
recognition of auxiliaries.  And if students are having trouble 
finding the main verb in their sentences, as teachers sometimes 
mention, simply have them substitute a pronoun for the subject noun 
phrase: It works every time!

2.  I wish my teachers had told me that those "eight parts of speech" 
were not created equal!  That's something I never knew.  Nor did they 
tell me that those so-called definitions of Nouns and Verbs and 
Adjectives and Adverbs were not very accurate.  For example, they 
didn't tell me that lots of words other than adjectives modify nouns. 
(And "interjection" as one of the eight!?!)

They never told me that those four parts of speech were in a class by 
themselves--a "form class," as we call it. You can often recognize 
the categories by their forms (you can even define them on that 
basis).  And my teachers certainly didn't mention that those eight 
categories were based on Latin rather than English, that perhaps some 
of them have been classified in error.  (For instance, they didn't 
tell me that articles aren't really adjectives--i.e., words that can 
be made comparative and superlative, that can be qualified by "very," 
etc.)    When I peruse the books at an NCTE or 4Cs convention that 
purport to include the latest good stuff on grammar, I always check 
the index for "determiner."  If it's not there, that grammar 
description is not linguistic grammar.  It is not based on the 
premise that students are already experts, that they automatically 
include a determiner with a singular countable noun--every time!

Those then are two lessons we didn't know about back in 
"pre-structural grammar" times.  So I can't, and don't, blame my 
teachers for not passing them, and many other important lessons, on. 
I might add that in the section of Grammar Alive called "An Overview 
of Linguistic Grammar," which I wrote, I described the "parts of 
speech" in this "new" way (not really new  anymore--50+ years old!). 
I also included a section on sentence patterns.  In my classes and my 
books I use sentence patterns as the framework to help students 
organize and build their knowledge of sentence structure.  As a 
visual tool, the patterns--and their traditional diagrams--provide a 
place for students to store all of the details of sentence expansion 
as they encounter them.

This, then, is the beginning of my answer.

Martha

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