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