Christine,
There are many ways in which the new descriptions of
grammar--some gleaned from transformational and some from
structural--make so much more sense than traditional. Take
the description of verbs. I have on my shelf grammar books that
list pages of so-called verb tenses--of this variety:
Singular present
I
eat
you
eat
he
eats
Plural present
we
eat
you
eat
they
eat
Singular past
I
ate
you
ate
we
ate
Plural past
we
ate
you
ate
they
ate
And on and on, filling pages with Future (I shall eat, you will
eat, etc.)Present Perfect (I have eaten); Past Perfect (I had eaten);
Future perfect (I shall have eaten); Future perfect progressive (I
shall have been eating)--and all labeled as if verbs had the feature
of number, as nouns and pronouns do.
You get the picture. When you add all the possibilities,
including the passive, and take each through all the subject pronouns,
the array looks formidable for kids. And, of course, all
of these are called "tenses," when, in fact and in form,
English verbs have only two forms that designate tense: present
and past.
No one told us that verbs in English are amazingly simple:
a mere five forms (except for be, which has eight). Check
out that past array: ate in every case! And
except for the -s form (the one used with singular 3rd person
pronouns), the present in every case is the base form, identical to
the infinitive.
It's true, of course, that there are nuances of meaning that
occur with the auxiliaries--including such modals as should
and could and might and may. But for native
speakers, with a few exceptions, the system is close to automatic.
Even nonstandard dialects (He don't; they wasn't, etc.) involve very
few verbs--and in every case I can think of, the verbs are
simply irregular ones being regularized.
In Understanding English Grammar, I have a chapter on
verbs that includes the "verb-expansion rule" that underlies
all of those pages of so-called verb conjugations. It looks like
this:
Main
Verb = T (M) (have + -en) (be + -ing) V
That's it! It takes a bit of explanation, of course--but it
makes very clear, for example, that when the main verb is the -ing
form, it ALWAYS has a form of be as an auxiliary. And it's
easy to relate to the traditional labels: If you choose have
+ -en as auxiliary, you're in the "perfect tenses"; if
you choose be + -ing, you're in the progressives; pick both and
you've created "perfect progressive."
The passive voice becomes a very simple concept: That's
when the auxiliary be is NOT followed by -ing, but rather by
the -en form (the past participle).
There are just so many neat things to know about verbs--and
they're all right there! This explanation probably doesn't
belong in junior high. It's not necessarily one of my
"wishes"--but I'm glad I know about it now.
And lots of other stuff too.
Lessons of this kind are the reason that grammar should be
included the high school curriculum.
Martha
Martha, please post more of what you wish you had
learned!!
Christine in Baltimore
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Martha Kolln
Sent: Monday, February 06, 2006 5:08 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: What is Linguistic Grammar?
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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