And you can add to this sort of lesson
some of the content of the article on teaching tense that I did in SIS last
year. It turns out that distinguishing between tense and aspect and
distinguishing auxiliary from main verbs make it much easier to talk about how
different verb structures are used in different kinds of writing. This also is
something that needs to be taught in high school. However, a traditional
approach, with its catalog of a dozen forbidding tense names (Future Perfect
Progressive Passive, well “Passive” increases the list to two
dozen), simply can’t provide the necessary tools or concepts to do this.
Herb
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf
Of Martha Kolln
Sent: Tuesday, February 07, 2006
3:15 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: What is Linguistic
Grammar?
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:
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, 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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