I agree with you about the need for some way to determine that all language arts teachers have the knowledge they need to teach grammar.

When I went to college about 30 years ago, I was an English major with a secondary education minor (along with journalism plus speech and theatre).  How many grammar classes did I have to prepare me to teach junior high and high school students?  Just one--a nightmare class called Transformational Grammar with tree diagrams I still shudder to recall.  All that did was confuse all of us in my class; it didn't prepare us to teach grammar at all.

My curriculum did include about 45 credits in various forms of literature.  Although I enjoyed them, I didn't need them to be an effective teacher.  No matter what poems I was studying with my students, the subjectivity of the symbolism led to different discussions with every class I taught.

But, oh, how I longed for a strong grammar (and let's not forget punctuation) background.  I was hired to teach language arts to 150 seventh and eighth grade students (5 classes a day).  The grammar text that school used was beyond-confusing.  I felt like such a fraud because I was literally one chapter (often, one page) ahead of my students.  Talk about the blind leading the blind.

I had no idea what compound or complex sentences were (which came up in my syllabus around May), so I simply told my students it was too complicated for them, but their high school teachers would explain it to them.

Fast forward to motherhood for me and the end of teaching junior high.  Instead, I opted for teaching freshman composition to college students two nights a week.  Guess what?  Those students had no idea of correct grammar and punctuation either, but now I was expected to grade for it.  I wasn't supposed to teach grammar, but I was supposed to penalize students for their errors.

Thankfully, I was much better prepared by then.  A teacher at my former school who understood grammar became my mentor.  She taught me all she knew.  It was nothing even close to the complexities of language and linguistics many of you are discussing.  It was basic, logical, useful, and effective.  Some simple, practical rules were followed by exercises that reinforced my students' learning of the rules rather than complicated their knowledge with exceptions.

I still use her principles to train the adults in my workshops.  If you could just see the light bulbs of learning that light up for them when they realize they can, indeed, learn practical fundamentals of grammar.  They are amazed that learning grammar can be so easy and wonder why it always was either ignored or seemed so complicated in school.

If only I'd had some grammar basics during my teacher training, I could have been a much more effective junior high teacher.  I would have gladly traded one lit class for one in traditional grammar.

So please provide teachers with tools that will make grammar and punctuation understandable and useful for their students.  Don't turn it into the equivalent of calculus when simply learning the equivalent of basic math will suffice.

Linda Comerford
Comerford Consulting

Phil Bralich wrote:

I have always felt that much of the problem that exists around grammar teaching is that many of the teachers who are called or impressed with the duty to teach grammar simply don't know it themselves. I have also felt we could do everyone a big favor by requiring potential grammar teachers to take a grammar test; thereby, assuring at the very least that the person being hired wasn't coming in ready to fight the War Against Grammar as his only means of saving face in the classroom.

However, I am unsure what form this would take.  I personally like the grammar section of the old version of the TOELF.  This would be very telling in many ways.  Do other readers out there have favorite, standardized grammar tests that could be given to potential grammar teachers?   Perhaps ETS should be tasked with the job of putting one together specifically for the testing of future grammar teachers.  Those without the scores could focus their attention on other areas such as essay and research writing without fear of being pressed into service for a grammar class while those with the scores will be picked for the classes they obviously are trained for.

Ideally, such a test would teach not only awareness of grammar forms but also grammar terminology.

Phil Bralich

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