To all,
I’d like to hear people’s opinions on two topics, one
regarding adjectives and the other, student readiness.
How comfortable are people with having adjectives
broken down into two subgroups, Limiting and
Descriptive? Limiting adjectives are most easily
recognized by the fact that they do not go through the
positive-comparative-superlative changes. They include
articles, demonstratives, quantifiers, ordinals, and
possessive pronouns. Descriptive adjectives, on the
other hand, do just that—describe—and except for words
like “perfect” and “unique” can be made comparative
and superlative. Yes, there might be the debate about
whether to include those pronouns, but I think they
fit nicely here.
Also, I understand Martha’s use of the term
“adjectival,” which includes anything that can modify
a noun—from the above limiting and descriptive
adjectives, to prepositional phrases, participial
phrases, and adjective clauses. In fact, Book Two in
my series of grammar books arranges things just that
way, by function rather than form, for adjectives,
adverbs, and nouns. That book is intended for grades
eight and nine, where I feel the students are ready to
step back and contemplate the relationships,
similarities, and possibilities of these collective
grammatical elements.
But in order to reach that level, of course, I guess
they have to have studied the forms, especially the
phrases and clauses parts, which I do in Book One. Is
that a logical sequence? Could they learn functions
first? Could they play around with ten ways to
describe a canoe in grade six, and deduce the forms
rather than having direct instruction in them? Which
leads to my big question: When are kids really ready
to make the leap from an adjective simply being the
word “big” to the clause “which was hand crafted by a
Penobscot Indian”?
Don Stewart
Keeper of the memory and method of Dr. Francis Christensen
www.writeforcollege.com
www.epsbooks.com
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