Rebecca, My interest in grammar teaching is what happens with native speakers of English, not English learners. ESL (I use this out of habit; one can easily understand that it might be a third or fourth or half of someone's first language ... ) teaching is already pretty well informed by linguistics. I loved using the Azar grammars when I taught ESL, and there is another one that is very good, but I don't remember the author. My point about futile exercises was those which are no challenge at all to native speakers. In my college structure-of-English class, I have begun giving the students review tests and practice tests from a 7th-grade public school book and one from 9th-grade as well. I do this at the beginning of the term to make several points about grammar and teaching (including to frighten them, because nearly all will be responsible for teaching the same stuff someday). Some of the tests require the students just to "choose the correct form", and others require them to find things like direct objects and reflexive pronouns. They inevitably do just fine on the former, and lousy on the latter. That's because they are speakers of standard English already. They have no trouble identifying the "correct" past participle form of an irregular verb in a sentence. Their intuition tells them that "I have taken" is correct standard English, and "I have took" is not. But they don't know what a direct object is, so they are stumped when asked to find one. (They don't do so well on points of standard English that are changing, such as the loss of "fewer" in front of count-noun plurals. They don't know that that's an issue at all, but it was a sample question from the CA high-school exit exam. And they don't have a clue where to use "whom".) Native speakers don't need to be told where a noun is in a sentence; if they're taught the noun signals, they can find them on their own. In the Jabberwocky line "all mimsy were the borogoves", for instance, "the" and the plural "-s" on "borogoves" are enough to tell them that "borogove" is a noun. The signals are not always that clear-cut, but you start with easy examples and move on. I don't object to exercises in principle; but the exercises should be good ones. I have a lot of exercises in the book I'm working on. I also don't think all "rote" work is bad; but it can't all be rote work. There's a lot of room for creativity and incorporating real texts. Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics Linguistics Minor Advisor English Department California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo E-mail: [log in to unmask] Tel.: 805.756.2184 Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596 Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374 URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/