Herb,
   It's interesting that when the SAT folk instituted a writing test (holisitically assessed, timed, to an unrehearsed prompt), the composition community reacted very quickly to say, among other things, that this is not a particularly useful measure of writing. Bob Yagelski, who chaired the task force, is a colleague here in Albany. But those are the same tests they use in "controlled studies" to measure the effect of grammar. There's certainly a bit of hypocrisy there.
    If I remember right, for one of the sentence combining/writing studies that Hillocks looked at, there was an inverse correlation of "syntactic complexity" and essay quality. Writing complex sentences might have benefits that almost get in the way in the short term, but pay off down the road. (If you want someone to do something awkwardly, ask them to do something new. I do that all the time as a musician. I have to force myself through the exercise period. To someone looking on, it might seem I'm regressing.) All this is a way of saying we need to wonder what we are measuring or attempting to measure.
   I think the best results in sentence combining come with a "metalanguage" approach. In other words, you have discussions with the students about which choices seem most effective and you don't hold back from building a common language. (See Steve Graham and Delores Perin, Writing Next: Effective Strategies to Improve Writing of Adolescents in Middle and High Schools, a report to the Carnegie Corporation of New York, 2007).  In general, for Graham and Perin, sentence combining when compared to traditional grammar had an effect size  of .50. Traditional grammar, in contrast, had a small negative effect. Their conclusion, echoing earlier studies (and drawing on some of the same studies): "although teaching grammar is important, alternative procedures, such as sentence combining, are more effective than traditional approaches for improving the quality of students' writing." It's interesting, though, that they throw out grammar when used as a criterion reference for scoring. The view seemed to be that separately scoring grammar might give it an unnatural weight.
   I think Debra Myhill poses the question very well. You can't measure the effectiveness of a strategy until you can theorize a connection between that strategy and some future result.
   Teaching X results in Y.  Is X being taught? Is Y happening as a result? If the short term results aren't good, do we need a longer frame of reference?
   I remember a passionate discussion with a colleague I deeply respect, which finally led him to say "teaching grammar will never replace teaching writing." I was surprised that he thought I might be saying that. I think some of the early results come from attempts to show that you can't improve writing SOLELY by teaching grammar. Is there anyone on the list who would argue with that? It might help if we start with deep agreement, that students learn to write by writing, not by doing workbooks.
   Is there such a thing as writing friendly grammar? How, exactly, does knowledge about language carry over?

Craig
   

STAHLKE, HERBERT F wrote:
[log in to unmask]" type="cite">

Scott,

 

You’ve put your finger squarely on the problem, and it is one of research design.  What you’re asking for is qualitative research, a body of methods and an approach that is showing up more in anthropology and other social sciences.  Much of the anti-grammar research makes the quantitative assumption that what’s real is what can be counted or measured.  If it can’t be counted or measured unambiguously, then it’s not real.  It’s an argument I’ve had repeatedly with my colleagues in psychology.  The T-unit is such a measure.  It’s about as subtle as you can get with counting things when it comes to research on language, part of what spawned my maxim “Anything in language that you can count doesn’t.”  There are sound statistical methods for determining whether the researcher’s judgment of construction type or of complexity is reliable, but these measures and methodologies tend not to have been used much in composition research, at least not in that area of it focused on grammar and writing.  Ironic, considering how composition researchers have embraced quantitative and ethnographic models in other areas of their research.

 

It is also, unfortunately, the case that good qualitative studies tend to take longer and are harder to get funding for because of that.  And because most graduate faculty in composition and rhetoric have been trained in the anti-grammar literature, they don’t encourage their doctoral students to undertake such dissertations.

 

Herb

 

From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Scott Woods
Sent: 2009-02-11 09:41
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Sentence composing/grammar to improve writing

 

Dear List,

I have been using using Don Killgallon's Grammar for Middle School: A Sentence-Composing Approach with my seventh grade classes.  Here's an example of a first sentence from a short story by one of my students, a native speaker of Arabic and not previously a very good writer:

 

His face pale, his shirt stained with blood, his pants tattered, his shoes ripped and dirty, the Roman soldier advanced toward the castle, stepping over the rotting bodies of the British, every step taking him closer to the enemy's territory, every step taking him closer to death.

 

Prior to learning to use absolute phrases and participial phrases (as well as the other modifiers he learned) this student could not have written such a sentence.  He could not even really think about improving his style. Teaching students to consciously control sentence structure works, in my experience.  Incidentally, students universally enjoy it.

 

Why don't the studies which measure the effectiveness of teaching grammar look at the  specific constructions and sentence types taught and the changes in the frequency and effectiveness of their use?  Clause length and other such measures seem clumsy and not particularly useful as measures of writing skill if we are trying to improve student writing. 

 

Scott Woods


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