Judy Diamondstone and I agree on a great many issues. She is absolutely right about the value of Mina Shaughnessy's Errors & Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing. I agree with the following: > To ward off any misunderstanding, I want to clarify my position. > I am certainly not suggesting that grammar should never be taught > explicitly; I prefer to set up activities/problems that highlight > grammatical features before making those features explicit. It > can't always be done and it doesn't always work, I don't quite understand the following: > but it shows > students the relevance of grammar to social life, to their > primary educational project, which is undertstanding themselves > and their world, and that makes my educational responsibilities, which > are to enlarge the world that students understand, possible. Most teaching of explicit knowledge of grammar, it seems to me, is to be able to control standard English. This is an expectation our society has for an educated person. I know of no research which suggests that a person who speaks a dialect of English that does not have the agreement -s marker is unable to understand sentences with that marker. The grammar which students don't understand is mostly unteachable or just not taught explicitly. (Sesame Street seems to have some very interesting language exercises on comparison, antonyms, etc. I don't think that is what we mean by teaching grammar.) For example, we know that most 8 and 9 year old kids do have the adult understanding of the following sentence: 1) The doll is hard to see. Their preferred meaning is that the doll can't see and not that the doll can't not be seen. Is this non-adult understanding every taught? I do know that a lot of the freshmen I teach at my regional university have difficulty with texts that use grammatical constructions that are rare in the spoken language, expecially heavy subject NPs and certain transitional structures that orient the reader to the writer's claims. They are sometimes unable(?)/unwilling(?) to use their knowledge about how English works to figure out how an author explains difficult concepts. Bob Yates, Central Missouri State University