In a recent posting I mentioned Mark Lester's Grammar in the Classroom.  I find it in many ways a fine text, but I haven't used it in my UG grammar classes because of its heavy use of Reed-Kellogg diagrams.  But my hesitation may be unfounded; hence my question.  What is the role of Reed-Kellogg diagrams in contemporary K12 grammar teaching.  I've looked at various language arts series, and some of them use   R-K to varying extents.  I've occasionally used them in my classes for their ability to represent certain types of grammatical function, something that phrase structure trees do only tangentially, unless you code function into node labels like Max Morenberg does in Doing Grammar.  R-K diagrams are weak on structure, and they aren't consistently reliable on function, but they do represent a respectable tradition of grammar teaching, and I know they have some level of support.  Do K12 language arts teachers need to be familiar with R-K?  Should they be covered in a UG grammar course for developing language arts teachers?

 

Herb