A while back Connie was recapping some failed efforts from past
decades to broaden the teaching of grammar.  I came across this passage from
Paul Roberts, whose 1962 book English Sentences, a popularization of
Chomsky, was widely read, widely taught, and widely forgotten.  From his
preface to the student:

     "We have said that all of us who speak English know English grammar,
and you may ask, if that is so, why you are required to study it.  What we
are after now, of course, is not the knowledge that permits us to
distinguish grammatical sentences from ungrammatical ones, but rather a
conscious understanding of the system and the way it operates.  Such an
understanding has certain practical uses in the study of writing and other
forms of communication.  It permits, for example, more efficient discussion
of punctuation and of the structure of English.  The sentences that we write
are often more intricate and more bound by convention than those we speak.
We have a greater chance in writing than in speech of losing our way and
blundering, and the blunders of writing are preserved, whereas those of
speech disappear on the echo."

     Roberts' opening point is not a bad one.  Defining grammar as something
we already know can lend itself to a cynical response (from students? from
the educational establishment?) about why it is then so necessary to study
it (as well as to the positive responses of relief and curiousity that many
teachers and language-lovers feel).  But it is Roberts' answer to the
question that especially caught my attention.  His purpose for learning
descriptive grammar seems to be ultimately the practical one of avoiding
"blunders." Blunders seem to include problems with sentence intricacy and
mistakes in the conventions such as punctuation.  So for Roberts the goal of
description never takes the student much beyond the realm of prescriptive
grammar and its conventions.  Or, to it put in the terms I suggested last
week, the study of "private" (innate) grammar turns out to have not much
purpose beyond the reenforcement of "public" (conventional) grammar.

Today I think we are answering the key question more broadly than Roberts
did, but it's not an easy task if we try to think beyond our own natural
passion for language and in terms of countless students of all ages, and
countless teachers and their school systems.  Grammar for what purpose
exactly? and for whom?

Brock Haussamen
Raritan Valley Community College
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