I want to thank everyone for thoughtful and thought-provoking responses to
my initial question.  I am always impressed at the time people on this
listserv are willing to invest to help each other out.

Ed:  My original posting concerned grammar pedagogy.  You chose to respond,
for the most part, by introducing an issue that was, at best, tangential:
how to treat phrasal verbs.  The phrasal verb question attracted much
interest and generated some _very_ enlightening discussions; my pedagogical
question fell by the wayside until Johanna picked it up and dusted it off.
I found it interestingly ironic that you, the person who decries the
preponderance of this type of discussion on this listserv, were responsible
for this linguistic detour and that, as you would have predicted, the
grammar question got a lot more play than the pedagogy question.

Craig:  One statement that you made struck me:  "Because grammar is at the
heart of language, it can be the foundation for so much else."  Help me out
here:  I would have said that meaning is at the heart of language and that
grammar is but one of the tools that we employ to achieve it.  (I will
respond to whether it should be the foundation for other areas below.)

Johanna:  I completely agree with most of your response.  I think the
following quote from your post strikes at the core of my issue:  "If one
thinks of grammar as only referring to word forms and sentences, it only
provides part of this foundation."  That is _exactly_ the impression I get
as I read most of the postings on this listserv.

I do, however, have a bit of difficulty with your math analogy ("Grammar
instruction provides the foundation for further study of language, just as
math provides a basis for engineering and science." )  Math is not an
innately acquired skill.  Nobody figures out how to add, subtract, multiply,
or divide by observation alone; structured teaching/learning is required.
So yes, a knowledge of math is an absolute prerequisite to the study of
engineering or science.  Our native speaker students, in contrast, are (or
soon will be) masters of informal, spoken language, and this fact changes
things.

One wouldn't expect EE concepts, for example, to shed any light on basic
math; students had better be well versed in many areas of math in order to
grasp the concepts in EE.  I would suggest that the same isn't necessarily
true of grammar.  It is certainly true that students need to know the basics
about grammar.  An understanding of concepts such as subjects, predicates,
nouns, verbs, sentences, and clauses are fundamental to any discussion of
language.  After these basics, however, I think we have it backwards.
Dialect variation, for example, is an excellent way to demonstrate, and
thereby teach things like negation, reflexive pronouns, S-V Agr., etc.  An
analysis of L1 or even L2 acquisition is a great way to explore sentence
types and provide a deeper understanding of grammatical permutations.
Doublespeak, advertisements, etc. provide a springboard for analyses of
passives, comparatives/superlatives, antecedents, etc.

How many times have we heard students say that they never really understood
English grammar until they studied a foreign language?  I think they grasp
it because, for the first time, grammar pertained to a system that they had
yet to master.  I wonder, therefore, whether we err when we say that a
detailed knowledge of grammar is required before we can explore language
usage more thoroughly.

John

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