Craig,

No apologies necessary. Your response is no diatribe but a thoughtful critique.

You seem to have the better of me. I didn't even know that there was
a "grammar in context" approach in existence, except for the kind
where you teach correctness in the context of a student's own
writing. This is not really teaching grammar-as-grammar, of course,
but an attempt to avoid those exercises in correctness, which were
called exercises in grammar. That kind of grammar-in-context works
for me, but it has nothing to do with teaching real grammar.

Since I didn't know that there was another kind of grammar in context
being tried out, one that has proven "so abysmal in practice," I'm
having a hard following your critique of it. I assume from what you
say that it was an attempt to teach grammar in connection with
rhetoric rather than correctness. And I guess further that it was
done in context (i.e., whenever a rhetorical issue came up in
students' writing or speaking) rather than in any systematic way. And
I'll go way out on a limb and guess that you think that grammar
should be taught thoroughly away from any specific context.

If any of this speculation is wrong, please correct me. It's this
kind of thought process, though, that led me to say to Geoff that
since teaching grammar separate from correctness did not help with
correctness, doing it that way with rhetoric wouldn't help with
rhetoric either. I was not mixing up the two issues as you suppose,
just making an analogy.

Actually, I don't think I have proposed teaching grammar only in
context. Seeing an issue about grammar in a context of some kind
shows students (I hope) how useful it would be to understand the
grammar underlying the issue. Then teachers can use some sort of
method to teach the grammar called for by the curriculum, which is
why the teachers would have brought the issue to the students'
attention in the first place. Furthermore, by returning to the
context, students would have an immediate way to practice what they
had learned.

Now, the question is, what will the teacher do to teach grammar in
the time between seeing the issue in context and returning to the
context to practice? That's the big question. My intention is to
experiment with several approaches to see if any of them works. The
purpose of my curriculum as given on the three pages with nine
different subjects is to give plenty of contexts for students to work
with and to specify what aspects of grammar might be taught within
each of the nine types of contexts. The curriculum also attempts to
specify what aspects of grammar would be emphasized at each grade
level. I'm fairly certain that this latter part of the curriculum
will need to be revised as experience dictates.

Which brings me to the last of your concerns: how we are going to get
teachers to use this curriculum (or any other grammar curriculum, for
that matter). That's a huge question. I'm relying on two comments
made by former professors of mine. One was made by a British teacher
of Old English who was asked the difference between teachers in
Britain and America. He said that American teachers tend to learn the
content they are to teach from the textbook they are given to teach
from. British teachers learn the content before they begin teaching.
(I don't know if he was right about British teachers, but I found his
comment about American teachers uncomfortably close to the truth.)
The second comment came from a teacher of curriculum theory who was
asked how to get teachers to adopt a new theory. The only way, he
said, is to provide them with materials to teach from. Putting these
two comments together is why I suggested that the ultimate outcome of
our attempts to reform and re-introduce the teaching of grammar must
be a textbook series.

At that point, I guess I'd better stop. I had thought to tell you
about the problems of teaching writing, but I'll save that for
another time.

Bill


>Bill,
>    With apologies if this seems like a diatribe.
>   I would echo Martha's objections to your curriculum, in part because
>I find the status quo so disheartening, and you seem to be accepting a
>"grammar in context" approach against the huge sense most of us have
>that it just isn't working.  It was presented as a sort of logical
>alternative to failed older approaches, but there is no sense continuing
>to believe that it has been shown to be effective. People defend it by
>saying everything else is wrong, but it has never been reasonably tested
>in its own right. (Of course, since the burden is on the student, not
>the teacher, to have the grammar rub off, no one is held accountable.)
>It was abandoned in England largely because it was a theory that proved
>so abysmal in practice, and we would do the same thing here if it were
>not a politically correct, largely unquestioned status quo.
>   Part of this comes from unclear use of terminolgy, like "context",
>which can mean looking at the role of grammar in the production of
>meaning OR teaching the avoidance of error when it actually shows up.
>You can praise Geoff for addressing the first and then assume that he is
>talking about the latter. None of the studies about grammar you cite
>have ever assumed that grammar has anything to do with rhetorical
>choice. It also comes from failing to address the differences between
>unconscious grammar and conscious knowledge, from believing that all we
>care about is habitual "proper" behaviour and not any kind of deep
>understanding of how our own language works. (A curriculm that helps
>students know may not help them conform.  We can't judge the first by
>testing the latter.)
>     Writing has been badly taught more often than not, so we could
>easily come up with studies that show the teaching of writing does real
>harm to students and use that as a justification to stop.  The reason we
>don't do this is that good writing is an agreed upon goal.  If
>understanding of language is an agreed on goal, and any stdent of
>language knows that grammar is at the heart of language, how can we
>conclude that bad teaching in the past should force us to avoid it?  We
>would search, and should search, far and wide for the best ways to do
>it.  (And current grammar in context approaches wouldn't make my first
>cut. They avoid the issue altogether. They give up the struggle and
>abandon the field without being honest about it.)
>    The truth is that when there is no scope and sequence for grammar,
>when there is nothing more than reductive, error based accountability,
>and when weakness is passed off as the poor moral fiber of the student,
>grammar simply never gets dealt with, and we get students in college who
>wouldn't know a clause from a santa. Students don't  learn about grammar
>from having it brought up on occassion by teachers who know little about
>it themselves.  What is our rationale for continuing with that? That
>forty year old approaches didn't work? That language itself is an arcane
>subject for specialists?
>
>
>Craig
>
>William McCleary wrote:
>
>>Geoff,
>>
>>I sure appreciate your pointing this out. It's exactly the kind of
>>idea about how grammar affects content (and logic as well) that we
>>can use to understand how texts are put together. The need to
>>understand then leads back to a need to use grammar.
>>
>>However, I'm thinking here of after-the-fact usage of grammar--that
>>is, after the text has been written. We look at a finished text to
>>see how the writer constructed it. Then we review or introduce enough
>>grammar to understand the syntax being used. Perhaps students could
>>then apply their knowledge of grammar in creation of content, but
>>perhaps not. The difficulty that students have in applying their
>>knowledge of grammar to correcting the errors in their writing
>>suggests that they could not.
>>
>>If, on the other hand, students were instructed to tell when and
>>where an event happened, wouldn't they improve their writing more
>>easily through modeling and feedback from peers and the instructor
>>than through the study of grammar? I think they would, though one
>>can't be sure without trying it. Have you tried it?
>>
>>Bill
>>
>>
>>>>In the main, though, teachers who teach writing have much larger issues
>>>>than style, whether >good and bad style or correct and incorrect style.
>>>>Their primary emphasis has to be on organization >and content.
>>>
>>>
>>>Have you ever thought that grammar can be used to teach organization and
>>>content?  For example, if "who, what, why, where, when, and how"
>>>comprise
>>>the main content of most if not all papers, then teaching grammar is
>>>a means
>>>by which students can learn how to communicate this content.  Both
>>>"when"
>>>and "where" information are communicated by using adverbs, prepositional
>>>phrases, and dependent clauses.  By teaching grammar, then, you are also
>>>teaching the construction of meaning/content - and isn't this the
>>>goal of a
>>>writing teacher?
>>>
>>>Geoff Layton
>>>
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