Like Teresa, I frequently find the detailed discussions of grammar on
this list interesting and possibly useful. If they get too far over
my head or go on too long, I just delete them without reading them.

However, I share some of Ed's concern about the direction the list is
taking. I don't want to put words in Ed's mouth, but let me take a
stab at explaining why I think he seems so disgusted with the
discussions of grammar. (He can correct me if I presume too much.)

I can remember back to when Ed started Syntax in the Schools. As the
title implies, he was concerned with teaching grammar in elementary
and secondary schools both on general principles (students ought to
know something about the language they are using) and as an applied
skill. If students could learn something about grammar, they might be
able to apply their knowledge to their language arts of reading,
writing, speaking, and listening.

The concerns then became those of how to teach grammar so that
students could actually learn it and how to help them apply whatever
knowledge they managed to acquire. Underlying this was the issue of
developing a version of grammar that was both teachable and
sufficiently faithful to language as it actually exists.

While having my doubts that these goals were attainable, I have
supported Ed's work, reading Syntax in the Schools and attending the
ATEG conferences whenever I can. After all, it has always seemed
ridiculous to me that composition teachers spend so much time trying
to teach students to eliminate errors in their writing while the rest
of the world exhibits so little curiosity about whether all this work
has any impact. Everyone complains about student errors, but no one
except the writing teachers tries to do anything about it. Millions
of red pens have died in the service of this cause with so little
result. If teaching grammar could somehow save some of those red
pens, I'm all for it.

Yet if one asks what teachers should do to improve their results, all
we get are the same old discredited answers: Teach grammar so that we
can "explain the problems to students in language they will
understand"; Administer to students more fill-in-the-blanks types of
exercises. Some promising techniques have been developed, such as
sentence combining and controlled composition, but to my knowledge
these have not been fully developed or tested for their success in
promoting correctness.

Why has there been so little research on teaching correctness?
Perhaps it's because the people who most need good research on
correctness have the least time and expertise to conduct it. Anyone
teaching secondary English or college composition full time has
enough to do and gets little encouragement or rewards for doing
research of any kind. The university departments, where research is
encouraged and rewarded, are little help. The two main ones, English
and linguistics, seem to have other fish to fry. Besides, no one in
those departments gets credit for trying to solve what are considered
"educational" problems. Not even the new specialists in
composition/rhetoric have been much help. The ones who have time to
do research seem to have other concerns.

So there, I think, is the crux of Ed's concerns about ATEG and this
listserv. Insufficient attention is being paid to the original
purposes of the movement that Ed started. It is true that some
progress has been made. For instance, ATEG is now allied with NCTE,
grammar has become a respectable topic within NCTE again, and some
valuable publications have appeared. But if we look for real research
on the original concerns, nothing much has changed. Except for Ed's
KISS system, no one seems to be working on a teachable grammar. In
fact, few of us have even been willing to help Ed develop and test
KISS.

It's enough to make a person grumpy.

Bill

>Dear Mr. Vavra,
>
>This group is helpful to me as a new English teacher and I enjoy the
>discussions, "irregardless" of  their length.  (Said that to cause nineteen
>more pages.)
>
>Teresa
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Edward Vavra" <[log in to unmask]>
>To: <[log in to unmask]>
>Sent: Friday, January 02, 2004 5:07 PM
>Subject: Thank you for responses to "Clause question"
>
>
>      I think it was Bruce who wondered if, whenever I ask a question on this
>list, it is a trick. The answer to that is no, but my real purpose is to
>reconfirm my belief that this group is not very helpful. I'm trying to catch
>up on the mail, so I copied and pasted the responses to my question into an
>html document. It's printing right now - 19 pages worth. That is, more or
>less, what I expected, but then I read Teresa's question about the student
>who claims that grammar is "stupid."
>       At the risk of being thrown off this list, did anyone consider whom I
>had in mind when I named my approach to grammar "KISS"? What is a
>non-grammarian going to do with 19 pages of discussion of one relatively
>simple sentence? And don't forget that many of the responses are based on
>linguistic theories that are totally Greek to most parents and teachers.
>They would have to take at least one, if not more courses in that type of
>grammar before they could really begin to understand what some of the
>responders had to say.
>        What I continue to find on this list is endless discussions of
>definitions and the explanations of specific, single sentences. It is no
>wonder that people such as Theresa's student find grammar to be stupid. The
>KISS Approach is probably not the best answer to the fundamental problem,
>but at least it addresses what K-college teachers (and parents) want to
>know, including the integration of grammar with writing, reading, and
>literature. See:
>http://home.pct.edu/~evavra/kiss/wb/New.htm
>Thanks for the responses,
>Ed
>


--
William J. McCleary
Livonia, NY

To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"

Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/