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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