Bill,
    Thanks for your thoughtful analysis.  My interest in joining this list was to find effective ways of teaching the grammar knowledge that students need for reading and writing.  I would like to see more on that theme.

Barbara Stanford

----- Original Message -----
From: "William J. McCleary" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sunday, January 4, 2004 12:31 pm
Subject: Re: Thank you for responses to "Clause question"

> 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
>
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