Hi Martha,

You didn't ask me, so pardon me for poking in here.  I would suggest
looking at _Language Exploration and Awareness:  A Resource Book for
Teachers_ by Larry Andrews.  It was written specifically to aid
teachers in the task you are tackling this fall.

This has been a very rich and informative thread.  Hats off to all of
you who have so unselfishly given of your time and expertise.

John

On 5/12/05, Martha Kolln <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>  
> Dear Craig and Bill and John and Geoff and all,
>  
>  First, thank you, Craig, for expressing so succinctly and meaningfully what
> our job as English teachers is all about:  to help students live in a
> language world.  That's it in a nutshell.
>  
>  I would like to share with all of you what I consider a splendid program I
> am now involved with.  Last week I taught my final class in an 8-week
> graduate course at McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland-a course for
> the English teachers of Carroll County, Maryland.  This course came about
> when the county's curriculum supervisor for English realized that in order
> to carry out the various mandated assessment requirements, as well as to
> help students facing the SAT, with its enhanced grammar component, the
> teachers needed help.
>  
> My involvement came about because last fall all of the teachers were given a
> copy of my "Understanding English Grammar" (Bob Funk is the coauthor) at the
> suggestion of several of the teachers who had used the book in their own
> teacher-training course.  I was invited to an inservice day last fall to
> talk about the book, based on what I call "linguistic grammar-and from that
> came the idea for a more extensive training program for the teachers.  Quite
> a few of the high school teachers in the county's seven high schools and
> even more of the middle school teachers have never studied grammar at
> all-neither in their college career nor when they themselves were middle
> school or high school students. 
> 
>  Our book is based on ten sentence patterns-call them clause patterns or
> verb-phrase patterns-that serve as a skeletal framework for all of the
> various sentence expansions: adverbials, adjectivals, and sentence modifiers
> in their various forms; clauses and verb phrases as nominals.  Students who
> learn this system have a real handle on grammar, a basis for understanding
> punctuation, and, even more important, a set of writing tools.  And as Geoff
> points out, an understanding of the structures that fill those what and
> where and when and why slots in the sentence.
>  
>  Carroll County has a two-year plan, what they are calling their grammar
> initiative, during which a scope and sequence for grades 6 through 12 will
> be developed for including grammar study in their reading and writing
> programs.  What I find so special is that the plan begins with the education
> of the teachers themselves.  There were 45 teachers in the McDaniel College
> class; they ranged from new teachers who had never studied grammar to
> veterans with linguistic training.  And I can say without hesitation that I
> have never had such enthusiastic students; they were eager to learn new
> grammar; eager to discuss ways of integrating a systematic study into their
> curriculum.  And while they are, of course, concerned about correctness and
> usage, the teachers all came to understand that grammar goes far beyond the
> error correction/ error avoidance model.  Another class is scheduled for the
> fall.
>  
>  All of the teachers in the county will have the opportunity to participate
> in preparing the final 6-12 plan.  This fall, there are discussion groups,
> study groups, and coaching partnerships scheduled.  And I'm happy to report
> that our proposal for a full-day workshop on the initiative has been
> accepted for the NCTE convention in November. 
>  
> A few years down the road, the high school teachers of Carroll County can be
> confident that their seniors and juniors and sophomores will have been
> learning about grammar since sixth grade; they can then build on that
> foundational knowledge.  Isn't it a shame that NCTE has refused to encourage
> and promote this kind of curriculum development. 
> 
>  I plan to bring in other topics on Language Awareness for the fall
> Inservice program.  Can you recommend a book, Bill, that I could suggest for
> the teachers' education?  I was thinking of Fromkin and Rodman's
> "Introduction to Language"; I would welcome other suggestions.
>  
>  Martha
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 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
>  
>  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/ 
> 
>  
>  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/
>  
> 
>  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/ 
> 
>  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/ 
> 
>  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/

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/