I am reading this thread with a growing conviction that the real problem
is being marginalized. It is clear that there will never be a consensus on
the nature of the ideal language arts curriculum.  Some practices that
become standard in one generation will be criticized and contemptuously
dismissed in the next.  That is inevitable.  Meanwhile, my problem
-- as a college classics teacher -- is that students coming into my
classes these days do not understand the most fundamental aspects of
English grammar. It is as though I pointed out that my students could not
add 2 and 2 and was treated to long debates on the perfect method of
teaching mathematics. Let me be more specific.

I have been teaching a freshman seminar on traditional grammar to college
freshmen.  Last semester, one of my students, Josh,  told me that he had
taken Spanish throughout high school and struggled with the conjugation of
the verb SER.  In all of that time, he had no idea how to conjugate BE.
He did not know what it meant to say that IS is the present tense, third
person singular of BE or that BEEN is its perfect participle.  In this, he
is typical of the college students that I meet.  I would like to see it
adopted as a "standard" that high school graduates be able to conjugate
English verbs. That would be one point.

Josh showed my some of his work for his English composition class.  It too
was typical.  One of the essays included in his final portfolio begins:
"Generally, the importance of having the ability to write papers and to
construct a well-composed essay is considered very important throughout a
student's education and even in their career."  This was in an important
paper that Josh had labored over.  The only comment from his teacher on
this sentence was to point out the lack of parallelism between
STUDENT'S and THEIR.  What leaps out at me in writing like this is that
the author obviously has no grasp of basic sentence structure.  If he did,
he would have instantly recognized that the nucleus of the sentence is the
absurd, "Importance is considered important."  On the basis of his
training, however, he had know idea what the grammatical subject of
the sentence was or what it meant to describe a word in those terms.  I
think that it would be reasonable to expect high school graduates to
understand parts of speech and basic sentence structures.  I would be
satisfied if they could produce examples of their own, creating simple
transitive, intransitive, and linking sentences on demand and phrases or
clauses illustrating each of the eight parts of speech.

I guess what I am asking is whether there aren't a few minimal units of
determinate grammatical knowledge that we could all agree on as providing
a basic foundation for the learning of foreign language and the
serious study of writing, whatever approach one's teacher might take.  My
nominations would be the ones that I mentioned:  verb conjugation, parts
of speech, and simple sentence structures.

















On Thu, 22 Jun 2000, Connie Weaver wrote:

> I think you've entirely missed my points, Bob.  Maybe somebody else understands
> well enough to try to clarify?
>
> Connie
>
> Bob Yates wrote:
>
> > Connie Weaver wrote about her experiences before the Michigan's Board of
> > Education:
> >
> > >  I happened to be attending that
> > > meeting to speak out on another issue, so I took my allotted 3 minutes to
> > > point out that such a narrow focus--mine you, this was one of the twelve most
> > > important things students were to learn in K-12--encouraged teachers to focus
> > > on teaching correctness at the sentence level rather than teaching students
> > > to plan, organize, draft, revise, and edit real pieces of writing, for
> > > genuine purposes.  The result?  The standard was revised to read something
> > > like "Students will write grammatical sentences, paragraphs, and
> > > compositions."  No other language standard remained in the list of twelve.
> >
> > Unless I have missed something in the recent discussion, everyone on the
> > list believes that all students need to focus on planning, organizing,
> > drafting, revising and editing real pieces of writing for real purposes.
> >
> > As someone who teaches the pre-service teacher course on grammar at my
> > institution, I readily admit that knowledge about language/grammar will
> > not help anyone plan, organize, or draft a text.  I know of no theory of
> > language/grammar which will help with those aspects of writing either.
> > Is this where there is a divergence in views about the role of grammar?
> >
> > However, all of the suggestions about writing in the texts college
> > students buy talk about the importance of revision and editing.  I am
> > sure there are people who can revise and edit texts and not articulate
> > why they made the changes they did. For those of us who are not so
> > gifted, being consciously aware of possible choices will be more
> > successful more of the time than just saying "it just sounds better."
> >
> > Unless I have missed something, the writing that people do in actual
> > jobs away from school is done in collaboration with others.  I know that
> > anything I write that has more permanence than posts to a listserv I ask
> > colleagues to read and comment on.  Such comments are always more useful
> > when specific terminology can be used.  Conscious knowledge about
> > possible choices in organizing a text and the nature of language/grammar
> > can make those comments more insightful.
> >
> > Bob Yates
>