When I teach grammar now, it's at the undergraduate level where my
students are largely English majors, some teaching, some literature.  I
try to take advantage of their literary training as a way into
understanding what grammar does for them.  I analyze the simple sentence
with them as a story in which the verb is the plot, the subject and
complements are characters, and adverbial modifiers are setting.  There
are some obvious ways in which this doesn't work, for example with
locatives like "She put the books on the shelf", where "on the shelf" is
a complement but functions adverbially.  Examples like this lead to
useful discussion of how and why analogies break down, as well as to a
fuller understanding of complements.  The major sentence structures
(linking, intransitive, transitive, ditransitive, complex transitive,
and a couple of locative variants) then work as different stories that
the language tells.  By the time they master the story analogy they're
far enough into understanding simple sentence structure that the don't
need the analogy anymore.  We then talk about subordinate clauses as
clauses that fill subject, object, adjectival and adverbial roles.  (I
know there are good syntactic arguments for not calling object clauses
noun phrases, but at this level it's simpler to.)  When we get into
non-finite clauses, I compare participial clauses to things that
actually happen and infinitive clauses to things that don't or haven't,
and we compare the meanings of the various head words to aspectual vs.
modal auxiliaries.  Reordered constructions, like passive and
extraposition, are then discussed in terms of information distribution,
introducing the notions "given" and "new".  One advantage I find from
this pedagogical approach is that it ties grammar into a more general
epistemology and into discipline specific knowledge about language use.

Herb


Montessori grammar operates on the same idea of asking questions to
identify
key parts of speech.

Nancy L. Tuten, PhD
Professor of English
Director of the Writing-across-the-Curriculum Program
Columbia College
Columbia, South Carolina
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803-786-3706
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of John Crow
Sent: Monday, April 04, 2005 4:51 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Washington

Johanna,

Much of what you do is EXACTLY how I handle grammar instruction.  I
use "It is true that _______" as a frame for fragments--a very minor
difference--and don't get into the tensed verb part of a sentence
definition.  Otherwise, we are amazingly in synch!

Do others out there have interesting slants on how to tie grammar
instruction to existing language competency?  Do you work top down,
bottom up, or both?

Thanks, Johanna, for taking the time to make such a lucid explanation
of your approach.  Fabulous!!

John

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