Ed, I worried too that you might take my "absolute horror" comment as a
personal attack, which I didn't mean it to be, at all.  Thanks for the
clarification; you are right that I didn't have a really clear idea of what
you meant.  Now I am eager to learn more, but it will have to wait until my
week vacationing in North Carolina.

I'm pleased that you offer the ATEG site as a place for the proposed joint
project.  Thanks.

With regard to such a project, I'm also wondering whether it would be good
to include some of our recent postings (edited to remove things like that
one exchange between Bob and Judy) on their own web page within the
project.  These might be an easy way to get some of our differing positions
"out there."  In my case as a teacher educator, I think there is some
possibility that our English Education unit will have an electronic
classroom by fall, and it would be great to access some of these
discussions online.  Students need to know that we too are continuing
learners in our field, and this would be one way to convey that point.  If
several of you like this idea and someone would volunteer to try to put key
postings into different web pages (trying not to make any one page too
onerous for students), I think that would be great.

Connie

Ed Vavra wrote:

> Connie,
>      I don't take what you said as a personal attack. In fact, I worried
> throughout the day that members of the list might take what I said about
> your work as a personal attack. I am very happy to see that we can have
> a civilized, yet sharp discussion on this list among people who have
> very fundamental disagreements. There are a lot of important comments
> that have been made in the last twenty-four hours, and I can't respond
> to all. I think that I will touch on some of them by focussing on
> Connie's "absolute horror" at my suggested objective -- that every high
> school graduate be able to explain how every word in ANY sentence is
> syntactically related to the basic pattern of a main clause.
>       Here again, I would suggest that Connie's horror results from her
> not understanding what I mean. My guess is that she is looking at
> grammatical concepts, rather than at USING concepts to analyze
> sentences. Although the difference seems simple to me, most people don't
> get it.
>      Instead of beginning with grammatical constructions, begin with a
> text (any text).  Imagine that the text has 100 words, and consider each
> word as a dot. In order to connect the dots, a person has to make 99
> lines (connections). Suppose that three of the words are "an old house"
> -- two adjectives that modify a noun. Anyone who can identify adjectives
> can thus make the two connections between the adjectives and the nouns.
> Similarly, anyone who can identify adverbs can make all the connections
> between adverbs and the words they modify. If one can identify
> prepositional phrases (99.9% of which function as adjectives or
> adverbs), one can make approximately 40 to 50% of the connections
> (depending on the level of the writing). Add subjects / verbs /
> complements to the mix, and one can account for close to 95% of the
> connections. Add verbals (gerunds, gerundives, and infinitives) and one
> is close to 98%. Add six more constructions, some of which are simple
> (direct address), and some of which are a little more complicated (noun
> absolutes), and one can do exactly what is causing Connie "absolute
> horror." I used this approach with future teachers, and in a single
> semester, all of them got the basics -- through clauses; several of them
> got it all. This was in a 15-week course, in which we also had to cover
> language development, usage, a survey of basic linguistics, etc. I
> wasn't satisfied, but I had to remember that many of my students were
> entering with no idea of what a verb is.
>      In the KISS curriculum, I suggest spreading this instruction out,
> ideally beginning in third grade. As I suggest in my description of the
> curriculum (http://www.sunlink.net/rpp/GC.htn), if we did this, it would
> probably take a LOT less time than is currently given to grammar, and it
> would be able to develop each of the concepts in much more meaningful,
> relevant, detail. (As I have said before, when my students work in
> groups to analyze their own writing, they begin to see for themselves
> that their sentences are too short and simple, fragmented, or too long
> and complex, etc. The grammar becomes meaningful to them.)
>      If we want to help the students, the instruction has to be
> systematic. By beginning with prepositional phrases, students
> automatically exclude objects of prepositions as subjects of verbs when
> they advance to the study of subjects and verbs. Having learned to
> identify finite verbs, their subjects, and their complements, clauses
> are relatively easy to learn because every S/V/C pattern is the core of
> a clause. (If they have three S/V/C patterns underlined in a sentence,
> there are three clauses in it.) Once they have mastered finite verbs and
> clauses, verbals are easier to identify -- any verb that is not
> underlined twice HAS TO BE a verbal. The preceding explanation, although
> it covers the essentials, is, I admit, somewhat simplified. My point
> here is that such a systematic approach builds on itself. Teaching
> Grammar as a Liberating Art explains the theory behind the approach, but
> for a better feel of what I mean, check out the Self-Paced Course for
> Teachers at:
> http://www2.pct.edu/courses/evavra/ED498/SP/index.htm
> Currently, I have the texts of nine jokes, six fables, and the opening
> passages of five famous novels analyzed at each level, with indications
> of the percent of connections made at each level. By level five, each
> text is 100% analyzed. (You can work your way backwards through each
> exercise by beginning at the answer key for level 5 at:
> http://www2.pct.edu/courses/evavra/ED498/SP/L5N06A.htm.)
>     Now I am well aware that the explanations that will satisfy me will
> not satisfy many of the linguists on this list. I agree here, with Harry
> Noden, and I would put myself in his first group. I am not after
> ultimate grammatical definitions. I am after grammatical concepts which
> students can use not just to discuss, but to understand how syntax
> affects writing. (Again, the student who sees, in working in groups,
> that his or her peers have gerundives (participles) or appositives in
> their writing, but that there are none in his or hers, will want to
> learn how to get them in -- we are all group animals.)
>        Again I want to suggest that the KISS curriculum has been
> designed based on a lot of research. It is a lot easier for fifth and
> sixth graders to learn to identify finite verbs because there are fewer
> distracting verbals in their writing. The work of Hunt, Loban, and
> O'Donnell has, to my mind, conclusively demonstrated that mastery of
> subordinate clauses (as opposed to their use as formulas) develops
> between grades seven and nine. There is no need to rush the curriculum.
> As David Mulroy pointed out, currently many (I would say most) of our
> high school graduates cannot identify verbs (or tenses). Likewise, I
> will say again, when SiS published the series of articles on the main
> idea in the main clause, some TEACHERS contacted me and said that they
> could not understand the articles because they could not identify
> clauses.
>       Connie stated that I would be "dooming most students to failure."
> But from my point of view, her approach does that. She underestimates
> the intelligence of students. I will agree that not every student may
> have the ability to get every word in every passage, but EVERY student,
> by twelfth grade, can learn to identify clauses. Once they can do that,
> by the way, they can understand for themselves the "errors" of
> fragments, comma-splices, and run-ons. Our current failure to respect
> students' intelligence is what dooms many of them to failure. I
> continually ponder what Vygotsky meant when he wrote "our analysis
> clearly showed the study of grammar to be of paramount importance for
> the mental development of the child." (Thought, 100) Unfortunately, he
> did not explain it, at least not in his two best known books. I don't
> think he had in mind the stuff that is in the major textbooks --
> definitions and simple sentence exercises. Nor do I think he meant
> linguistics. Perhaps he meant something such as Churchill describes --
> in essence the diagramming of sentences. But even more, I think what he
> had in mind is something that grammar can offer better than any other
> subject. The introduction to inductive thought. All of our grammatical
> terms are abstractions -- and if we teach them as such, by having
> students identify all the variations of the concept in living language,
> the study of grammar may develop abstract thought. This is, I realize,
> the topic of an essay, if not a book. By the way, Connie, in looking for
> my notes on Vygostky, I ran across my notes on your Grammar for
> Teachers. I "grade" almost everything I read, based on a five point
> system. A five means that it is worth re-reading, a three that it might
> be, a 2 that it probably isn't. Your first six chapters got a five, two
> four pluses, and a four minus. Seven through nine, where you got into
> details, got "2-". Put another way, I think I agree with what you want
> to do with grammar; I just strenuously disagree with the way you want to
> do it. And that is because all of your examples are so simple.
>      And that brings me to Susan Witt's comments about what happens as
> children move on from one level of complexity to the next. I've just
> been rereading Hunt's 1970 study (on the Aluminum passage). One of the
> things he notes is that by seventh grade, most students are using all of
> the basic constructions very well. From that point on, he suggests
> further development is a matter of combining and embedding
> constructions. As Susan notes, as Hunt noted, as Mellon noted, this
> further development leads to more errors. On the surface, the errors
> look similar, but they are not. As Edith noted, in their research
> project, some students produced more comma-splices, etc., but, when they
> looked closer, they found that many, if not most of these errors, were
> at least accompanied by (I would go so far as to say caused by) more
> complexity in the writing -- either compounding or subordination. Edith
> wishes that she could have the students for another semester. Don't we
> all? But the fact is, that we cannot. We can, however, develop a
> coherent, systematic curriculum, especially in middle and high school,
> in which each teacher could do his or her part, knowing that the
> students would be moving on to teachers who would have the students use
> what they learned from us and develop it further.
>       Before leaving, I want to note that I agree in principle with
> David Mulroy. The KISS approach currently pays almost no attention to
> verb tenses, or to pronouns, or to a few other grammatical concepts that
> students should (and could)  probably learn. I find it very frustrating,
> as an instructor of writing, to speak to college Freshmen of tense (or
> number) and have them have no idea of what I mean. I am, however, only
> one person, and thus far I have been attempting to explain the
> fundamentals of KISS -- the things that students need to know at one
> level (S/V/C patterns) so that they can use them at the next (clauses).
> Note that in the ideal curriculum, I suggest that grades four through
> six be devoted to S/V/C patterns. Over the course of three years,
> students could probably also get the basic ideas of tense and number.
>      I will be interested., of course, to know if, after looking at the
> materials in the Self-Paced course, Connie (or anyone else) is still
> horrified. But I would like more specific objections. What, in the KISS
> curriculum, will probably not work, and why?
>      As always, I would appreciate help, not only in response to the
> previous question, but also in guidance for the direction that my work
> should take. It took me all of last summer to put the Self-Paced course
> on the web. Those passages, with their levels of answer keys, are
> designed 1) to demonstrate how KISS works, and 2) to be used as
> exercises, both for and by teachers. I could devote a lot more of my
> time in that direction -- developing instructional materials. On the
> other hand, there is the call for research. This summer has basically
> been devoted to the 93 Aluminum revisions. In the setup of those
> passages, specific constructions are identified, but I am not attempting
> to explain the "connection" of every word. The aluminum passages also do
> not make very good instructional material for teachers in their
> classrooms. I'm caught between the two directions. Making instructional
> material is useless if no one uses it -- the research might get more
> people to use it. But a lack of instructional material (examples) may
> also makes the approach unattractive. I'm open to suggestions.
>      If you got this far, thanks for your patience. And Connie, thanks
> again for not taking my remarks personally.
> Ed V.