To add a tangent to Brett's point -- 

One of the problems I frequently confront in the classroom is the ease with which certain formulations allow students to learn the *wrong* things. Students who have been given as a definition of subject only "what does the action in the sentence" run into trouble as soon as they look at a passive construction, for example, and I have seen many, many students who will classify "on the table" in "The book on the table is a dictionary" as adverbial because of the definition they remember from primary school (I have no way of knowing if that was the only definition they were given -- I've seen some very creative manglings of definitions I've given in classrooms too, but it's definitely the one they remember). Bare-bones semantics-only-based definitions are probably very easily taught, but then, it's a lot easier to teach people that the Earth is flat. The real problem is that it's very difficult for students to *unlearn* this kind of appealingly simple, but wrong, stuff. 

The trick with any research on this is that to be meaningful, it can't simply evaluate the degree to which the students internalize and are able to act upon what was taught; it needs to also take into account whether what they were taught was accurate, and *that* requires focusing on only those things that different grammatical approaches don't disagree much about (otherwise, "accurate" becomes a political football).  There is, however, a ton of stuff all modern grammarians (well, 99.9%) would agree on -- "The boy" in "The boy was given a book" is the subject, despite not doing the action, etc. (there are some obvious problems with definitions and circularity here, but if the notion of "subject" includes "participates in, or determines, subject/verb agreement" -- and 99.99% of grammarians define it as including that -- then "the boy" has to be a subject in that sentence). I don't know of any study that has focused specifically on measuring how well different approaches allow students to learn that kind of information -- although it may be out there and I just haven't seen it. 

Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University


-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Brett Reynolds
Sent: Wed 8/12/2009 2:31 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Grammar question/ease of understanding/studies
 
On 12-Aug-09, at 1:00 PM, Scott Woods wrote:

> Has anyone studied the ease with which students learn to understand  
> grammar based on the linguistic or instructional approach taken.   
> For instance, has anyone compared how quickly and well students  
> learn to understand noun modifiers when they are grouped together  
> and called adjectives (or adjectivals) versus when they are  
> identified with greater specificity?

It would depend entirely on how you operationalize "learn to  
understand grammar." Certainly, the field of applied linguistics is  
replete with studies of different instructional approaches using  
similar grammatical descriptions, but I'm not aware of any studies  
comparing different grammatical descriptions under similar  
instructional conditions.

Best,
Brett

-----------------------
Brett Reynolds
English Language Centre
Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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