Bill, you explain such issues so well it's always a pleasure to read them, and despite it all, you don't seem too grumpy after all. I think, though, there is more research available than many suppose, both in the past and currently. Hillocks' notorious Research on written composition: New directions for teaching (NCTE 1986) drew some damning conclusions about teaching grammar, but the conclusions were based on the very few studies that met his criteria. Along the way he summarized a large number of studies that did show positive results, often for teaching nontraditional types of grammar (such as generative or transformational). I found his pages on grammar studies more encouraging than I expected to. More recently, in 2000, Richard Hudson published in Syntax in the Schools a research review, and here is the link to the article: http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/writing.htm. In addition, an academic search engine such as ProQuest can find the admittedly narrow but steady trickle of studies related to grammar teaching and correctness.
No magic bullet has emerged, and as you explained in a prior e-mail, we do go over the same conversation as new teachers join the discussion. But I'm not grumpy either, since I think the problem has its roots in some very large cultural issues: the mixed signals that students get about literacy in America (they are told that the expectations are high but they also see that the culture's real priorities are consumerism and celebrity); the obstacles to young people learning and practicing writing skills year in and year out (many teachers in many schools can't give the kind or the amount of writing that they would like to); and the strength of traditional grammar, usage, and mechanics for defining the formal characteristics of edited written English. For me the best route is the one laid out in the NCTE documents that ATEG has prepared, which argue that grammar is best taught in the context of language awareness, and language awareness takes in not only writing but reading, speaking, and appreciation of dialects and other languages.
Brock
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of William J. McCleary
Sent: Sun 1/4/2004 1:31 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Cc:
Subject: Re: Thank you for responses to "Clause question"
Like Teresa, I frequently find the detailed discussions of grammar on
this list interesting and possibly useful. If they get too far over
my head or go on too long, I just delete them without reading them.
However, I share some of Ed's concern about the direction the list is
taking. I don't want to put words in Ed's mouth, but let me take a
stab at explaining why I think he seems so disgusted with the
discussions of grammar. (He can correct me if I presume too much.)
I can remember back to when Ed started Syntax in the Schools. As the
title implies, he was concerned with teaching grammar in elementary
and secondary schools both on general principles (students ought to
know something about the language they are using) and as an applied
skill. If students could learn something about grammar, they might be
able to apply their knowledge to their language arts of reading,
writing, speaking, and listening.
The concerns then became those of how to teach grammar so that
students could actually learn it and how to help them apply whatever
knowledge they managed to acquire. Underlying this was the issue of
developing a version of grammar that was both teachable and
sufficiently faithful to language as it actually exists.
While having my doubts that these goals were attainable, I have
supported Ed's work, reading Syntax in the Schools and attending the
ATEG conferences whenever I can. After all, it has always seemed
ridiculous to me that composition teachers spend so much time trying
to teach students to eliminate errors in their writing while the rest
of the world exhibits so little curiosity about whether all this work
has any impact. Everyone complains about student errors, but no one
except the writing teachers tries to do anything about it. Millions
of red pens have died in the service of this cause with so little
result. If teaching grammar could somehow save some of those red
pens, I'm all for it.
Yet if one asks what teachers should do to improve their results, all
we get are the same old discredited answers: Teach grammar so that we
can "explain the problems to students in language they will
understand"; Administer to students more fill-in-the-blanks types of
exercises. Some promising techniques have been developed, such as
sentence combining and controlled composition, but to my knowledge
these have not been fully developed or tested for their success in
promoting correctness.
Why has there been so little research on teaching correctness?
Perhaps it's because the people who most need good research on
correctness have the least time and expertise to conduct it. Anyone
teaching secondary English or college composition full time has
enough to do and gets little encouragement or rewards for doing
research of any kind. The university departments, where research is
encouraged and rewarded, are little help. The two main ones, English
and linguistics, seem to have other fish to fry. Besides, no one in
those departments gets credit for trying to solve what are considered
"educational" problems. Not even the new specialists in
composition/rhetoric have been much help. The ones who have time to
do research seem to have other concerns.
So there, I think, is the crux of Ed's concerns about ATEG and this
listserv. Insufficient attention is being paid to the original
purposes of the movement that Ed started. It is true that some
progress has been made. For instance, ATEG is now allied with NCTE,
grammar has become a respectable topic within NCTE again, and some
valuable publications have appeared. But if we look for real research
on the original concerns, nothing much has changed. Except for Ed's
KISS system, no one seems to be working on a teachable grammar. In
fact, few of us have even been willing to help Ed develop and test
KISS.
It's enough to make a person grumpy.
Bill
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