Scott,

Certainly, definitions can be useful with middle school children.

We should just not make the mistake of thinking that we are going to 
find definitions that cover ALL the members of a category and ONLY the 
members of that category, simply because that's not how grammatical 
categories work.

You should use definitions that convey the core, prototypical cases; 
this should be enough for students to grasp the essential idea. Once 
again, teachers should be aware that there will be peripheral members 
that will not display all of the characteristics of the category, but 
there is no need to discuss them until you actually encounter them.

I hadn't read your definitions until now, but they feel like they have 
been witten by people who have never really TAUGHT grammar. If they are 
to be used/ learned by students who have never studied grammar before, 
they seem unduly complicated ("subject, complete: the simple subject and 
its modifiers"; "verbal, infinitive: a verbal that consists of to� plus 
a verb and functions as a noun, adjective, or adverb", and why the need 
for "predicate nominative" and "predicate adjective" when you can use 
the function "subject complement"?). Some of them are simple, but hard 
to apply:

clause, dependent (subordinate) a clause that does not express a complete 
thought and cannot stand alone 

clause, independent (main) a clause that expresses a complete thought and can 
stand alone 


Notional definitions might work for parts of speech, but not really for 
phrases or clauses: how can you tell whether a thought is complete or 
not? "Cannot stand alone" might work better, although if students 
punctuate dependent clauses as fragments, it probably means that it 
feels to them like they can stand alone.
It might make more sense to start with prototypical cases: a subordinate 
clause is a clause introduced by a subordinator (because, that,...)
I don't think a more exact "linguistic" definition such as this one 
would be useful in middle school: a subordinate clause is a clause that 
has a function within another clause.

Your "parts of speech" definitions are not very clear either: some of 
them refer to meaning (nouns or verbs), others to functions...


I don't want to come across as too negative, but if your students come 
to you with no background in grammar (as some of the discussions seem to 
imply), I don't see how you are going to make this work!

Marie



> Dear List,
> There has been much discussion of whether grammar is (or can be) a 
> science. That is all interesting (to me at least) and often useful. 
> But as a middle school teacher, I'm primarily interested in 
> engineering grammar instruction so students use language artfully. 
> Regarding using definitions in the classroom, I'm interested in 
> definintions that help students understand important linguistic 
> phenomena for the purpose of improving student performance in 
> understanding written language and using these concepts artfully in 
> their writing. Merely teaching definitions will not not achieve this 
> end, obviously, but definitions may have a role.
> Science helps us in the design process by informing our understanding 
> of the phenomena and environments we need to understand, but it cannot 
> tell us how to design effective systems. The sciences relating to 
> effective instructional design and engineering in grammar, reading, 
> and writing include cognitive science, linguistics, and behavioral 
> psychology (at a minimum). These tell us about the nature of both the 
> things being learned and the learners. Science informs our engineered 
> instructional systems, but it cannot tell us what to do, when to do 
> it, or how to do it.
> We use science to tell us how the world works; we use engineering to 
> create something new. One of the things we are (I think) mutually 
> engaged in is designing grammar instruction that achieves worthy ends. 
> We ought not to lose sight of that end.
> Scott Woods
>
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