I am very worried that the following suggests that there is no hope for
the teaching of grammar anywhere in the curriculum.

Connie Weaver wrote:

> I'm sure you know
> that decades of research suggest (1)  that the grammar isn't learned very
> well by a majority of students'; (2) that what's "learned" isn't well
> retained by a majority of students; and (3) that grammar knowledge seems to
> be even less often applied to actual writing.  . . .

And then she added the following.

> Students seem even less motivated to learn grammar than they were when I
> started teaching, quite a while back.  Oh, sure, we can get them through our
> college courses in grammar for teachers, but do we really know whether they
> understand the grammar well enough to teach it, except by following a
> teacher's manual?  I worry about this.  Students who understand the concept
> of "sentence," for example, usually don't have the faintest idea why someone
> else would have trouble grasping what is and isn't a sentence, grammatically
> speaking.  Of course I try to help them understand such things, but I always
> wonder how many of my students will be/become good at teaching the concept to
> others.  Guess I'm the listserv pessimist--perhaps in part because I listen
> to and talk with my students as equals about learning and teaching grammar.
> What I learn from most of them isn't especially encouraging.

There are two separate issues about teaching grammar here. 1) what
should be taught in
schools; 2) what should be taught to teachers.

I am concerned about (2).  Even if the overt teaching of grammar in the
primary schools has no value, I suggest that ALL language arts teachers
need to know as much as possible about English grammar for several
reasons:

        1) Assessment of their students writing.  What are more complex
structures?  What aren't? Why is X considered more complex than Y?

        2) Recognizing possible language variation and with true language
deficits and understanding why language might vary.

        3) Assessing appropriate and inappropriate texts for the teaching of
writing.  For example, I would want my pre-service teachers to
understand that texts which state without any qualification "the passive
voice should be avoided" is wrong and a joke.

I think the poor quality of texts for the teaching of grammar is
directly related to the fact that people who actually know something
about language have never been part of the debate.  In the 1950s and
early 1960s a major debate took place on the pages of the College
English about the utility of using linguistic insights in teaching
writing.  The linguists lost because the theory that motivated their
suggestions was not very helpful for the kinds of problems English
teachers faced, and that theory was being successfully challenged.

A good example of this issue is teaching about the concept of a
"sentence" as discussed in handbooks which prescribe that only "complete
sentences" are acceptable in academic writing.  The standard definition
is that a "complete sentence" is a "complete thought."  or a "complete
sentence" is claimed to have a subject and a verb that agrees with that
subject.  Both DeBeaugrande and Noguchi have pointed out how difficult
those concepts are to apply.  The "complete sentence" has a formal
property that is revealed by making a yes/no question or a tag
question.  This formal property of independent sentences is something
that ALL native speakers know by the time they get to first grade.

Although this kind of thinking underlies how science is done in the
West, it is not taught very well in the schools.  And, a lot of English
teachers are not taught how to figure out what they already know about
language.  Almost ALL texts assume that native speakers don't know much
about the structure of language.  Of course, as native speakers, they
know a whole lot.  We must figure out ways of making that clear to
teachers so that they can use that knowledge in their teaching.

One of the common observations I get in my grammar class is that I make
the description of language like mathematics.  I have to agree.  There
are formal properties of language which are like the formal properties
of math.  I am convinced there are students at the college level who
have great resistance to formal abstractions and the kind of reasoning
which goes with them.

Although students might be less motivated to learn grammar, there are
all kinds of ways in their professional lives in which knowledge of
grammar is presumed.  I would observe that the grammar checkers on their
computers presume they know something about grammar.  I am seriously
thinking about having my students look at Bushisms of the Week kept by
Jacob Weisberg on slate.com this fall.  The question would be for
classify what the "non-standard" aspects of the utterances are or are
the utterances standard English but just nonsense.  Are such utterances
acceptable for teachers?

Bob Yates, Central Missouri State University