Gretchen, No apology needed. I wrote a lengthy response last night only to have our unspeakably kludgy Groupwise Webaccess serve cut me off and delete the whole thing before I could send it. So I'll give it another try. I think we're talking about two different sets of problems, using the same vocabulary but meaning different things, which is one of the impressions I got from the discussion on the middle school list. For example, my point about Quirk was not that we should all go out and buy that gougingly expensive book, as excellent as it is. I don't even ask my graduate students to buy it, although I encourage them to ask for it as a birthday present. My point rather was that we and our respective ilks don't read the same stuff. We've heard of each other's sources and probably read some of them, but the ones we each go to when we need to figure something out are clearly not the same. The implications of this are, I think, important to this discussion, because we need to recognize up front that we aren't always talking about the same things, even when we use the same words. When you cite the experts you read as convincing you that "teaching grammar in isolation doesn't work to improve writing," I can only agree heartily. That's why I made my smart-aleck references to math, social studies, etc. Why should it improve writing and why should that be the reason for teaching grammar? But here again, I'm using "grammar" in one way, and, I suspect, you're using it as another. For you, grammar is a set of minilessons that you slip in when they are useful. For me grammar is a systematic study like these other disciplines. I find it strange that we graduate kids from high school expecting them to know something about US and world history, math, government, science, literature, human biology, etc., but we don't expect them to know anything at all about the one capacity that distinguishes us as a species. Rather, we allow ignorance of language to spawn and support language-based prejudices, and our society even encourage these prejudices. We continue to teach as truth an incredible array of nonsense about language that no other discipline would tolerate for a moment. However, I also know that if language is going to be taught as subject matter, it's going to be taught by language arts teachers like you, which is as it should be, but you've made the point well that you already have an overflowing curriculum that you really can't fit grammar as system into. But here in Indiana, middle-school language arts teachers are going to have to find a way, because the new standards mandate extensive coverage of grammar, to a degree that can't be achieved without a systematic approach. I don't know how they're going to do it, but I do know that as a college grammar teacher who helps to prepare these teachers I have a responsibility to equip them appropriately--and I need for them and for language arts faculty who teach their methods courses to help me to see what they need from linguistics. I'm not pushing for a middle school linguistics course, although that's been done successfully and it works very well. Rather, let me suggest a three-way division that might help place approaches to language in some perspective. The minilesson approach you currently use is a way of making sure that children learn and follow the canons of prescriptive grammar. These are fundamentally social conventions of the same sort as table manners and appropriateness of dress. And they have to be taught if children are to learn to function successfully in a wider world. The kind of grammar I'm talking about is what comes out of the scholarly tradition called traditional grammar. This is frequently mixed with and confused with prescriptive grammar, but they are different. Traditional grammar deals with formal written English but deals with it as a systematic study. Two of the giants in the field, in the 20th c., are Otto Jespersen and Sir Randolph Quirk, not to mention Quirk's coauthors. They and scholars like them have produced high quality, relatively theory-neutral, in-depth descriptions of how formal standard written English works. This is the kind of grammar that I think ought to be taught in the schools. Linguistics, the third division, is a science that investigates what human language is and how it works. Linguists attempt to deal systematically with cross-linguistic differences and similarities and to explain why these things are so. Some of us get formal to a degree that would make a mathematician purr, and others of us deal with aspects of language that don't formalize quite so well. As a discipline, linguistics probably doesn't belong in the middle school curriculum, although linguistic enrichment activities can, I think, be very useful and exciting. Take a look at the Linguistic Olympics site to see examples of this. The Linguistic Olympics presents simple problems of linguistic analysis in a wide variety of languages and dealing with a wide range of linguistic topics. These problems are kept at a level appropriate to middle and high school problem solving skills, and they can be very entertaining and insightful. You can look at them at http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~tpayne/lingolym/. But finally, we have to work together: middle-school language arts teachers, language arts education faculty, and linguists, to figure out what teachers need to know and to do in order to teach grammar that is the intellectual peer of the literature and writing they teach. And yes, I'd love to see the math teachers squirm! Herb To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/