Grammar in Context: Why and How

Abstract

If we were to summarize the state of grammar in most American schools today in one sentence, it would be this: Grammar is very often taught but very seldom learned. This fact seems odd since grammar, unlike many other aspects of the middle-school curriculum, receives continuous support from teachers, parents, and administrators. Yet, despite efforts made on various fronts, the grammar of their own language remains a mystery to most students. Rather than making them more comfortable with their mother tongue, a few lessons in the difference between lie and lay or restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses seem to produce a greater uncertainty bordering on panic. Many people, even some very well-educated people, simply learn ways to avoid rules they never really understood or learn to make excuses for their mistakes by apologizing lamely, I never was any good at diagramming sentences. Although students do not appear to be learning grammar the way it is presently taught, most grammar curricula do not reflect new ways of teaching but simply rely on the same old techniques despite their ineffectiveness. In many schools, the same grammar objectives-students will be able to identify verbs in sentences, for example-show up for several different grades, sometimes even being listed as an objective for grades as different as second and ninth. That fact alone should indicate to us that something is seriously wrong. Why should it be necessary to repeat the same instruction year after year? Why should students be taught, over and over again, the same definition for parts of speech, with only the examples changing? A calculus class does not spend the first week identifying numbers and reviewing addition and subtraction, and yet after many years of study and even more years of use, students at all grade levels are given grammar lessons that start at square one over and over again. The reasons for this state of affairs are many, but there is one that seems particularly important to us: Traditional grammar instruction is bound to fail because it is given without any realistic context. In Ed Vavra's words, are never asked to do anything with [grammatical knowledge] (1987, 42). People who feel comfortable and confident with the grammar of our language developed that confidence by becoming language of standard English (Smith et al. 1982, 35). They spoke it and heard it spoken, they read it, and they wrote it. Grammar lessons showed them the patterns for what they already knew and in that sense were irrelevant. Now, however, we want the grammar lessons to do what life used to accomplish, and the old drills will not work. The classroom must now become the place where students become natural language users and learn grammar as part of the life of reading, writing, and speaking. Yet when language is taught in the middle grades, context is often ignored. Students are made to learn definitions--of parts of speech, kinds of sentences-and then are given worksheets on which each sentence contains an exam-