Taking the G-r-r-r Out of Grammar

Abstract

linguistics revolution that displaced traditional prescriptive with the more modern, structural and transformational-generative grammars. The title doesn't reveal that the course also came into the statutes under back-to-basics pressure: legislators may have thought they were remediating a lack of knowledge of correctness on the part of teachers-you know, the mythical progressive teachers who don't mark errors and approve of anything that students spel or rite. Although the descriptive grammar course at our university is intellectually much more respectable than a mere correctness course, students don't always come to it bubbling with enthusiasm over the prospect of learning the intricacies of syntax (whatever that is). Moreover, because the course has, in the past, been taught mostly by university linguists who presented a detailed and technical transformational-generative perspective, students have questioned the usefulness of the course and its applications in teaching. Still, when our students begin their first teaching assignments, they often report coming face-to-face with teachers committed to a traditional approach to grammar. Sometimes pressure for parts-of-speech grammar comes from community demands for basics; sometimes it comes from teachers who remain convinced that, despite research to the contrary, grammar is somehow vital in teaching writing; too often the grammar pressure comes about simply because that's what's covered in the standard-issue textbook. Whatever the causes, our students have often perceived that their descriptive grammar course failed to give them the tools they needed to cope with studentor first-year teaching. Let us begin by saying that we believe in grammar. We even speak and write it! But we've studied the research and know that presenting traditional parts of speech and drilling away at usage items is no way to teach children to read, write, listen, and speak. We are also convinced that teachers should have a solid understanding of syntactic systems and structures-the rules, laws, circumstances, and conventions that govern how we use language. In the summer of 1995, we decided to team teach the descriptive grammar course and to take a whack at revising it. Specifically, we wanted to make the course a bit more