Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar

Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar

anthologized in Cross Talk in Comp Theory, ed by Victor Villanueva ISBN: 0-8141-0976-4 by Patrick Hartwell For me the grammar issue was settled at least twenty years ago with the conclusion offered by Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer in 1963: In view of the widespread agreement of research studies based upon many types of students and teachers, the conclusion can be stated in strong and unqualified terms: the teacher of formal grammar has a negligible or, because it usually displaces some instruction and practice in composition, even a harmful effect on improvement in writing. -205 [He wants to ask 4 questions: 1. Why is the grammar issue so important? 2. How can we intelligibly define the word grammar? 3. What do findings in cognate disciplines suggest about formal grammar instruction? 4. What is our theory of language and what does it predict about the value of grammar teaching?] [He distinguishes 5 versions of grammar. #1. Native speech patterns. #2 Scientific description of native patterns #3 Linguistic etiquette #4 Grammar as taught in school #5 Stylistic advice] ... or James Briton's analogy, offered informally after a conference presentation, that grammar study would be like forcing starving people to master the use of a knife and fork before allowing them to eat. -216 

 I consider a hypothetical argument, that if Grammar 2 knowledge affected Grammar 1 performance, then linguists would be our best writers. (I can certify that they are, on the whole, not.) Such a position, after all, is only in accord with other domains of science. . . -216 

 Arthur S. Reber, in a classic 1967 experiment, demonstrated that mere exposure to grammatical sentences produced tacit learning: subjects who copied several grammatical sentences performed far above chance in judging the grammaticality of other strings. -218 

 Most students, reading their writing aloud, will correct in essences all errors of spelling, grammar, and, by intonation, punctuation, but usually without noticing that what they read departs from what they wrote(22). And Richard H. Haswell ("Minimal Marking," CE, 45 [1983], 600-604) notes that his students correct 61.1% of their errors when they are identified with a simple mark in the margin rather than by error type. -223 22---- See Bartholomae, "The Study of Error"; Patrick Hartwell, "The Writing Center and the Paradoxes of Written Down Speech," in Writing Centers: Theory and Administration, ed Gary Olson (Urbana, Ill.: NCTE 1984) pp 48-61; and Sondra Perl, "A Look At Basic Writers in the Process of Composing," in Basic Writing: A Collection of Essays for Teachers, Researchers, and Administrators (Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1980), pp13-32 

 Developing writers show the same patterning of errors, regardless of dialect. (29) Studies of reading and of writing suggest that surface features of spoken dialect are simply irrelevant to mastering pring literacy. Print is a complex cultural code--or better yet, a system of codes-- and my bet is that, regardless of instruction, one masters those codfes from the top down, from pragmatic questions of voice, tone, audience, register, and rhetorical strategy, not from the bottom up, from grammar to usage to fixed forms of organization. -224 

 Writers need to develop skills at two levels. One, broadly rhetorical, involves communication in meaningful contexts (the strategies, registers, and procedures of discourse across a range of modes, audiences, contexts, and purposes). The other, broadly metalinguistic rather than linguistic, involves active manipulation of language with conscious attention to surface form. -225