Researchers are even more emphatic and swift to disagree with one another: The June 1999 issue of the Canadian Modern Language Review printed an article titled “What’s Wrong with Oral Grammar Correction?” by J. Truscott. Readers barely have time to catch their breath before turning to the follow-up article by Lyster et al: “A Response to Truscott’s ‘What’s Wrong with Oral Grammar Correction’.” One researcher insists that we “trash tradition,” eliminating grammar lessons altogether (Schuster 518); and another maintains, “Students [must learn to] identify the eight parts of speech and learn the rules for their use” (Manning 94).
The conflicts continue in fields of second-language acquisition and language development. Researchers such as Lyster maintain, “Considerable evidence has accumulated that much grammar acquisition occurs in a relatively fixed order; learners are not able to master one aspect until they have mastered certain others” (462). Nunan disputes this claim: “It is simply not the case that language learners acquire target items perfectly, one at a time” (101). What’s an English teacher to do?
This paper will argue against the traditional teaching of grammar. The reasons are as follows: (1) there is no experiential proof that students’ written or oral language improves with formal grammar instruction; (2) there is no evidence supporting the idea that students will understand the structure of their language by studying its grammar; (3) there are no data confirming that students become better writers and speakers when teachers correct their written or oral errors; (4) differences of opinion among educators and researchers only add confusion to the ongoing drama. In addition, this paper will offer some solutions to the grammar dilemma by discussing some techniques that do help students speak and write with greater clarity — conferencing, recasting, generative techniques, class discussion; academic exercises such as sentence combining with a focus on the effects, rather than the failures, of student writing; and poetry. Although first- and second-language research data are usually considered separately, both fields of study are pertinent to any discussion about grammar. For this reason, sources for this paper have come from researchers and educators whose fields of expertise may be first- or second-language acquisition.
DEFINITION OF GRAMMAR
Grammar means different things to different people. Lois Powell, a fifth-grade teacher with a master of art in writing, defines grammar as a collection of factors that include spelling, punctuation, syntax, and sentencing that makes sense.” A school administrator characterizes it as “the correct usage of rules pertinent to a spoken language.” A fourth-grade student declares grammar is “what you learn so you don’t make mistakes.” For the purposes of this paper, grammar describes the body of rules and conventional linguistic behaviors governing a particular language; it is what one learns to manipulate in order to convey meaning and includes the parts of speech, the terms for those parts, as well as the structure as a whole.
CHECKING OUT THE MYTHS
The stage is crowded with myths that add to the confusion surrounding the traditional teaching of grammar. Some believe a knowledge of grammar improves students’ written and spoken language; others claim the study of grammar helps students understand the structure of language, thereby improving their writing skills; and a less extreme chorus of educators suggests grammar be taught only in the form of mini-lessons. Those who defend the efficacy of traditional grammar in the classroom do so without scholarly validation from researchers or educators. As one teacher declared, “I teach grammar. They [the students] don’t get it, but I teach it anyway.”
Myth #1: The study of grammar improves students’ written and spoken language.
In 1999, Borg observed and interviewed five teachers of English as a foreign language. He wanted to find out whether they had pedagogical reasons for incorporating regular grammar lessons into their curriculum — specifically, did teachers believe their students benefited from grammar instruction? In all cases, teachers admitted they did not believe grammar instruction had any positive effect on students; nonetheless, they continued to teach it. They did so, concludes Borg, because students expect it (TTGT 158). Parents expect it, boards of education expect it, even teachers expect it of themselves — including those who know little or nothing about language structure or the naming and reshuffling of its parts. Of course, one must ask why expectation carries such non-pedagogical clout. The answer lies buried in Europe’s Middle Ages, when the study of grammar was thought to discipline a Christian’s mind as well as his/her soul. It is no accident that Latin, the language of the first Church, is the model for many precepts of English grammar. [MY FRIEND PETER MANCHESTER WRITES: "'Language of the first Church'"? Do you mean first language of the Church? Neither is correct; the language of the earliest church was Greek." My mistake for not having defined "church." I mean, if you want to get purely technical, it would have been Aramaic. So, let me clarify by saying, the language of the Christian church during {yes, and after} the Middle Ages.]
Weaver cites two examples: the rules forbidding split infinitives and the appearance of prepositions at the ends of sentences (3). [HERE AGAIN, PETER TSK-TSKS. HE WRITES: "It is not immediately clear that 'forbidding' governs both 'split infinitives' and 'the appearance of prepositions at the ends of sentences.' The reason is that the two objects of the forbidding are not given parallel form. The ambiguity disappears if we read, 'the rules forbidding split infinitives and prepositions at the ends of sentences...' How's this Peter?: The rules forbidding prepositions at the ends of sentences and split infinitives. Sorry for the interruptions. Now let's continue.] Grammarians base these rules, respectively, on the fact that Latin infinitives are always one word, therefore, impossible to split, and on the fact that Latin is inflectional; i.e., its verb forms indicate the relationship between subjects and their objects. As we see, expectation is a tough protagonist, but it is hardly a convincing pedagogical player.
Many educators agree that traditional grammar instruction does not improve students’ spoken or written language. Schuster argues, “Grammatical definitions in textbooks are pedagogically useless” (522). “[Grammar] can’t be taught. It never has been taught, and, barring radical changes, it never will be taught” (521). Charles Scott, an English instructor for more than thirty years, notes, “Indeed, there doesn’t appear to be a correlation between acquiring grammatical rules and writing or speaking more effectively.”
What students do learn in traditional grammar classes, if they learn anything, is the vocabulary of grammar — i.e., the naming of its parts — not the structure of language. One reason for this, argues Nunan, is that “grammar is very often presented out of context” (102), so students fail to see its relevancy to discourse, oral or written. Moreover, as Borg’s study shows, when pressed to search their pedagogical souls, even those who teach grammar fail to applaud its pedagogical performance. Grammarians, on the other hand, insist that the study of grammar plays a decided role in written and oral production; thus, students must at least learn the vocabulary of grammar. This could be an innocuous enough academic activity, but it would not lead students to a higher plane of writing or speaking. And, as Schuster points out, that vocabulary is not so easy to learn (522). A noun can be proper or common, phrase or pronoun, object of a preposition, direct object or indirect object, concrete subject or figurative subject; a verb can be active or passive, auxiliary or principal, participial or … wait, maybe that’s an adjective. Very confusing (ouch, a fragment).
Kalkavage points to a major problem with traditional grammar instruction: “It is not so much that the student fails to apply a rule. It is rather that he fails to grasp the point of the rule.” (59). Overheard before a grammar test: “I think I understand it when we go over it in class, but I really don’t get it.” From my experiences teaching English and Italian as well as studying four foreign languages, I understand, first-hand, it is one thing to ace a name-the-part-of-speech test or a fill-in-the-blank-with-the-correct-verb test; it is another thing to convert testing materials into real language, spoken or written. What is more, when I do manage to communicate in a target language, I don’t suspend discourse to consider my next syntactical maneuver. Instead, I focus on the matter at hand and improvise, which is precisely what preschoolers do as they acquire their first language.
Let's consider grammarians who devote their professional lives to the study of grammatical form and function. If the study of grammar guaranteed excellent speakers and writers, one would suppose grammarians to have mastered written and oral communication. Not so. They are not outstanding speakers or writers. And those who publish grammar books are just as guilty of grammatical blundering as are the rest of us. In The Writer’s Options, Morenberg and Sommers err in their use of the word “among.” Granted, the error may have been the work of a copyeditor who remembered, and clung to, the precept that one refers to a relationship between two entities and among three or more entities. This is only true, however, if those entities are within a group and are not individually named — among people — or are the subjects of comparison. “Reading your different versions aloud and listening carefully to the variations among them will help ….” (50). One can compare only two things at a time, so the word should be “between.” They also ignore the standard American-English rule for the word “which,” which is supposed to be reserved for non-restrictive clauses. “Here is a list of subordinators which can help…” (101). While some argue “which” in a restrictive clause is a style choice, one might use the same argument for the double negative, a perfectly legal construction in the Romance languages, or the passive construction, which suffers no discrimination in Germanic or Romantic languages (cf. Warriner 603 and Garner 83). But these examples are minor in comparison to Nunan’s gem: he claims to have found a passage in a grammar book that reads, “The passive should be avoided if at all possible” (103).
The drama plays on. Questions of punctuation and style continue to clash, fall, and rise again. Some diction is eternally damned — “ain’t,” “being that,” “irregardless”— “shibboleth[s] of poor usage” (Garner 208). And some usage makes regular comebacks; for example, the intermittently maligned comma splice. Klinck sings its praises with examples such as, “Writing is like architecture: it endures, it has weight.” She reminds us that tag questions — “You can come, can’t you?” — and tag statements — “You can change it, you know” — are perfectly acceptable (96). I like the comma splice, it heartily upsets my word processor’s Grammar Check.
Myth # 2: Students will understand language structure by studying grammar.
One acquires grammar by imitation and experimentation. One refines one’s knowledge of grammar by reading, writing, and further experimentation with language. It does not work the other way around. Weaver reminds us, “Even toddlers use grammatical constructions that are reductions and precursors of the mature syntax they will gradually acquire” (2). An English-/Spanish-speaking bilingual preschooler knows enough to ask for the “red apple” when she’s speaking English and the “manzana roja” when she’s speaking Spanish. With no apparent effort, she can step into a new linguistic theater and flip an adjective to the other side of a noun without ever having suffered through a formal grammar lesson.
Schuster’s studies spotlight the ineffectiveness of traditional grammar instruction as a prerequisite for understanding the structure of language. For five years in a row, he gave the same group of students a simple grammar test — identifying five parts of speech: verb, noun, pronoun, adjective, adverb. Students were tested at the beginning of each academic year in grades six through ten. In the first year, students scored an average of 64 percent; in the fifth year, their average score was 68 percent — an increase of only 4 percent, despite yearly repetitions of traditional grammar lessons. In another study, the same researcher gave a group of tenth-graders a simple grammar test requiring them to identify passive and active sentences. He administered the test in September and repeated it the following June. After a year of study, the students’ average score had increased by 1 percent. Schuster’s findings indicate only that the students never learned to name the parts of speech or a sentence type. This is not to say they did not know how to speak or write effectively. As he dryly intimates, William Faulkner was so bored by the focus on grammar in freshman English, he dropped the class (524).
Myth #3: Teachers help students learn grammar by correcting their errors
When a student gets a paper back that is covered in red (or green), more often than not, s/he sees only the red (or green). Even if the teacher’s corrections are valid, most students profit not at all from error correction. Indeed, evidence indicates that the red marks serve only to alienate and discourage them. In addition, correcting students’ oral usage does little or nothing to change language patterns. In fact, if students interpret teachers’ corrections as confrontational or accusatory, they will go to extremes to continue their nonstandard usage.
Compounding the problem, most teachers who take on the task of error correction have little training in the structure of language and are usually ill equipped to explain grammar as it applies to written or oral language. So, one teacher will find problems with x, y, and z, and another teacher will love the creativity of x, y, and z, but will find fault with a, b, and c, which had been ignored by another teacher.
The problem deepens when teachers must decide which corrections warrant their greatest attention. A survey by Dr. Johanna Rubba and her students at the University of California expanded Hairston’s 1981 survey, which found that business people are consistently intolerant of anyone who speaks nonstandard varieties of English. Rubba and her students sent a survey to 250 “schoolteachers, college teachers, and individuals in private industry who might be hiring or evaluating others” (1). They asked respondents to determine the errors in 65 sentences, six of which were grammatically perfect. If they noted an error, respondents rated the degree to which they were bothered by it. What is interesting, and pertinent to the problem of error correction as a way of imparting rules of grammar, not all teachers noticed the same errors, and some — a rather large 40 percent — found errors where none existed. Moreover, teachers at different instructional levels recorded different degrees of tolerance for the errors they did find. Middle-school teachers tended to be unfazed by errors, while college and high-school teachers declared themselves extremely bothered by them, especially by mechanical errors. The only agreement among educators was their declaration of war against students’ nonstandard, or dialectal, forms of writing (Rubba). In this regard, educators’ attitudes toward nonstandard English mirrored those of the other respondents.
We have seen that educators don’t always agree on correct usage or its importance, grammarians don’t necessarily concur on all points of standard usage, and the very people who describe and publish the rules of grammar often disregard them in their own grammar texts. To borrow a line from Ralph Cramdon: This is a fine mess.
SOLUTIONS
If teachers insist on teaching grammar formally, they must ask themselves why. Borg’s study determined that teachers often take a particular pedagogical tact — even if it has proven less than effective — simply because they have been trained in that particular pedagogy (TPS 21). Year after year, they teach grammar, hoping it will enable students to achieve clarity in written and oral expression; and year after year, the same problems arise and remain unresolved. One elementary school principal agrees: “Teachers teach grammar because they have always done it.”
There are solutions. Teachers can teach students how to write and speak with greater clarity, and they can even teach them about the structure of language. Increasingly over the past several decades, educators have opened their eyes to new possibilities and have discovered productive ways to teach communicative skills. Some educators and researchers even call for the creation of separate departments devoted to writing.
Create Separate Departments of Writing
A growing number of educators declare that departments of English should be separate from departments of writing. Gill notes the impossible task facing English teachers — “to teach writing, to increase appreciation of literature, and to instill mechanics and the subtleties of grammar” (48). Peter Elbow takes the argument a step further in declaring that grammar instruction has no place in a writing class. What is more, says Elbow, there may not be much value in teaching specifics of writing; for example, “the introduction, imagery, structure” (cf. Peinado). He believes it is far more important to create an effective learning environment; and one way to do this is to establish separate departments of writing. His influence is still strong at SUNY Stony Brook, where I taught in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric. In student-centered, not teacher-centered, classes, we used techniques such as freewriting, brainstorming, and mapping to help students generate ideas. And we encouraged class discussions to help students clarify and organize their own ideas. In one semester, students wrote only three papers outside of class, but each paper was drafted and redrafted a minimum of five times. Grammar was never mentioned. Class work involved discussions about genre, language, writers’ techniques, paraphrasing, organization. Students read extensively, and the focus of discussion was on how authors use language to convey meaning. We did not analyze content; rather, we discussed authors’ techniques and how they use technique to convince or to elicit responses from an audience. Student writing, in most cases, did improve by semester’s end.
Conference with Individual Students
At Suffolk Community College where I tutor writing students, I always ask students what they want me to look for before I read their papers — a question that never fails to surprise and sometimes annoy them. I specify: “Do you want me to look for grammar? Structure? Sequencing of ideas? Mechanical aspects such as spelling and punctuation?” I do this as a courtesy and, in so doing, allow writers to retain some power over their work. In addition, I always ask their permission before marking anything on their paper. After all, it is not possible to inspire enthusiasm or improve a student’s written skills by highlighting every error or incident of nonstandard usage in one paper. The most effective way to help students improve their writing is by conferencing with them and limiting the discussion to a few predetermined points such as subject-verb agreement, paragraphing, punctuation. In this way, students are not overwhelmed by the difficulties of organizing and presenting a perfect, or a so-called perfect, paper.
Recast Students’ Errors
In ESL classes, I always recast students’ errors into standard English. If a student says, “I didn’t do nothing this weekend,” I recast the statement in the form of a question, an exclamation, or both: “You didn’t do anything! Who else didn’t do anything this weekend?” According to researchers Mohan and Beckett, recasting in causal explanations helps students discover the relationship between “form and meaning in discourse” (140). This approach does not help students learn the vocabulary of grammar; however, it does allow them to recognize that there are different ways of using language. More important, it teaches that language has the power to elicit different responses in an audience, depending on how the writer or speaker decides to cast it.
Talk About Register
Educators such as Conrad contend, “Grammatical study [should] take place within the context of a register or by comparing registers” (352). Comparing registers — for example, newspaper writing with narrative writing or classroom talk with party talk — provides a non-threatening way to teach syntax, lexicon, and semantics in respect to their roles in written and oral expression. It also encourages students to approach grammar in a very personal way. Rather than dictating rules of correct speech or writing, teachers guide students to the realization that they already adhere to correct rules of speech and writing, and those rules vary depending on where they are and with whom they are communicating. Such pedagogy awakens students to possibilities of communicating in other registers — the narrative essay, the persuasive speech, the business letter, the dreaded research paper.
Introduce Sentence Combining
Sentence combining is another way to teach grammatical principles without giving a grammar lesson per se. The pedagogical aim of sentence combining exercises is not to teach “correctness” or grammatical nomenclature; rather, it is to consider and analyze the results of certain varieties and combinations of sentences. It should not matter that students are unable to identify a restrictive clause or noun phrase; it is far more important that they understand they can manipulate language to express or convey meaning. Sentence combining is an effective tool, especially as a whole-class activity, when students volunteer their own sentences for consideration. The activity helps students view their work objectively; thus, giving them greater appreciation for the intricacies of sentencing and paragraphing.
Incorporate Poetry into the Curriculum
Salvatore Lentini, an educator in New York’s Rocky Point school district, believes in enriching his classes as well as his students by incorporating poetry into academic topics. His students are delighted to search for adjectives and gerunds to describe themselves in autobiographical poems; or to poeticize history, math, science, literature, even sports, guided by poetic templates requiring them to provide adverbs, participles, nouns, adjectives, expletives, simple and compound sentences. Lentini’s approach is exciting for students, and they learn that writers wield great power. Without having suffered the pain or boredom of a single grammar lesson, his students acquire a sound knowledge of the labyrinthine structure of language.
CONCLUSION
Learning the grammar of one’s own language is like learning a foreign language, probably one of the most difficult intellectual feats for anyone above the age of twelve. And, like foreign language study, it is impossible to retain what one is studying if one never has the opportunity, or a reason, to use it outside of class. If a teacher’s aim in teaching grammar is to help students speak and write Standard English, he or she must examine the research. Studies clearly indicate that teachers continue to recite traditional grammar lessons because they have not questioned their pedagogical worth. This paper has shown that there are myths surrounding the efficacy of teaching grammar, and those myths continue their presence in the academic theater, despite their having been dismissed by researchers. It has also offered some suggestions for incorporating grammar instruction into curricula without forcing students to memorize grammatical scripts that are essentially meaningless.
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