Yeow! That grammar chapter was an eye opener...

I'm wondering if Julie intentionally used our class discussion last Thursday to "foreshadow" this chapter! First, I have to say that I learned something new. I have not heard of any of these studies that show the teaching of formal grammer to be ineffective. That was fascinating - but I cannot say that I wholeheartedly agree. I don't think that will surprise anyone. But let me just say that for the people in the world who grow up being read to as young children and reading voraciously throughout their lives, explicit instruction in the rules of grammar probably probably is unnecessary. I do agree and believe that they just implicity learn. The connection between reading and writing has been widely studied; and, the studies almost always show that writers benefit substantially from their reading background knowledge .

I'd like to know more about that 1979 New Zealand study done by W.B. Elley, I. H Barham, H. Lame and M. Wyllie. I want to know about their student sample. I don't doubt the generalizability of it (unlike Janice Neuleib); rather, what I wonder about is the makeup of that student body. For the results to be negligible, that might mean that the students whose writing improved after grammar instruction was balanced out by those whose writing did not.

Check out this website - http://www.msu.edu/~sandinkr/grammarwhybother.htm In it, Stephen Krashen cites this study in a way that makes more sense to me. If you don't know anything about Krashen, he's a reading and ELL (English Language Learners - formerly known as English as Second Language learners) guru. He's also discussed on page 219 in Cross Talk in Comp Theory. He says that grammar instruction shouldn't necessarily be at the core of English instruction, but it does serve a valuable purpose. It's the editing purpose that most strongly connected for me.

From my experience teaching learning disabled and/or at-risk students to read (and we're talking high school students here), I have to say that I have seen dramatic improvement in their ability to read the written word when they learn (through direct and explicit instruction) to apply specific rules related to phonemics and syllabication. Although I haven't explicitly taught many rules of grammar, I am teaching a unit on spelling rules to 11th graders (the "y" rule, "drop the e" rule, and the "doubling" rule). They tell me that they are helpful and they do apply them when they write. Could they be blowing smoke? Well, yeah - but I don't think they are...

That grammar chapter hit home in so many ways...on page 214 when Jean Whyte talks about oral language functions developing differently in readers and non-readers- I see that ALL the time! This reminds me of our conversation about television sets and inner city children. Julie made the point that virtually every inner-city home has at least one television set. Yet urban students aren't developing nearly the early language skills as suburban kids. I've not really thought about that television argument; but, upon further reflection, one point that must be made is that television is not really interactive. Kids can watch it, listen to it, and learn language from it. But they can't respond to it and receive feedback about the language they are using. This speaks to Robin's example about correcting her four year old daughter who is just learning about verb tense. Televisions can't do that! And, it's the misuse of verb tense in the social language of some inner city kids that is a grammatical nightmare. There's no Robin there to correct the urban child who says "I been done had that" instead of "I've done that." This is when we need to explicitly teach the rules of grammar in school. Certain sectors of society do not model proper grammar when speaking. And, although I'm all in favor of allowing language to evolve, at this point in our society, this misuse seems to widen the gap between those who are educated and those who are not (whether real or perceived).

The argument was also made that most grammar rules can be internalized by reading the written word. I agree. For most people, they can look at a sentence, and based on what they know from reading, they can tell if something doesn't seem right. But I can tell you from experience that there is a small percentage of the population who cannot. When asked to re-read their work to make sure things "sound" right, they still can't identify problem spots. It's these people who, in my humble opinion, DO benefit from grammar instruction!
We started a writing center at The Milton Hershey School last year. We employ a minimalist tutoring strategy there where we do not write on a student's paper at all. When Richard Haswell discussed minimal marking on page 223, it validated the techniques we use in the writing center. And it really works! Even the poorest writers can usually identify an error if we point out the general location of the error. By the way... we also read Stephen North's work when we were researching our writing center model. It was good to reconnect with his work when I The Making of Knowledge in Composition. It was interesting to read how disjointed the research on composition has been.

Britton's analogy on page 216 that grammar study is like forcing starving people to master the use of a knife and fork before allowing them to eat is a little dramatic. Writers who do not know the rules of grammar are certainly able to communicate through the written word. However, it is tedious to read the work of someone who does not know spelling rules and basic sentence structure. Sometimes the writer's message gets lost in the translation. This cycles back to Stephen Krashen's opinion that grammar does serve a purpose - and I have to say that it's my opinion too!