Grammar will never be effective in the classroom unless we significantly change the way we prepare teachers. Most teachers believe that their college education should have prepared them, both for the content and the methods of their teaching. Yet several surveys indicate that poor preparation for teaching grammar is one of the teachers’ primary complaints. Inadequately prepared, these teachers have no choice but to fall back on the textbooks, textbooks which they themselves may not understand. "Grammar" thus becomes, for students and for some teachers, a game of guessing the answer in the answer key. Nothing could be more deadening.

     A catalog of surveys and teachers’ complaints is not our objective here, but readers deserve more than just my word that the problem lies not in the teachers, but in their preparation. Joyce K. Killian, in "Preparing English Teachers: The Cooperating Teachers’ View"  asked cooperating teachers about the quality of preparation in grammar, literature, and composition. She states:

Lowest ratings in preparation went to the area of grammar, the average being only 2.8, or slightly "less than adequate." "You can’t teach what you don’t know" was the explanation that most cooperating teachers gave for their student teachers’ problems in this area. Several pointed out that grammar was poorly taught at the college level, at least the type of grammar that student teachers were expected to teach. This left the student teacher to fall back on what he could remember from his own junior or senior high grammar instruction. (139)

     Sharon J. Taylor, on the other hand, is specifically interested in improving instruction in grammar. In "Grammar Curriculum--Back to Square One," she explains her work "with the language arts teachers of the junior and senior high schools . . . to develop a curriculum for teaching English grammar and usage." Having studied most of the research, the group

came to several conclusions. The first was that although they seriously doubted the usefulness of continuing to teach grammar and usage in the traditional way, they would probably continue to do so because they did not possess the materials or the methodology for other approaches. (95)

     Although certification requirements differ among the states, most, if not all states, require that student teachers at some point study "grammar." There is, however, little agreement about what constitutes "grammar," and thus there are wide ranges both in the backgrounds of the college instructors and in the content of the courses. Pedagogical grammar is not a course that college professors stand in line to teach. We might venture the guess that 99% of these courses are taught by someone in the English or the Education department (who views it as a burden) or by someone in linguistics (who has a linguistic bias). The haphazardness of such teaching assignments would be comical, did it not have such disastrous consequences.

     Most English professors believe that they can teach grammar. Their training, and most of their scholarly interests, are usually in literature, and they are blissfully unaware that a controversy about grammar even exists. They therefore select a grammar textbook, traditional, of course, and have their students work their way through it. English professors don’t seem to realize that if twelve years of traditional instruction haven’t done the job, an additional college semester won’t either.

     Education professors, on the other hand, are more aware of the controversy and require their students to study texts which survey linguistics. Such courses, in other words, are not in grammar, but rather about grammar. The difference may seem superficial, but it is not. Students working through a traditional text, no matter how ineffective, are at least involved in applying the grammar to sentences. Students who survey linguistics may never analyze a single sentence!

     At many of the bigger universities, the grammar course is taught by someone in linguistics. Linguistics Departments tend to welcome this, since it assures them of a steady, large supply of students for courses, thereby insuring the survival of the department. But, as noted in the previous chapter, linguistics and pedagogical grammar exist for different purposes. Some linguists, recognizing the special needs of teachers, honestly attempt to meet these needs, but frequently student teachers are submitted to a course in structural or transformational grammars, or whatever else happens to be the specialty of the professor assigned to teach the course. Students, in other words, come out of the course being able to discuss deletion rules or immediate constituents, but they are often unable even to identify the subjects and verbs in a paragraph of prose.

     Since the states’ guidelines are so vague, many students satisfy the "grammar" requirement by taking a course in the history of the English language, or, as noted, a course in general linguistics. Here is Bill O’Rourke’s commentary on such a course, a course he teaches:

      Should an English education staff be proud or ashamed of the fact that fifteen out of seventeen graduates, after one semester of teaching, tell us that the one thing they wish the university would have offered them is a course in how to teach grammar? If it was a goal to purely reflect the public schools in our teaching, this evidence would tell us to be ashamed. If our goal was to reform the English curriculum in secondary schools, then maybe we should be proud. I taught the linguistics methods course at UNL and I taught it with one overall goal: to make language instruction in our secondary schools more than grammar. We covered history of the language, lexicography, dialect, semantics, usage, public doublespeak, and grammar. But we talked about grammar in terms of what is the purpose for teaching grammar, what does research tell us about its relationship to writing and speaking, what is the thinking behind the different types of grammar? It seems to me that this type of approach, this questioning beyond just the methodology, is precisely what English education should be concerned with. ("‘Lion Tamers and Baby Sitters’: First-Year English Teachers’ Perceptions of Their Undergraduate Preparation." 21-22.)

     As for grammar, note that O’Rourke doesn’t teach it, he teaches "about grammar." His "we talked about grammar" is charmingly deceptive: his students have not read the research; they have not mastered any of "the different types of grammar." (He is certainly not telling us that within four or six weeks of his course he produces masters of traditional, structural and/or transformational grammars: if that were the case, his students either shouldn’t have complained or should have known enough about grammar to conclude for themselves that it doesn’t help students.) O’Rourke’s "talked about," in other words, means that the instructor talked and the students agreed. Students do have enough sense to know not to contradict the professor who is grading them. Once they didn’t have to worry about his grade, they told him, as well as they could in the questionnaire, what they really thought.

     What, we might ask, was their complaint? What was it that they did not get? I would suggest that, very simply, such courses do not meet teachers’ fundamental need: many teachers cannot even identify all the subjects and verbs in a paper written by one of their students. They did not learn how to do this in high school, nor do they learn it in college. Since they cannot identify subjects and verbs, they cannot identify clauses or verbals. In complicated sentences, they may sense that something is wrong, but they lack the terminology with which to explain it. As a result, they go into their classrooms knowing full well that they are, as teachers, grammatically incompetent. What are they to do? Can we expect them to tell their students (or their administrators) that they do not understand what they are talking about? As I will explain below, I tell my students that all the time, but I tell them that only because I am very confident that I do know what I’m talking about. Human nature allows us to admit our weaknesses only when we feel our strengths. If we feel weak, we become defensive and dogmatic, precisely what the teacher, especially the teacher of grammar, should not be.
 
 

     Several years ago, I ran across an article that distinguishes knowing "that" from knowing "how." Since then, I have seen the same distinction made in a number of articles, many of them related to the "process" approach in composition. I had fully intended to use the distinction in this book, since it fits: there is a tremendous difference between knowing "that" a clause has a subject and a verb and knowing "how" to find all the clauses in a paragraph. Most students know "that" a subject is supposed to agree with its verb in number, but many of them do not know "how" to get all their subjects and verbs to agree. (Primarily, I would suggest, because they do not know "how" to find all the finite verbs.)

     Since examples could easily be multiplied, the relevance of the distinction to a discussion of pedagogical grammar should be obvious. The distinction apparently goes back to Giambattista Vico, but for Vico himself, knowing "that" and knowing "how" are both subordinate to knowing "why". Isaiah Berlin summarizes Vico’s view this way:

full knowledge can be only knowledge "through causes," per caussas (in Vico’s spelling); according to this principle we can be said fully to know a thing if, and only if, we know why it is as it is, or how it came to be, or was made to be, what it is, and not merely that it is what it is, and has the attributes it has. (13.)

     There can be little question that the traditional approach to grammar basically conveys "that" knowledge: its rules and definitions are presented as "facts" that students must memorize, but with the unusual exception of some diagramming, students rarely need to know "how" to apply these definitions and are never taught how (or why) to apply the rules. It is less widely recognized, however, that many sentence-combining texts and exercises are also "pedagogical grammars," but that they simply move to the other extreme: they teach "how" and often attempt to skip the "that" by using as little grammatical terminology (if any) as possible.

     It is, indeed, ironic that proponents of sentence-combining at times denigrate traditional grammar, with its repeated exercises, as mere "conditioning," i.e., not in step with the new, "cognitive" theories of education. Traditionalists may not have been successful in improving students’ writing, but at least they assumed that students were capable of understanding and dealing with grammatical concepts. They assumed, in other words, that students could understand words such as "clause," "participle," etc. Perhaps it was the semester I spent training a rat for an experimental psych course, but something makes me see pure sentence-combining exercises as the most degrading conditioning of human beings that one can find in the schools. 

     Theoretically, of course, sentence combining is supposed to expand the students’ abilities by leading them into more and more complicated syntactic combinations. But the only way to test this is by having the students discuss what they are doing, and that cannot be done since most sentence-combining sequences do not give the students the terminology with which to have such a discussion. Unfortunately, many educators are under the mistaken impression that "research" has demonstrated the effectiveness of sentence-combining, but this is not so. Most of the research, moreover, is based on simple increases in the length of main and subordinate clauses. Such increases are parallel to increases in the length of mazes that rats are trained to run: the rat doesn’t "know" what he is doing, or why; neither does the student, or, we might add, the teacher.

     One of the claims made in favor of sentence combining was -- it is hard to believe, but apparently true -- that sentence combining is "teacher proof!" Teachers don’t have to know anything to administer the exercises. This is, it seems to me, a rather strange concept of "education." Teachers don’t really teach, they "administer" (at, we might note, much lower pay than official administrators). It is no wonder, therefore, that many teachers begin to view themselves as babysitters. 

     If traditional grammar teaches "that" and sentence combining teaches "how," in what way does the syntactic approach presented in this book help students and teachers understand "why"? "Why" is a big question, and as we approach it we need to distinguish between what we might call the intrinsic and extrinsic "why." The intrinsic is, I must admit, more like what Vico had in mind: what makes grammar what it is, what "causes" it? Ultimately, this is a philosophical/psychological question that the experts still (and will continue to) wrangle about. In a more limited sense, however, the question can be phrased as "why is ‘bird’ a noun?" Traditionally, there have been three different ways of defining the parts of speech (by form, by meaning, and by function). Thus, to say that "a noun is the name of a person place or thing" is to define the category by its reference or meaning, whereas to say that a coordinating conjunction "joins like parts of speech" is to define it by its function. In the theory presented in this book, the parts of speech are all ultimately defined by function (a "noun" is a word or construction that acts as a subject or object), but, as we will see, the definitions by meaning may be helpful especially for students in the primary grades. Fortunately for teachers, students don’t often ask these philosophical and quasi-philosophical questions which could easily drive us all into becoming philosophers. They are much more likely to ask "Why should I study grammar?"

     "Why should I study grammar?" takes us to the extrinsic "why." Grammar can, in other words, help us understand the "why" of other things. We will consider several of these things in greater detail in later chapters, but since many teachers also ask "why study grammar?" it may be helpful to summarize some of the reasons here. An understanding of grammar, for example, can help us understand not only how, but also why the writing of adults differs from that of children, and why the language of readers and writers differs from that of people who primarily use the language only orally. We will see that there is significant evidence that syntactic constructions arise in a developmental sequence, that, for example, people master the subordinate clause before they freely use gerundives (participles). This knowledge, in turn, will explain why syntactic constructions should be taught in a specific sequence, i.e., one that follows natural development.

     A frequent complaint of teachers is that students’ sentences are too short or too long. We will see how the student who understands grammar can not only determine how long is "too long," but also why his or her average main clause ought to be longer or shorter. An understanding of grammar can also help teachers and students understand why some students make the errors that they do. And, given time, it will also help students avoid them. Most interesting of all, perhaps, is that an understanding of grammar can be combined with some simplified concepts of psycholinguistics to help students explore how the mind processes language. This knowledge can then be used for practical purposes: to understand why one should follow the basic rules of punctuation. But it can also be used for "pure" learning: to understand, for example, why everyone might say "They discussed the town that was destroyed," but no one would say "They discussed the town was destroyed." (My own students seem to enjoy acquiring this "pure" knowledge as much, if not more, than they do the practical.) We’ll also explore how certain syntactic constructions are related to logical relationships: for students, this means understanding why they should use adjectives, predicate nouns, and appositives to do most of the work in a paper meant to characterize a person (rather than relying, as many students do, on transitive and intransitive verbs).

     These "why’s" cannot, of course, be answered by grammar alone. Grammar must be integrated with the study of mental development, with psycholinguistics, with stylistics, with basic logic, and with reading and writing. But such integration is exactly what students need, especially in a society filled with 20-second TV commercials, rapidly shifting scenes in TV programs, mini-courses, and rapidly shifting topics even in "normal" high school and college courses. Traditional grammar added to the fragmentation by presenting constructions individually without adequately exploring how constructions are actually interrelated in sentences. But grammar does not have to be taught that way. Teachers can make grammar one of the most systematic of all academic subjects, and they can also make it an important link among widely divergent disciplines.
 
 

     Wayne Booth will, I hope, forgive me for playing with the title of his famous essay, an essay which I much admire. But the question naturally arises: if the theory of grammar presented in this book can be related to disciplines as complex and distinct as psychology and logic, then must teachers be masters of all these disciplines, plus the grammar, plus, of course, all the other things that they are required to teach? The answer to that rhetorical question is, of course, negative, but it raises the important practical question -- exactly what must teachers "know" to teach grammar well? They must, of course, have some "that" knowledge -- that there are eight parts of speech, that any verb that is not finite has to be a verbal, that an infinitive can function as a noun, adjective, or adverb, etc. But this "that" knowledge is actually far less than many people think. As I noted in the preceding chapter, almost everything a teacher needs can fit on a single page. More important, teachers need to know "how" to apply this knowledge to explain how most words are syntactically related to the main subject and verb. Teachers who have a good background in traditional grammar can master this skill in a few hours, since it is mainly a matter of learning to apply what they already know. Average student teachers who have almost no training in grammar can, on the other hand, often master what they need in a single college semester. Finally, teachers should know a few answers to the question "Why is the study of grammar important?"

     The biggest mistake of traditional pedagogy is the belief that teachers should know all the answers. This belief is an inheritance from the "knowing-that" tradition, from the Grandgrind school of facts. Nothing could be more deadly for education, since the belief results in insecure teachers who tend to cut students off from free inquiry. The teacher’s job is to help students understand how language works, and, as we will see, there are often several satisfactory explanations. Having given the students the "rules of the game," the knowing-that knowledge, the teacher’s role becomes one of coach and mediator. One of the rules, for example, is that "Prepositional phrases function as adjectives or adverbs." Suppose that students are discussing the sentence:

Is the prepositional phrase "between parents and children" adverbial to "creates" or adjectival to "relationship"? Some students will see it one way; others, the other. But since both explanations fit the "rule," why shouldn’t both be acceptable? This prepositional phrase is a simple example of a situation where alternative explanations are appropriate. In Chapter Five we will see several others that involve more complicated constructions, but the point here is that the teacher is not the ultimate authority for deciding the "correctness" of such explanations. As long as the explanation fits the rules (and, in a few advanced cases, even if it doesn’t), it is "correct." The more important question is "Is it effective?" Do the other students in the class see the explanation as explanatory?

     My students believe that I am smarter and more knowledgeable than I really am. In my grammar course for teachers, students analyze sentences in paragraphs that are randomly selected. I do not check the paragraphs before I give them to students in order to see if I can explain all the words. On the contrary, I encourage students to bring in any sentences that they can find that are particularly troublesome. The primary assumption of the course is that it will teach students how to explain any word in any sentence, and thus it would not be fair for me to limit the sentences to those with which I had no problem. Such an approach is risky: I have found three or four examples which I cannot explain within the theory presented in this book, and even some of those which I can explain require a great deal of thought (and I’m a slow thinker). But I’m also confident about what I am doing and thus not afraid to tell students "I don’t know."

     The procedure in the grammar course is to have the students analyze sentences from a paragraph on the overhead projector. In the materials I originally prepared for the course, I absent-mindedly left out direct address, and the following sentence appeared on the board:

The problem was how to explain "Bill." The students, naturally, looked to the teacher, me. But my normal response is "Don’t look at me: I don’t know." In this case, I actually didn’t. I remembered direct address, but since I had not included it in the rules of the game, I was looking for some explanation that stayed within the rules and was toying with the idea of explaining it as an interjection. "I don’t know" is always followed by several seconds (sometimes minutes) of silence or of small group conversations as students discuss the problem among themselves. Then one student offered the following: "Bill" is an appositive to the implied subject "you." Grammarians may not like it, but the explanation works: it connects "Bill" to the main subject and verb and it stays within the "rules." (And it is much better than my idea of the interjection.)

     The interesting part of this story is that students believed that I "knew" the answer all along. I regularly hear comments such as "You know. You just won’t tell us." or "You know. You just want us to figure it out for ourselves." Sometimes I know, and sometimes I don’t know, but in either case, I want students to figure it out for themselves. At times, I will even carry an unresolved question from one class period to another, thereby giving students (and myself, if I need it) time to work out an explanation. Practice, of course, makes perfect, and after ten years of teaching sentence analysis, there are very few words that I cannot easily explain. But teachers who are new to the method presented in this book will find "I don’t know." an extremely valuable pedagogical tool.

     Although different schools and school systems may wish to spread it out in different ways, the method presented in this book is sequential and cumulative. The general outline of the sequence is:

 1) prepositional phrases
 2) subjects and verbs
 3) clauses: subordinate and main
 4) verbals: gerunds and gerundives
 5) verbals: infinitives
 6) seven other constructions.

     For teachers, the arrangement of this sequence has several implications. If, for example, a school system arranges the sequence by grades as suggested in Chapter Seven, then seventh grade teachers would be concerned only with the first three stages, through clauses. They would never, in other words, be faced with problems such as "Bill" in "Bill, come here." Nor would they have to deal with the verbals. This point deserves emphasis because, as we have noted earlier in this chapter, most teachers feel very insecure about teaching grammar, even from a textbook in which the exercises are simple and for which an answer key is supplied. And here I am, suggesting that students should be able to select their own sentences for analysis and that every word in every sentence can be analyzed! But not all teachers would be involved in analyzing every word in every sentence. Seventh and eighth grade teachers need only go through clauses; ninth and tenth grade teachers would, in this arrangement, also be responsible for verbals; and, of course, someone at the high school level would have to give a stab at analyzing every word. Most schools, however, have at least one teacher who would find this task interesting, challenging, and rewarding.

     Given the nature of students and their objective, teachers at every grade level should at least be able to identify the various constructions. Once students realize that their ultimate task is to be able to explain how every word in a sentence fits, they begin asking questions. Although the class may be at the stage of clauses, a student might draw the following sentence (if the sentences are from randomly selected paragraphs, not every sentence will include subordinate clauses):

Invariably, a student will ask what "walking" is. If I were an eighth grade teacher, I would answer this question with something such as "It’s a gerundive. You’ll study those in ninth grade." John Holt has noted that students absorb a lot of knowledge even when we’re not teaching it. (See his discussion of spelling in "How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading.") And my own experience with college students is that such questions, answered in this way, usually mean that many students will already recognize gerundives when we get to them.

     There is one danger in such ahead-of-schedule questions -- teachers should not let themselves get drawn into long explanations. The purpose of the sequence is to introduce students to one new construction at a time and to have them fully relate it to the constructions they have already studied. If the class is working on clauses, then some of the students should be having problems recognizing clauses. (If none of the students has a problem, then the class should be reading Dostoevsky, discussing style, or playing baseball.) Explaining (as opposed to identifying) gerundives to such a class will therefore confuse some of the students, giving them what is sometimes called a "cognitive overload." Thus it may be best to answer requests for such explanations with an "I’ll be happy to explain that after class." Teachers will regularly find themselves deciding what to explain and what not to.
 
 

     Testing and grading is rarely discussed in books about teaching English: perhaps that is why there is so much reliance on national standardized tests. If all instruction occurred between one instructor and one student, then formal testing could be abolished -- the teacher could easily tell when the student was ready to go from addition and subtraction to multiplication and division. But since the average teacher is dealing with several subjects and about twenty-five students at a time, some testing and grading is required. Most of the work that students do with syntax should probably not be graded, and teachers actually need to give very few tests. (For readers interested in the problems involved in grading, the subject is discussed in more detail in Chapter Seven.)

     When I first started teaching grammar, I assigned a class of fourteen students one page of text in which they were to label the part of speech of every word. I have never been more bored than when I took those papers home and graded them. To add to my frustration, when the class met again, the students all wanted to go over the entire assignment orally. Never again, I promised myself, would I grade or correct such homework. And I kept my promise. It really doesn’t make sense to spend time reviewing it if the students are going to review it again in class. Nor does it make sense to require students who already can recognize the parts of speech to do a bunch of busy work. Now, I don’t care whether or not students do the homework assignments. As long as they can perform the analysis in class and pass any tests, I’m happy. If students want a grade for homework, they can grade themselves. I refuse to do it.

     Testing, however, is a different question. Since this approach is cumulative and arranged in stages, the students’ ability to comprehend one stage often depends on their mastery of a preceding one. To identify verbals, for example, students are told that "any verb that is not finite (that they would not underline twice) has to be a verbal." To begin to identify verbals (stages four and five), students thus need to rely on their mastery of stage two, subjects and finite verbs. Unless the teacher wants a class of frustrated students, it simply makes sense to test to be sure that most of the students can identify subjects and verbs before they are introduced to verbals.

     My experience has been that the best tests to serve this purpose are short, easily graded, and very informative. To test knowledge of subjects and verbs, for example, a teacher can take a randomly selected paragraph from the students’ texts, library books, or their own writing. Underline the subjects and verbs, and count the words that are underlined. This number serves as the base figure. In correcting and grading, count as an error every word that is underlined that should not be, and every word that isn’t and should be. This may sound rough, since theoretically some students may make more errors than there are base points and thus end up with a negative grade, but actually it isn’t rough and it stops students from underlining everything. What this grading procedure tends to produce is an inverted bell curve. Students who understand subjects and verbs will get most, if not all of them right, and they will underline few if any words that are not parts of subjects or verbs. Students who do not understand will make errors all over the place. Very few students will be in the middle.

     In spite of most teachers’ veneration of the bell curve, I would suggest that the inverted bell is pedagogically more helpful. As long as the grades on tests fall on an inverted bell curve, the teacher knows not only that instruction should continue, but also which students are having problems. Sooner or later, however, the inverted bell will disappear, the "A" side growing as the "F" side shrinks. The teacher can then decide when to use the results of the test as the reason for discontinuing formal instruction in subjects and verbs with the entire class. (Those students who still need help can get it in individual instruction.) As I will repeat in later chapters, the end of "formal" instruction should not be the end of the use of grammatical terminology. Whenever appropriate, and especially in discussing the students’ writing, teachers should make an effort to use the grammatical concepts that students have learned. How they do so will depend upon the teachers, but even the negative, marginal "Agr S&V" will be comprehensible to students who can identify the subjects and verbs. Still negative, but less so, would be such comments as "Could you use more interesting verbs?" or "Could you add more details in prepositional phrases?" The most fruitful comments are still, of course, the positive: "I love your choice of verbs!" "Great details in the p phrases!" Several sections in this book provide teachers with other suggestions for making positive comments about students’ use of grammar.

     Having suggested a test on which students can potentially receive negative scores, I must still deal with the question of "final" grades. I will leave to others the question of how much the grammar component should count in a class or course that is primarily not about grammar, i.e., "Should the grammar grade count for 5% or 15% of the student’s grade for fifth grade English? I must, however, deal with the question of how one determines the student’s grade for the grammar component itself. Since this approach to teaching is cumulative, and since students can get grades below zero on tests, simply averaging quiz grades will obviously not do -- students who begin with negative grades could never establish a decent average, even if they ended up getting perfect scores.

     In my grammar course for teachers, I have developed a way around this problem by disregarding all grades except three near the end of the semester. What counts, after all, is not what the students knew at the beginning of the course, but what they know at the end. Thus, near the end of the semester, I give two "exams," followed by a "final exam." These "exams" are substantially the same as the other tests, except that they are used to determine the students’ grades. Each student’s final grade is either the average of the two exams or the grade for the final, whichever is higher. This procedure gives students ample opportunity to demonstrate what they do know, and it is not unusual for a student who began with F’s to get an A in the course. The course grade thus reflects not the average work done by the student throughout the semester, but rather the student’s mastery of the material presented throughout the course.
 
 

     Although grading and testing are important and should be discussed, they are much less important than the teacher’s attitude. I might note that all of my degrees are in Russian Language and Literature, and as a college student I assumed that I would end up teaching the Russian language. I never dreamed that I would teach English grammar. My own memories of studying English grammar are distasteful, and when I first agreed to teach the course, I did so from a feeling of obligation and assumed that I was headed for a boring class. But even though I still teach courses in Russian literature as well as Freshman composition, I find no course as interesting and rewarding as my grammar course. Not every teacher will share my enthusiasm, but I would like to end the chapter with what I see as the reasons for mine.

     First, teaching grammar requires little outside preparation and very little time outside of class. The grammatical rules that have to be learned can be listed on a single page. For exercises, I usually use short essays written by students, essays that I have already typed and dittoed for discussion in my writing courses. As noted above, I never grade or even collect homework. Second, grading, both of tests and for the course, is objective, quick, and fair. 
Third, every student can master the material. One of the most frustrating things about teaching Freshman composition is that I occasionally get a student who does not have a prayer of passing the course. And more frequent are the students doomed to a D. Such students were apparently brought up in a totally oral culture, were not required to do any writing in high school, and even if they are willing to take advantage of tutoring, they are simply too far behind to meet the standards established for the course. Frequently, class discussions go right over the heads of these students. In the grammar course, the situation is quite different, even though the students have to cover all the constructions discussed in this book and some students begin the course by marking "is" as a preposition. Throughout the course, students regularly analyze sentences, and since the approach is cumulative, they include everything they have studied. Thus, even when the class is at stage five and studying noun absolutes and delayed subjects, the students mark the prepositional phrases, subjects, verbs, etc. For the faster students, such marking is automatic: they do it without thinking. But as they do it, the students who are having problems with finite verbs, or clauses, or whatever are receiving additional instruction directly related to their problem.

     I do not mean to say that no student has failed the course, for several have. But the failures can clearly be attributed to refusal to do homework or to follow directions. One of the directions, for example, is that if a student is having problems, he should analyze each sentence by looking for constructions in the order in which we study them. Thus he should mark all the prepositional phrases first, then the subjects, verbs and complements, then clauses, and then verbals. One student simply refused to follow this direction and insisted on looking for the construction that we were currently studying first. As a result, he would do such things as mark "having" in "The were having a good time" as a verbal. His problem, in other words, was not in understanding the grammar, but rather in following simple directions.

     The fourth reason for my enthusiasm is that syntax is systematic and the course is clearly goal-directed -- the students’ goal is to understand the system of syntax such that they can explain how every word fits. The problem of fragmentation was discussed above, and as we will see in later chapters, educational theorists such as Jerome Bruner persuasively argue that students perform better when they can clearly see and understand their goal. But in this approach to syntax, students not only quickly see how words are related in groups, they also experience an early sense of their own progress. Since approximately a third of the words in the average sentence are in prepositional phrases, the student who can understand such phrases is already one third of the way toward his goal. If we add subjects, verbs and complements, the student is over half way there. Such initial success is clear to the students and motivates their further progress.

     My own penchant for problem-solving may not be shared by everyone, but most people enjoy solving puzzles, from crosswords to Rubik’s cube to chess. Syntactic analysis is another form of puzzle-solving. Given a set of constructions and rules, the object of the "game" is to explain how the pieces fit. Each sentence is a new puzzle. In my grammar course we do not work, we play a game.

     My sixth reason is that the course is interdisciplinary. On one level, this means that the passages we examine may be on any topic. More important, we relate syntax to the psychology of language development, to  the psychology of the reading process, to logic in its philosophical sense, and to rhetoric and stylistics. And teachers who want to can also get students involved in statistical research (and all the problems and rewards of statistics and computer programming).

     But my major reason is the attitude of the majority of the students at the end of the course. A business major remarked, "I finally understand grammar and know why it is important." An English major, a senior, complained that she wished she had taken the course earlier so that she could have applied it to the study of stylistics and have better understood what was said about various writers’ styles. In no other course that I teach have I sensed the feeling of confidence and satisfaction expressed by many of the students in my grammar course. You can’t intimidate the students who have passed that course by telling them that their sentences are "too long" or "too short." They will count the number of words per main clause and find you numerous published writers who use clauses just as long or short. You cannot tell them not to begin a sentence with "but," for they will show you such sentences in the writing of many an acclaimed stylist. For these students, authority no longer resides in the teacher or in the grammar books: it resides in their own heads and in their ability to analyze what they read and write. Isn’t that the purpose of an education?

1.Are the teachers in your schools satisfied with the preparation they were given in college for teaching grammar? If they remember the professor who taught them, do they know what department (English, Education, Linguistics) she was in?

2.Although I have emphasized "knowing why," students obviously also need to "know that" and "know how." Select two or three assignments that students are given, and discuss the extent to which they are "that," "how," and/or "why" oriented?

3.Are some teachers threatened by students’ questions? I once observed a student teacher in a class during which the students, who had read "Dr. Heidigger’s Experiment," saw a film version of it. After the film, the teacher attempted to "lead" the discussion by posing a series of questions, none of which were attracting much response from the students. At one point, one of the boys raised his hand and asked why there was no butterfly at the end of the film, when there was one at the end of the story. The teacher’s response was "I don’t know the answer to that, but could you answer my last question ...?" The student’s question was thus cut off, and for the rest of the period, he simply looked out the window. (Fortunately for him, he was in the row by the window. I was stuck in the center of the room.)

I have described this episode because it is an example of a teacher being threatened by a question. The attitude seems to be that questions must have answers, and if the teacher does not have the answer, then the question cannot be important.

4.What do the teachers see as their main problems in teaching grammar? Any teacher who says that there are none has not given the question much thought. Problems may range from lack of preparation, to poor classroom materials, to the differences in the preparation of the children entering their classrooms.

5.How are the students graded for their work in grammar? How should they be graded?