This chapter, like the preceding and the following, is organized by the sequence in which constructions should be taught. As chapters four and five indicated, the sequence is not my own idea: it evolves from everything we know about the natural development of syntactic structures in children. I would like to go further, however, and suggest that, ideally, constructions might be taught at the following grade levels:

3rd grade prepositional phrases
4th grade compounding; subjects and verbs, 
       adjectives & adverbs
5th grade subjects, verbs, and complements
6th grade subjects, verbs, and complements,  ellipsis
7th grade subordinate clauses, retained complements
8th grade subordinate clauses, appositives, 
       nouns used as adverbs, direct address
9th grade verbals: gerunds and gerundives
10th grade verbals: infinitives; delayed subjects,
       noun absolutes, interjections

     Readers of early drafts of this book, who found my suggestions about grade levels quite controversial, raised several interesting questions, each of which deserves a response:

a) Am I attempting to dictate what teachers should do and when?

     Educated, informed teachers are by far the best judges of what students should be taught and when. Currently, however, if we ask teachers why they teach students to recognize subjects and predicates in fourth grade, we either get a quizzical look, or a response such as "That’s what’s in the textbooks," or "The state requires it." Currently, teachers do not have reasons for teaching traditional grammar in the traditional way; they have a mandate, a mandate based on "That’s how it’s always been done" and on a grammar that is, as we noted in Chapter One, based on Latin, not English syntax.

     My suggested sequence, therefore, is not intended to dictate anything, but perhaps Mother Nature is. All I am trying to do is to suggest the logical implications of everything we know about natural syntactic development. My suggested sequence includes several components that teachers could move, and it is, moreover, strictly limited to what I have defined as "syntax": it does not include any of the rules of usage, or formation of tenses, etc., all of which I leave to the judgement of teachers and other specialists in primary education.

b) Shouldn’t the study of grammar be limited to a period of no more than two years?

     This question, I have to admit, surprised me. I didn’t think that anyone would believe that instruction in grammar should be limited to two (or even five) years. College Freshmen, however, frequently note that they studied "grammar" in tenth grade, offering that as an excuse for why they have since forgotten it. Their comments and this question made me realize that in practice, if not in theory, current instruction is often actually limited to one or two years of the curriculum.

     The problem with such an approach is that natural syntactic development is itself not limited to one or two years of a student’s life: if the subordinate clause naturally develops around grade seven, and appositives around grade ten, during which two years are we going to teach syntax? As preceding chapters have indicated, syntactic "growth" is an extremely slow, protracted process. Attempts to accelerate or otherwise interfere with that process are typically American. Indeed, European cognitive psychologists have labeled them "the American Fallacy." The sequence suggested above, on the other hand, attempts to mirror natural development. Subordinate clauses are listed for grades seven and eight because that’s when the research tells us that subordinate clauses naturally blossom, etc.

     There are still other reasons for spreading out the process. First, different attitudes are required on the students’ part at different stages in the sequence. High school students are not particularly responsive to learning lists, and many of them will simply refuse to do so. As a result, they will end up marking "of" as a verb. Third graders, on the other hand, are generally more receptive to instruction that includes pure memorization and recognition. Second, assimilation requires time: that is why the natural developmental process is itself so lengthy. Since we know that the unconscious natural development of syntactic structures spans a period of almost two decades (from birth to high school), can we really expect students to get a good conscious grasp of the system in a period of two years, years during which they may be in the middle of the natural process?

c) Isn’t third grade too early to begin the study of grammar?

     The question about starting in third grade was more common, and is more interesting, although no more valid. One reviewer, for example, wrote:

Prepositional phrases are positively defined by the presence of a preposition accompanied by a noun acting as object and by a modifying relationship with some other structure in the sentence. In other words, a student cannot know what a prepositional phrase is without knowing at least the concept of noun, or to move it back one step more, the minimal distinction between word and phrase, because a prepositional phrase is also defined as not being a clause.

     Third graders are not usually required to write very much, and I have been unable to get good samples of their writing, but here is an example from a fourth grader’s journal:

I live in a brick hous on duane Dr. There are three room living room, kitchen, and bathroom. There are four bedrooms. I share a bedroom with my sister Cyndee. I have a basement with a workshop laundry roomm and famly room. I have a back yard with a hammock and clothes line and an ugly ever green bush. And in my front yard I have some flowers and bushes.

     Prepositional phrases could, of course, be postponed until fourth grade, but that would make fourth grade rather difficult. My suggestion that fourth graders learn to recognize subjects and verbs in their own writing is no more difficult than what most of them currently are asked to do: underline subjects and "predicates." In fact, it is easier, since currently many students get confused by the prepositional phrases in their exercises.

d) To what extent would the sequence I am proposing supplement or replace current pedagogical practice?

     The sequence I am suggesting is ideally intended to replace all current instruction in syntax. Overall, it would require far less time than that devoted to current instruction. Currently, for example, students are usually given instruction in subjects and verbs and then numerous exercises in which they are asked to identify the subjects and verbs. In their later years of school, their teachers often feel that the students do not understand subjects and verbs, so the teachers repeat the instruction and students do more time studying subjects and verbs and filling in exercises. The premise of this approach, on the other hand, is that constructions are not taught until students are ready for them, and that once they have been taught, they continue to be used as tools every year, indeed in every exercise in which students study syntax. Students would never, for example, look for the participles in a sentence without first finding all the prepositional phrases, subjects and verbs, and subordinate clauses, primarily to eliminate these constructions from being considered as participles, but also as an automatic review.

     Several considerations make it difficult to estimate exactly how much time such instruction would consume. Some of these are obvious: slower students take longer than quicker ones. Some, however, are less obvious and more difficult to assess. If, for example, an eighth grade class was discussing a set of essays that they had written and much of the discussion generated by the students involved main-clause length and arrangement of subordinate clauses, should this time be considered instruction in grammar or in writing? If students are discussing Shakespeare’s "That Time of Year," and a student argues that "death’s second self" has to mean "night" because the two words are related through apposition, is this time devoted to instruction in literature or in grammar?

     Perhaps the best way to assess the time required would be to phrase the question as How much time would it take the average third grader to be able to look at a short passage that he had written and identify the prepositions in it? Then, when this student gets into fourth, fifth, and sixth grades, how long would it take him to be able to learn to identify the subjects and verbs in his own writing? Imagine, for example, that a fourth grade teacher spent one class period, early in the year, introducing students to subjects and verbs. During the rest of the year, twice a week, class begins with the analysis of one sentence, taken from a classmember’s paper, the class finding first the prepositional phrases and then the subjects and verbs. If the sentence is on the board before the students enter, the exercise should take less than five minutes.

     Two weeks after the formal introduction, (thereby benefitting from four additional class exercises) students could be given homework consisting of five sentences, again preferably from their own writing, in which they were to find the prepositional phrases, subjects, and verbs. Teachers could opt to collect and grade these assignments, or to have the students correct them in class. Similar short homework assignments could be given every two weeks. During the alternate weeks, teachers might want to give a short quiz, again no more than five sentences. As soon as, to the teacher’s satisfaction, the majority of students have mastered the skill, formal classroom instruction should cease. Some students, of course, would still be having trouble and need help, but there is no reason to make everyone repeat what soon becomes boring. Although formal instruction would cease, syntax should not be forgotten. Most of the exercises suggested in this chapter are actually exercises in writing. The extent to which a teacher would use them would depend on the interests of the teacher and the students. Depending on the students and teacher, the time required for formal instruction in syntax in fourth grade would thus range between ten to thirty minutes per week.

     The level of mastery developed by students in a school at one grade level would affect the time required for the study of grammar at the next grade level. If, for example, a school decided that every fourth grader should be able to identify the subjects and verbs in his or her own writing, then the odds are that fourth graders would spend thirty minutes per week on formal syntax. As a result, however, when they got to fifth grade, they would have to add only one construction to their repertoire, the complement. Formal instruction could be organized the same as in fourth grade: an introduction, a single sentence on the board twice a week, etc. If they have mastered subjects and verbs, students will find this part of the analysis automatic. It will generate few questions and require little time. What time is required will be focused on complements, which will thus be mastered more quickly. Again, as soon as the teacher feels that the students have met the expectations of the school, formal instruction should cease.

     Since the question I am addressing is that of time required, perhaps we can now phrase it as how long, given this rate of instruction, will it take an average class of fifth graders, students who have already learned to identify subjects and verbs, to learn to identify and distinguish predicate nouns, predicate adjectives, and direct and indirect objects in their own writing? Do we really need a research to test this? Or does common sense tell us that the brightest students will master it within two weeks, that average students will take at most fifteen, and that, if the teacher continues to give students a sentence twice a week, even the slowest will probably grasp the concepts by the end of the year?

     Several aspects of the sequence presented in this chapter have been suggested in earlier chapters, but they bear repeating. First, the sequence can be compressed into three years, or even, as in the grammar course I taught for future teachers, into a single college semester. Such compression is harmful: the more compressed the sequence, the less time students have to assimilate each item and the less time they have to apply what they are learning to their own writing and reading. In my grammar course for teachers, I can use none of the exercises discussed in this chapter simply because many students begin by not knowing what a preposition or verb is, and they must complete the course with an understanding of noun absolutes. All of our time is devoted to analyzing sentences, and we have none left for writing. As already noted, in my Freshman composition courses, we cover everything up to subordinate clauses in two to three weeks. The problem here is that many college Freshmen are unwilling to sit down and familiarize themselves with a list of prepositions. As a result, they cannot recognize prepositional phrases, and, as a result of that they have trouble finding subjects and verbs, and, as a result of that, they get totally lost with clauses. If the sequence is spread out, however, students in third grade would have an entire year to familiarize themselves with prepositions and prepositional phrases.

     Second, the approach is cumulative. Students focus on prepositional phrases in third grade, but they continue to place parentheses around such phrases whenever they are involved in analyzing sentences. Thus the student who cannot assimilate prepositional phrases in third grade has continued instruction in fourth, fifth, sixth, etc.

     Third, the approach is conceptual, not categorical. The third grade student who writes "My daddy was talking about when we went fishing." will not be able to analyze "about when we went fishing" as a prepositional phrase. Students should be expected to make mistakes in analyzing complex forms of simple constructions. But their concepts will expand as they come to understand other constructions: the seventh grade student will realize that a prepositional phrase may be more than just a preposition with a simple noun or pronoun as its object.

     Fourth, this sequence does not address some aspects of grammar, notably usage, tenses, and pronoun reference, all of which should be taught at some point. At which point is a question that I leave to teachers of grades three through twelve.

     Fifth, some teachers will feel that many constructions are introduced too late in this sequence. My response to this objection is twofold. Personal experience suggests to me that we have been introducing too many concepts far too early. When he was in second grade, my son brought home his English assignment -- he had to select "its" or "it’s" to fill in the blanks in a series of very simple, paired sentences. He didn’t really understand what he was doing, but somehow he muddled through the assignment. I asked him why he put "its" in one of the blanks: he pointed to "it’s" and said, "Because I put that one in the other blank." I couldn’t argue, but I did have to wonder why so many of my own college Freshmen have trouble with "its" and "it’s." As far as I know, second grade is the only time when students receive instruction in the use of "its" and "it’s": after that, all they get are red marks on their papers when they use the wrong one. My first response, therefore, is that if we are attempting to teach grammar as concepts rather than as categories, perhaps we should delay instruction until students are capable of understanding the concepts. My second response is that the sequence outlined above basically coincides with what we know of the development of these constructions in students’ writing. As was noted in Chapter Four, all the research suggests that students begin to master the subordinate clause in seventh grade, a process which may last through ninth (and beyond for some students). If, therefore, clauses should be the focus of seventh and eighth grades, the verbals must come later, since they are most easily learned, as the previous chapter suggested, through a process of elimination after subordinate clauses have been bracketed.

     The following discussion, it should be noted, is top-heavy, i.e., much more space and detail is included in the discussion of prepositional phrases than in that of other constructions. The reason for this is simple: the discussion of prepositions includes the presentation of a method and approach that can be continued, with different constructions, of course, in the following grades. Some repetition is therefore unavoidable, but I have attempted to keep it as minimal as possible. I have also addressed the question of "grading" throughout the chapter. Some teachers believe in grading more than others, but even those who believe in it have always seen it as a problem, especially when one considers grading the grammar in a student’s own writing. Thus many teachers feel uncomfortable teaching grammar without a textbook that includes an answer key. As I hope my comments suggest, grading is really both simple and fair if we concentrate on one or two items at a time.
 
 

     Most kindergartens have the letters of the alphabet posted large on the classroom walls; third grade classrooms should have the prepositions. Of all the parts of speech, prepositions are the most concrete in the sense that they are limited in number and do not change form. When a third grade student finds an "in," "of," or "with" in her writing or reading, she can be certain that she is dealing with a preposition. Some prepositions, of course, also function as subordinate conjunctions, but as we will see, they do not create a problem if the teacher doesn’t let them.

     Supplemental exercises for helping third graders master prepositional phrases are limited only by teachers’ imaginations, but basically they fall into three categories -- filling-in-the-blanks, finding them in their reading and their own writing, and using them in their writing. Students should probably do some of each, not because the students need them to master the concept of prepositional phrases, but rather because the exercises indicate to students that their study of syntax is related to their reading and writing.

Filling-in-the-Blanks

     Fill-in-the-blank exercises currently have a poor reputation, and probably deservedly since they are associated with the proscriptive, Grandgrind, correction-of-errors approach to grammar that has been shown to be of little effect. But if they are used with imagination, such exercises can be interesting, challenging, and effective. All that the teacher needs to do is to find some appropriate reading material for the students, then replace the prepositions, their objects, or both, with blanks. Ditto the paper, and have the students fill in the blanks, but don’t forget the most important part of the exercise. Read, or have the students read, some of the versions to the class. As students (and teachers) will soon see, the exercise is not simply an exercise in grammar, but also one in creativity and whatever else the teacher wants to make it. I have done similar exercises with college Freshmen, in which I replace not only prepositional phrases but also adjectives and adverbs with blanks. One of my favorites is based on the opening paragraph of Eudora Welty’s "A Worn Path." Students receive the hand-out shown in Figure 7-1. 
 

The original is:
 

It was December -- a bright frozen day in the early morning. Far out in the country there was an old Negro woman with her head tied in a red rag, coming along a path through the pinewoods. Her name was Phoenix Jackson. She was very old and small and she walked slowly in the dark pine shadows, moving a little from side to side in her steps, with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grandfather clock. She carried a thin, small cane made from an umbrella, and with this she kept tapping the frozen earth in front of her. This made a grave and persistent noise in the still air, that seemed meditative like the chirping of a solitary little bird.

     The following students’ versions, written in class in twenty minutes, suggest the variety of possible responses:
 

1. It was December -- a cool dark day by the big lake. Far out in the cool darkness there was a small plump woman with green flowers tied into her grungy black hair, coming down a foot from the neck. Her name was Helen Kelbaughski. She was very polite and nice and she walked slowly through the dark sleazy woods, moving a little towards the lake with caution and with careful steps, with the much heaviness and lightness of an animal with a dying hunger. She carried a long, black cane made from an alloy, and through this she kept tapping the dark earth in front of her. This made a dusty and scraping noise through the wooded area, that seemed meditative like the mountain lion of a cool dark forest.

2. It was December -- a cold dreary day in the small town. Far out in the wild country there was an old crippled woman with silver bells tied to her large black shoes, coming towards a bridge over the lake. Her name was Betty Greg. She was very tall and skinny and she walked hunching over the large black shoes, moving a little in time to the sound of tinkling steps, with the awkward heaviness and lightness of a body with weighted shoes. She carried a dull, black cane made of an oak, and with this she kept tapping the brown earth in front of her. This made a soft and rhythmical noise along with the belled shoes, that seemed meditative like the bells of an old catholic church.

3. It was December -- a very cold day throughout the empty park. Far out from the trees there was a very beautiful woman with dark glasses tied around a skinny neck, coming from a house in the park. Her name was Joan Herlihy. She was very slim and neat and she walked swiftly through the "dark" ominous park, moving a little from side to side with quick steps, with the obvious heaviness and lightness of a person with a physical handicap. She carried a big, brown cane made from a ?, and with this she kept tapping the frozen earth in front of her. This made a repetitive and echoing noise in the empty park, that seemed meditative like the sounds of a beautiful red woodpecker.

4. It was December -- a cold dreary day in the run down neighborhood. Far out in a distant galaxy there was a loony goony woman with bad spells tied with terribly smelling porkchops, coming from a spacecase in the north. Her name was Banana Head. She was very crazy and weird and she walked pervertedly through the entire bizarre galaxy, moving a little with leaps with jumps with cocky steps, with the terrible heaviness and lightness with a wacko in a similar galaxy. She carried a huge, gigantic cane made in a factory, and with this she kept tapping the small earth in front of her. This made a funny and distinctive noise on the small earth, that seemed meditative like the drown of a junky burned out engine.

Some of the constructions in each version are awkward, and writer number three left a "?" in one blank, but each writer basically fulfilled the assignment. Obviously, this is more than just an assignment in grammar -- it is material for a lesson (or lessons) in writing. As such, what I like about it is that so much is already given. Students do not have to search for a topic: it is already given, but it is general enough that each student can interpret it differently. Nor do students have to worry about "how much" they should write: that too is given, as is the basic structure of the writing. I am not, of course, suggesting that this is a major or necessary assignment for teaching writing, but I would argue that since the assignment gives students so much, they can do more such assignments or do them more quickly. Students do not need to spend time searching for a topic, inventing something to say about it, etc.

     But what do students get from such an assignment? If they can’t hear or read what other students have done, they probably do not get much. But if they do, then there is literally no inherent limit to where their versions may lead. Without any prompting from a teacher at all, the first sense of the students is amazement at the variety of responses. Most students (and teachers) don’t realize that the passage can be "interpreted" so variously.

     Depending on the assignment and the responses received, the instructor can then lead students to a more searching discussion of the differences. For one, there is the role that prepositional phrases play in establishing the setting ("by the big lake," "in the small town," "throughout the empty park," "in the run down neighborhood"). Even at the college level, most students’ narratives occur in a void. Discussion of the prepositional phrases thus might lead to a discussion of setting, and third grade teachers can even have their students each draw a picture to accompany their written version. Then there is the question of physical description: "with green flowers tied into her grungy black hair," "with silver bells tied to her large black shoes," "with dark glasses tied around a skinny neck," "with bad spells tied with terribly smelling pork-chops." In both setting and physical description, there is the question of how the different versions appeal to different senses -- sound, sight, smell, etc. There is the question of tone and how the details support that tone. And then there is the question of figurative language: meditative "like the mountain lion of a cool dark forest," "like the bells of an old Catholic church," "like the sounds of a beautiful red woodpecker," "like the drone of a junky burned-out engine."

     Third-graders need not, perhaps should not, be introduced to all these critical terms, but they can discuss the ideas. ("What words and phrases show where the lady was?") An added advantage of such exercises is that they quickly demonstrate to students that the students do have interesting ideas and things to say. Teachers might want to vary what is left blank, perhaps beginning with exercises in which only the prepositions are blanked out, then only the objects, then both, and then entire phrases, including adjectives.

Finding Prepositional Phrases in their Reading and Writing

     We must, at the earliest possible point in their education, demonstrate to students that what they are learning about grammar is relevant to their own reading and writing. There is probably no better way to do this than to have the students make the application directly. Teachers can select and prepare dittoes of paragraphs from the students’ textbooks and, more importantly, from appropriate library books so that the students can place parentheses around each prepositional phrase:

     Big Billy Goat Gruff said, "To cross the stream, we must go (over a bridge.) (Under the bridge) lives a big ugly troll (with big eyes and a long nose.) He likes to eat billy goats. And he does not like anyone to go (over his bridge.)

     The billy goat passage also demonstrates two problems with these exercises, but again these are problems that should and can be easily solved by the teachers and school system -- they are not problems for the students. The first involves the interference caused by "to" used in infinitives. Some school systems might want to insist that third grade students be able to distinguish nouns and pronouns from verbs, and thus might count all prepositional phrases that begin with "to." My own inclination would be to save the noun/verb distinction until fourth grade and therefore to ignore, when grading, any marks put around a "to" construction. Students can simply be told that "to" may or may not be a preposition and that they will learn to make the distinction when they study nouns and verbs.

     Compound objects of prepositions ("with big eyes and a long nose") present another question to be decided by the school system. The concept of compounding, if not the term, can be introduced in third grade. Students can, for example, simply be told that "if something means `with big eyes and *with* a long nose,’ then the closing parenthesis goes after nose." If it is decided to hold compounding until fourth grade, then teachers can accept variant answers--"(with big eyes and a long nose)" or "(with big eyes) and a long nose"--as correct. Students who give the latter answer will have no trouble reformulating their concept later, just as they reformulate "He cutted the paper" to "He cut the paper."

     As is the nature of grammarians, I have been emphasizing the problems and exceptions, but it bears repeating that the majority of the phrases that third grade students will meet will be simple and easily recognized. As instruction should go beyond the mechanical placing of parentheses and grading, students can discuss, if not every exercise, then at least some of them, exploring how the writer uses the phrases. They might, for example, count the number of such phrases per sentence. Their attention should also be directed to the kinds of information that the phrases add to each sentence. Most often, these will be details of time, place, and physical description.

     In addition to studying the use of such phrases in published writers, students can study it in their own previous writing, in that of their predecessors, and/or in that of students in grades ahead of them. If, for example, the students have been writing a journal, they might be asked to count all the prepositions they used in the previous week’s writing. The students could work in small groups, checking each other’s counting and calculations, leaving the teacher free to resolve any problems encountered by a group. Students might also find it interesting to compare their performance on an assignment with that of their predecessors or with that of students in grades ahead of them. If the class consists of twenty-five students divided into five groups, the teacher or an aid could prepare five copies of each of the paragraphs to be analyzed and distribute them among the five groups, each student in a group getting copies of the same paragraphs. Each group could then analyze its papers and calculate its results, and the class could then combine the figures for a class average.
 

Using Prepositional Phrases in their Writing

     The ultimate goal of instruction in syntax is to improve students’ reading comprehension and their writing. This final type of exercise should have the most direct influence on students’ writing, but it should probably be preceded by some fill-in-the-blank and analysis exercises so that the students are fairly comfortable with prepositions and their phrases. In this last type of exercise, students are first asked to do a piece of writing. This can be collected, read, commented on, and whatever else the teacher may wish to do with it. But the papers are then returned to the students, who are asked to REVISE the paper by adding prepositional phrases. There are a number of ways in which the students can be directed to make these revisions.

1. They can be asked to revise so that the total number of prepositions in their passage is 10, 15, etc.

2. They can be asked to revise such that they add five, ten, etc. prepositions.

3. They can be given a mini-list of prepositions and asked to revise such that they use each a specified number of times, i.e., "with" - two times, "in" - three, "during" - once, etc.

     Since third-grade students already know English, they are not going to add prepositions to their writing without adding some objects as well. Later in the year, teachers may wish to insist on the addition of full prepositional phrases, but when they first begin such exercises, students should be given full credit for adding "down," for example, even if their addition is only to "He fell." : "He fell down." Likewise, I can see no reason for criticizing the student who adds a full sentence to the original in order to add a preposition that doesn’t seem to want to fit in any of the originals. The object of the assignment is not to create a mold or straight-jacket, but rather to help the students increase their syntactic fluency and to help them realize that they can revise by inserting material into their original sentences. As for grading, teachers can assign "points" for each preposition used, or the completed assignment might simply be recorded with a checkmark.

Time Requirements

     Since short fill-in-the-blank exercises can require as little as ten minutes of class time, during the first ten weeks of third grade, students could easily do one or two of them a week (either instead of, or in addition to, the two sentences per week discussed above). They are also relatively easy to correct and/or grade. Some schools might even consider passing the papers to the fourth grade, where groups of students could "correct and/or grade" them, thereby reinforcing the fourth graders’ understanding of such phrases and of their own progress. (The fourth grade students could work in small groups, passing the papers around the group.) The middle of the school year could focus on the analytical exercises, which are also brief and easy to correct. The writing exercises might best be concentrated in the last part of the year, perhaps once a week. Writing exercises require more time, as do discussions of fill-in-the-blank and analyzed passages,  but this time is not devoted exclusively to "grammar." Students should be discussing the effects of the grammar on detail, tone, etc. Often these discussions will stray far from grammar, but if the students are interested and are discussing the writing, what more can teachers ask for?

     Having discussed writing only in relation to grammar, I should emphasize that most of students’ writing should NOT be directly related to grammar. Students, even third grade students, should be writing in school every day, if not for homework, then either in journals, or in response to stories or their other subjects. No one who likes writing associates the act of writing with grammar, and it is extremely important that we not create such an association for our students. Grammar can, however, be associated with revision. In suggesting exercises for getting students to use prepositional phrases in their own writing, I did not suggest that students be told to "write a story in which you use ten prepositions." The story should be written first, collected, and then handed back for a second, separate assignment of adding the phrases. Separating the assignments by collecting the papers between them assures that students will NOT be thinking of the prepositions they have to add when they should be concentrating on the act of writing.
 
 

     The approach taken in fourth grade need not differ significantly from that in third. With adjectives and adverbs, for example, which might be started in fourth or fifth grade, students can start with fill-in-the-blank exercises, progress to labeling adjectives and adverbs in their own writing and in short reading passages, and then go on to revising their writing by adding a set number of adjectives or adverbs. As always in analyzing or revising their own writing, students should do a writing assignment first, as an assignment completely unrelated to their study of grammar. Although the study of adjectives might begin in third grade, the study of adverbs should not begin before students have learned to recognize verbs.

Subjects and Verbs

     The most creative way for students to learn to recognize subjects and verbs is probably through well-designed fill-in-the-blank exercises. Short short stories with blanks for most of the subjects, verbs, or both invite students to use their imaginations. Teachers might wish to precede such exercises with written examples, or better yet, with an exercise or two done by the class as a group. In early exercises, students might supply only subjects, then only verbs, then both. If some of these exercises are based on stories the students will later read in class, they will be able to compare their own versions with the original. Here, for example, is the opening of "Rabbit’s New Rug," by Judy Delton, with blanks in place of the subjects:

     __________ had a new rug in his house. The __________ had just delivered it. The __________ had large red tulips on it, and small yellow daisies. __________ had green leaves and light blue snapdragons. ___________ clapped his paws together. "My new __________ is so pretty, __________’ll call my friends over to see it."

     Rabbit had a new rug in his house. The Flora Floor Store had just delivered it. The rug had large red tulips on it, and small yellow daisies. It had green leaves and light blue snapdragons. Rabbit clapped his paws together. "My new rug is so pretty, I’ll call my friends over to see it."

     Oh, how Peter __________ he __________ _________! He __________ a boy playing with his dog. Whenever the boy __________, the dog __________ straight to him. Peter __________ and __________ to whistle, but he __________n’t. So instead he __________ to turn himself around -- around and around he __________ . . . faster and faster . . .

     Oh, how Peter wished he could whistle! He saw a boy playing with his dog. Whenever the boy whistled, the dog ran straight to him. Peter tried and tried to whistle, but he couldn’t. So instead he began to turn himself around -- around and around he whirled . . . faster and faster . . .

     As for reading, such exercises focus students’ attention on the importance of CONTEXT. Once the student has filled in the early blanks, his responses limit his later choices, be it because he has established a season of the year, or the age or sex of a character. One of the things that specialists in reading tell us is that poor readers fail to establish such contexts: they do not limit their expectations and therefore do not anticipate the possible directions which a text may take. Stated differently, poor readers fail to attempt an integration or interpretation in the course of reading. As a result, they do not thread through the ideas but leave each isolated. Having finished, they have worked their way through a series of words without comprehending what they mean as a unit.

     The improvement to vocabulary will result not from the exercises themselves but from class discussion of the various responses:

 around and around he whirled
 around and around he went
 around and around he spun
 around and around he danced

     Fill-in-the-blank exercises might be the first step toward a final goal of fourth grade students -- the ability to underline the subjects and verbs in a typical short passage written by one of their peers. Here again exercises can be short, requiring no more than five minutes to complete in class. Another five or ten minutes might usually be devoted to "correcting" them in class, with the students exchanging papers or even correcting their own. Teachers could follow students’ progress by collecting and grading a short passage once every two weeks. Most students won’t find such exercises particularly interesting, but they will do them, and their enthusiasm will be increased when they are asked to underline the subjects and verbs in their own writing.

     Every human being is more interested in his own ideas and creations than in the ideas of others. Students will therefore naturally find it more interesting to analyze their own writing than to analyze the paragraphs supplied by the teacher. Such exercises not only make grammar relevant, they convince the student that what she is learning will assist her in reading and writing in the real world. Paragraphs and sentences chosen by teachers are often much too simple. Students realize that they can analyze these simple sentences, but they also realize that they cannot transfer that skill to their other reading and writing. But if they are analyzing their own writing, then the teacher can not possibly have "pre-selected" the passages.

     Correcting such self-analyzed assignments is more time-consuming, both in and out of class, but it is well worth it. In class, students could work in groups of three or four, passing the papers around the group, with the teacher circulating to help if questions arise. Since the students will be working with papers that they have already written, teachers might wish to add "revision" to the underlining assignment: in the process of underlining their subjects and verbs, each student might be asked to replace two, three, etc. subjects and/or verbs in their original simply by crossing it out and writing the replacement above it. In effect, this combines the fill-in-the-blank exercise with the students’ own writing and starts all the students toward an understanding, perhaps even the habit, of revision. The complaint, common even among college teachers of Freshman English, that most students consider revision to be nothing more than recopying, would disappear if most students were to do exercises such as this one in fourth grade and then continue similar ones throughout their schooling.
 

Compounding

     Compounding is a concept that fourth grade students can master. In analyzing sentences, they will have seen subjects, verbs, and objects of prepositions joined by "and," and probably by "or" and "but." They can learn that "and," "or," and "but" are "compounding conjunctions," and that any of the things (prepositional phrases, subjects, verbs) that they have learned and all the things that they will learn in the future can be compounded. If the students are analyzing their own writing, the question of compounding will probably arise quite naturally as one of the students is bound to say, "Can a verb have more than one subject?"

Other Writing Exercises

     Most of the time, writing and grammar should be kept separate -- students should write daily, but they should analyze some of their own writing days after it has been written. But every few weeks, students might attempt what I call "stretching exercises." Here again students can work with their own writing or with a passage selected by the teacher, but the exercise differs in that students are asked to add certain constructions without adding more sentences. Students can be given passages shorn of adjectives, of adverbs, of prepositional phrases, or even of compound subjects and verbs, and then be asked to insert a specified number of adjectives, phrases, etc., or a combination thereof. This is the grammatical equivalent of sentence-combining, but it forces the students to develop their perceptual abilities as well as their syntactic. Instead of being given:

and asked to create "It is a big, white house," the student is given simply

It is then up to the student to decide if the house is "big and white," or "small and green." In a longer passage, the options are even more interesting:

Asked to add two adjectives and a prepositional phrase to these three sentences, some students will pile them all on "house," "boy," or "sister":

Other students will spread the modifiers out evenly:

Once again the discussion of such passages should go beyond the grammar. The difference in these two versions reflects an important principle which might be labeled "verbal density": the more important a topic, the more words devoted to it. The first version emphasizes the house, the boy and his sister being apparent afterthoughts.

     Jerome Bruner suggests that any idea, properly prepared, can be learned at almost any age. As teachers, however, we have not only not sufficiently prepared the concepts, we have inadequately taught the relationships among them. The concept of verbal density, for example, relates not just to words in individual sentences, but to entire papers. Isn’t it our job as teachers to help students see this interrelationship? Why, then, do most college Freshmen not understand the principle? Most composition textbooks tell students to organize their ideas from least important to most. In some cases, an ordering principle is obvious: the death of an individual is considered, by most people, to be less important than the death of a thousand. But in the majority of cases, no such inherent logic is apparent. "How," students annually ask me, "can they tell which idea their reader will consider most important?" The answer is obvious, given the principle of verbal density: whatever they have the most to say about is the most important. If the later paragraphs in a paper become shorter, if there is less development of each of the ideas, then the writer has organized poorly. This principle of verbal density can be introduced as early as fourth grade.

     Teachers who value creativity might wish to refine the preceding exercise by replacing some of the key words with blanks:

Students are now free to use their imaginations: house, tree, hole, swamp. Having filled in the blanks, the students can proceed to add whatever constructions have been assigned. Discussions of these papers will probably be even more interesting and lively.
 

Subjects, Verbs, and Complements

     The only syntactic construction that need be added to the students’ analytical understanding of grammar in fifth grade is the complement in its four variations. Syntactic analysis can continue as in third and fourth grade, but it might now be made even a daily occurrence, with the students quickly analyzing a single sentence written on the board by the teacher. Such daily exercise would require only five or ten minutes, short enough not to bore the students who find it easy, frequent enough to help those who are having trouble. The sentences, if taken from the students’ text and library books, will be a little more difficult, as will be the analysis of the students’ own writing. (O’Donnell and Hunt found the average main clause of fourth graders to be 8.51 words long; that of fifth graders, 9.34. See O’Hare, 22.)

     The similarity to the math curriculum should not be forgotten. Children do addition problems in second, third, fourth, fifth and even sixth grade. Indeed they probably do too many such problems and eventually find them boring. The syntax exercises will be much less boring if the teacher approaches them in the right spirit. Whereas math has only ten digits to be added or subtracted, no matter how many columns, syntax carries thousands of words. Each sentence will thus be different, and teachers should as often as possible go beyond the syntax to a discussion of the meaning or creativity of the passage being analyzed. After two or three weeks devoted to exercises like those done in the fourth grade, teachers can introduce the complements.

     Fill-in-the-blank exercises may be helpful, but students may find it easier to attack complements through direct analysis. The only thing they have to learn is to ask the question "Verb what or whom?" and then distinguish zero complements from predicate nouns, predicate adjectives, indirect and direct objects. Most students find it helpful to be told, i.e.,to be required to learn, the simple rule that the verb "to be" ("is," "are," "was," "were") can never have an indirect or direct object -- any complement of "to be" has to be a predicate noun or predicate adjective. Throughout fifth grade students will thus add the complements to their analysis of sentence structure, both in their reading and in their own writing.

     At some point, probably fairly early in the school year, teachers might want to introduce a few sentences with predicate nouns that do not equal their subjects:

A basic skill that a teacher could explain to a child would be an instrument such as the guitar.

Other Writing Exercises

     Teachers may want to continue the stretching exercises suggested for fourth grade, but these exercises may be made even more specific. Suppose, for example, that students are asked to imitate the structure of:

  Mary in the manger,
  Mary before the cross,
  Mary in the garden,
       Wept.

     One exercise that perhaps all fifth graders should do involves dividing a complement into more specific components, thereby creating compounds. Students, even college students, have a tendency to use vague, general words: "He plants flowers." Better writers have a tendency to be more specific: "He plants roses, marigolds, and verbena." Not only is the second sentence more detailed, evoking a clearer mental picture, it also provides three "hooks" (roses, marigolds, and verbena) as opposed to one (flowers) for further elaboration. Much of the additional main-clause length of professional writers results from elaboration of such "hooks":

He plants red roses which usually become infested with aphids, yellow marigolds which blossom with no problems, and pink verbena, which rarely ever blooms.

     The number of "problems" in such an assignment should not be large: three or four should suffice. A student who can do three can do ten, but will be bored by the fifth. A student who cannot do three cannot do ten. Thus teachers might want to assign three short sentences for homework ("Mary likes dolls." "Bill likes sports." "Sam likes books.") If the students can do them, then go on to something else. If they have trouble, the exercise can be discussed in class and three more sentences can be assigned for the next day.
 

Subjects, Verbs, Complements, and Ellipsis

     Sixth grade students need not add anything to their conscious repertoire for syntactic analysis, although, as I suggest below, they might add ellipsis. But in addition to analyzing their own writing and that in their textbooks, sixth grade students might start analyzing the syntax in short poems and paragraphs from short stories. They might also, as I suggest at the end of this chapter, act as judges for writing done by fourth and/or fifth grade students. If it hasn’t been done before, teachers might also want to put more emphasis on how constructions are syntactically related, i.e., by having students draw arrows from prepositional phrases to the word modified.

     Ellipsis is one of those constructions that can be introduced anywhere between third and eighth grade. Younger students rarely use it, so it is best left for a later grade, and I have placed it in sixth simply because no other new concept need be introduced here. The best way to introduce it is probably to collect a few sentences from the students’ reading or writing that include ellipsed verbs

     Having been regularly underlining subjects and verbs since fifth grade, students will already have seen that many sentences include more than one subject/verb pattern, and since seventh grade is the beginning of students’ natural assimilation of subordinate clauses, it would seem to be the best year for introducing the concept. The basic definitions of clauses and the procedure for distinguishing them were discussed at length in the preceding chapter and need not be repeated here. Brackets, arrows and labels have several pedagogical advantages over traditional diagramming. A typed and dittoed worksheet, double or triple spaced, provides students all the room they need to analyze the sentences without recopying them. The students’ concept of prepositional phrases will continue to expand, as they will now be able to explain phrases that have noun clauses as their objects:

     Fill-in-the-blank exercises don’t work very well with clauses, but there are other exercises that do. Primarily, students should be engaged in the analysis and discussion of their own writing and reading. As they learn to distinguish clauses, they can also begin to do some analytical studies of their own, for example, counting the number of words per main clause in selections from their own writing, their reading, and, perhaps, the writing of students in grades ahead of and behind them. Such analysis should not be limited to numbers -- words per main clause is a primary measure of syntactic maturity, but it is not infallible. Many a student will write inflated balloons (See Chapter Eight.), and thus students should discuss the style of some of the passages that they numerically analyze. If, in fifth and sixth grades, students have been doing some exercises on moving main ideas into main slots, some of them will note the inflated balloons in the passages they are analyzing. Their comments will help the rest of the class see that maturity is a matter of quality as well as quantity.

     Analyzing their own writing as well as that of their peers is, with one exception, probably all the instruction in syntax that weaker writers need. (The exception is the rules for punctuating clauses. In the traditional approach, most students can memorize these rules but find them useless because they cannot distinguish the clauses in their writing.) Most weaker writers simply cannot see the difference between their sentences and those of their peers -- they don’t know why their sentences are poor. Since they can count, the numerical approach helps many of them understand. In itself, of course, this understanding will not automatically lead to longer sentences or more imaginative writing, but it will give the students a clear goal toward which they can work, whether it be the elimination of fragments, an increase in clause length, or less hot-air.

     Teachers may wish to use some additional writing exercises, three of which readily come to mind. The first, and most obvious, is sentence-combining. Teachers might take a short, published paragraph and rewrite it, making as many of the subordinate clauses as possible into main clauses. The students’ objective is then to subordinate as many of the main clauses as possible. As always, the most important part of the assignment is the ensuing discussion. Discussing the versions of an entire class is probably unmanageable, but the teacher can select two or three versions (plus the original). Rather than embarrass the weaker students, I take weaker versions from previous years and use them anonymously. If such weaker versions are not available, teachers might want to fake one, or perhaps compose a composite from the work of several students. 

     The second exercise is the reverse of the first -- have the students rewrite a passage that has subordinate clauses, making as many of them as possible main. Piaget, among others, has noted that true mastery of a concept includes "reversibility." As they "decompose" a passage, students will see the value of subordinate clauses. Another exercise is a more complex version of the "stretching" exercises -- give students a sentence or short passage composed entirely of main clauses and ask them to add a specific number of subordinate clauses.

      Later in the year, these "stretching" exercises might lead into what I call "Recipe Rosters" which  include constructions that students have already mastered:

Write a sentence with:
a.) one main clause with the pattern S/V/DO,
b.) one subordinate clause used as a direct object, 
c.) one subordinate clause used as an adjective, 
d.) three prepositional phrases used as adjectives, 
e.) one prepositional phrase used as an adverb, 
f.) ten adjectives, 
g.) and one adverb.

     Most of the students’ resulting sentences will not be elegant, but teachers should remember that neither are jumping-jacks. Exercises, academic or physical, are meant to stretch and build -- the elegance, if it appears at all, appears in the game, or, in the case of syntax, in the students’ actual writing. Teachers who haven’t used such exercises before also need to be reminded that they are time-consuming and mentally demanding. Unlike traditional "identification" exercises in which students are given twenty sentences and asked to identify the subordinate clauses, one of these syntactic puzzles is sufficient for an entire assignment.

Retained Complements

     Retained complements (complements after passive verbs) could be studied as early as fifth grade or as late as tenth. I would strongly suggest that they not be introduced in fifth, as that is when I suggest the introduction of regular complements. Retained complements are rarer than the irregular verb forms, and thus there is no reason for not letting students consider "song" as simply a direct object in "Mary was sung a song," just as we wait until they have mastered the regular "-ed" verb ending before we emphasize "cut" instead of "cutted." Recognition of retained complements depends on students’ ability to distinguish active from passive verbs, so it would be perfectly logical to combine the retained complement with the study of voice, provided that "voice" isn’t introduced too early. Able to distinguish voice, the student simply has to remember that whatever would be a predicate noun after an active verb is a "retained predicate noun" after a passive one, etc. The intricacies of retained complements have been discussed in the preceding chapter.
 
 

     Eighth grade is primarily a continuation of seventh. Teachers might want to put more emphasis on the active use of some of the rarer uses of noun clauses (such as the subject). Primarily, however, the students can simply continue to analyze sentences and short passages from their own writing and reading. Teachers might want to continue to organize this as one sentence a class, twice a week, but I would suggest that by eighth grade it would be better to have students work with complete paragraphs, perhaps one every two or three weeks. The problem in working with individual sentences is that we tend to select sentences of approximately the same length and syntactic texture for study, thereby giving students the impression that writing should consist of such "normative" sentences. In working with paragraphs, on the other hand, students are able to see that a long, complex sentence may be the lead (or the culmination) of a series of shorter ones. Students can also see and discuss how sentence length varies and how it is related to context.

     If the students have not yet done a statistical comparison of their own writing to that of their juniors and seniors, eighth grade would be a good time for the project. We already know, of course, what the results will be: the average number of words per main clause for a class of students will increase at each grade level. Letting students perform their own study, however, convinces the students that they are, in fact, growing. A school system might even want to have the students save some of their papers from earlier years so that the students could perform a statistical analysis of their own growth over the years.

     The additional constructions that I have included for eighth grade are relatively simple, and many school systems might want to introduce them earlier. It should be noted, however, that although young children use nouns as adverbs and direct address relatively frequently, the appositive is one of what Hunt calls the "late-blooming" constructions, and they probably should not be "forced" into students’ writing before their time. Once introduced, however, they can easily become components in "stretching" exercises.
 
 

     As the preceding chapter suggested, verbals are often reductions of clauses. It makes sense, therefore, to teach them after students have basically assimilated clause structure. Loban’s studies suggest that the weaker students are still developing clause structure in ninth grade, but the majority of ninth graders have it well in hand and are ready to move on. The easiest method for introducing all the verbals is through sentence analysis and the process of elimination. Students will have been underlining finite verbs since fifth grade. Now they are ready to learn that "any verb that is not underlined has to be a verbal -- a gerund, gerundive or infinitive." Verbals will have been appearing in the sentences they analyze more and more frequently as they approach ninth grade, and to a large degree they become obvious simply by being prominent constructions that the students can’t explain. My own students like visual aids and usually put a box around gerunds and gerundives. A box with only an arrow coming from it designates a gerundive; an arrow plus label ("S," "DO," etc.) indicates a gerund. The definitions and functions of gerunds and gerundives have been explained at length in preceding chapters, but here we might consider some exercises for having students use them in their writing.

     The two constructions can, of course, be added to the "Recipe Rosters," placed in sequence either immediately before or after the subordinate clauses in the exercise. Teachers might want to include some exercises that involve the use of the gerund as subject -- as the following chapter indicates, many students have problems with this construction. Another simple exercise is to give students two simple main clauses

and ask them to combine them, first by making one a subordinate clause:

then by making it a gerundive:

These exercises are perhaps too simple, but they will help students understand the interchangeability of some subordinate clauses and gerundives.

     The most productive assignment for gerundives is probably that involving revision -- returning a short paper that students have already written and asking them 1.) to revise it, 2.) to include in that revision a specified number of gerundives, and 3.) to place a box around each of the gerundives. The boxes make the syntactic component of the revision easy to grade, and the paper can also be graded for its intrinsic merit. Gerunds don’t fit such an assignment since their use depends more on the subject being written about than on the style of the writer. (Since gerunds are words that name actions, a paper about actions -- sports, for example, or any process -- will naturally evoke more of them.)
 
 

     Tenth grade can provide the final pieces of the syntactic puzzle. Having learned to recognize gerunds and gerundives by their participial form, students can master infinitives by learning that any verb that is not finite and not a participle has to be an infinitive. Teachers may want to introduce some sentences with infinitives used as subjects and have students practice the pattern in their own writing, but otherwise the use of the infinitive is quite natural and poses no problems. In analyzing sentences, my students like to put a "circle" (more like an "oval") around infinitives.

     Delayed subjects, noun absolutes and interjections have all been defined and discussed in the preceding chapter. Tenth grade students will be able to recognize them because they will be embodied in the few remaining words that the students cannot already explain in some other way. Whereas most of the preceding constructions are common enough to be found in almost every paragraph of moderately mature prose, these constructions are relatively rare. As a result, teachers should probably begin by offering selected sentences for analysis, rather than paragraphs. Later, students might well be asked to cull their own reading to bring to class one or two examples of each. Since most students will be able to master these three constructions in three or four weeks, teachers might wish to spend the remainder of the year analyzing selected student papers (or paragraphs from them), or in having the class do research projects. (Students who need longer will find that the research projects and stylistic studies suggested for grades eleven and twelve will provide opportunities for review.)
 
 

     Having followed the preceding steps, the majority of eleventh graders would be able to explain the syntax of any English sentence. The last two years of high school can thus be devoted to stylistics, research, and/or a general introduction to linguistics. Whichever of these is chosen, it is important that students continue to analyze sentences regularly, perhaps a short paragraph every few weeks. Such analysis will not bore students if they are allowed to pick at least some of the passages to be analyzed and if the analysis goes beyond mere syntactic identification to some discussion of style, the purpose of the writer, or research.

     Stylistics is discussed more fully in Chapter Nine, but here we might note that students will already have noted numerous differences in style. For example, I use two papers, one by a writer who loves subordinate clauses and uses few gerundives, another by a writer who uses few clauses and loves gerundives. Students note the difference on their own; I do not have to point it out. Teachers can guarantee variety in the style of passages to be analyzed -- while still letting students select the passages, by determining where the passages are to come from. Thus, during the first week of the school year, each student can be assigned to bring in a passage, chosen by the student from the local paper, Time magazine, a biology textbook, a Nancy Drew mystery, a sixth grade student’s paper, etc. The teacher, or an assistant, can then type the passages, double-spaced, and ditto them for distribution to the class, assigning one passage for each week (or every other week) of the school year. Students can analyze the passage as homework, perhaps also answering specific questions about each -- how many sentences begin with prepositional phrases? With subordinate clauses? How many words are there per main clause? Class time can then be devoted to discussing any problems in analysis and to the style of the passage as related to its source, probable purpose, etc.

     Students (and teachers) might also find it interesting to do research projects, particularly if the teacher intends to make such projects an annual, cumulative experience. (Research projects are the subject of Chapters Twelve and Thirteen.) During the first half of each year, for example, the class might analyze passages from a specific writer (Hemingway, James, Faulkner), a specific magazine (Newsweek, Popular Mechanics, New Yorker), or from the writing of students at a certain grade level (fourth, eighth, twelfth). The entire class might focus on one of these, analyzing as many difference passages from it as possible. Analysis could be limited to words and subordinate clauses per main clause, or it could extend to any other constructions the teacher and class choose to include. The class could then arrive at a statistical profile of the writer or publication, and students could write a research report summarizing their findings. This report could then be filed in the school library for the use of future students, who might, for example, compare their own class’s analysis of the writing of Poe with that of previous classes’ analyses of Hemingway and Faulkner.

      During the second half of the year, the class might do a similar analysis of their own writing, using papers that they had written during the first half of the year. Although the primary purpose of such projects would be to keep students analyzing sentences so that they improve their command of syntax, the projects will give students a sense of personal involvement in what the school perceives as an important project, and the results of their research will help them perceive how their own writing compares to that of others.

     Since high school is, for many students, the end of their formal education, I firmly believe that at least part of the last two years should be devoted to a general introduction to linguistics. Every American need not understand transformational grammar or the history of the language, but everyone should be aware that these fields of study exist. They need not be studied in detail -- a ten-page essay can easily give students a general sense of the history of English. Likewise students can be introduced to areas within linguistics (morphology, semantics, etc.), and its purposes (comparative, historical, theoretical). The basic purpose of this study should not be to make sure that every student learns that Bloomfield wrote Language, but rather to open doors and take a peek at what some people have devoted their lives to. Most of the students in a class may be totally uninterested in the entire question of language, but then this survey may be the impetus to the next generation’s Chomsky. Students can’t become interested in fields of study if they do not know that the fields exist.
 
 

     When I was in high school, I was a member of the "Mathletes": teams from different schools would meet once a month to compete at solving math problems. Such competitions are educational and enjoyable: they can revolve around syntax and writing, as well as math, and they can be held not only between schools but even between members of a single third-grade class. We have already seen some of the "problems" for such a competition: the fill-in-the-blank and "Recipe Roster" exercises. Their use in competitions is limited only by the imaginations of teachers.

     Suppose, for example, that a third-grade class was given five minutes to do a fill-in-the-blank exercise on prepositional phrases. Some students probably would not finish -- their papers could be eliminated. (If the competition were based on teams, their team could get a point for every blank filled in with the proper part of speech.) The papers of the rest of the class could be given to a panel of judges -- perhaps a few students from a fourth grade class, perhaps the third-grade class next door. (Names could be erased and replaced by numbers.) The panel could then rate the papers on two scales (1 to 5) for, let us say, a.)sense, and b.) originality. To make it even more educational for the students on the panel, they might be asked to read and make notes on the papers first. Then they could discuss them before filling in their ratings. The tabulated ratings would then establish the winners. If a class has such a competition once a week and the teams are uneven, they could be reorganized two or more times a year, each time distributing the better students among the teams. Such team competitions would encourage the better students to help the weaker members of their team, and the weaker members would have a reason for trying to improve and do well, even though they had no hope of winning as an individual, since their scores would affect the performance of their team.

     Recipe Rosters could serve as the main type of problem for higher grades. They could include all the constructions the students had covered, each construction having a specific point value:

Write a sentence with:
a) one subordinate clause used as an adverb (10)
b) two prepositional phrases as adjectives (3 ea)
c) one prepositional phrase as an adverb (3)
d) five adjectives (1 ea)
e) one adverb (1)

     Obviously, the variety of "problems" is endless, as are the different approaches to scoring. Within a classroom, between classes of the same grade in the same school, or between school systems, the competitions can be stimulating. Winning sentences could be posted on the bulletin boards, or even printed in the PTA’s newsletter or the local newspaper. Such competitions are one way in which "grammar" could receive -- and contribute to -- a positive image.
 
 

     Grammar currently has a negative image because teachers tell students what they have done wrong, but rarely, if ever, note what they have done well. There are, of course, psychological reasons for this: teachers believe that it is their job to help their students avoid errors, and the best way to do this is to point out the errors. It is also much easier, and quicker, to write "frag" in the margin of a paper than it is to comment on the development of an idea in that same paper. But as I have suggested throughout this book, most students don’t understand what "frag" means, or if they do, they cannot analyze their own sentence structure such that they could avoid the fragments that they make. Naturally, the students simply perceive grammar as an impenetrable mystery which they come to hate.

     Perhaps the most important aspect of the grammar curriculum presented in this chapter is that it allows the teacher to make comprehensible, positive comments about students’ writing. On a third-grader’s paper, a teacher could easily note, "Nice prepositional phrases!" On a fourth-grader’s, "Nice strong verbs!" A ninth-grade student might find boxes around some of the gerundives in a paragraph, and the word "Nice" in the margin. Positive comments such as these, by balancing negative comments, would give students a sense of accomplishment and pride. As we all know, carrots are a better pedagogical tool than are sticks.

     As the following chapter suggests, teachers should probably ignore some grammatical errors, but even if the teacher wants to note them, the comment could often be softened by explaining to the student that the error results from an attempt to use an advanced construction. Suppose, for example, that a teacher notes numerous dangling gerundives in the writing of her eighth graders. If she chooses not to ignore them, she might place a box around each and write "DG" in the margin. When she hands the papers back, she could then explain to the students that the boxes and "DG’s" refer to dangling gerundives and that gerundives are typical of ninth grade writing. She could then briefly explain what gerundives are, what the problem is, and how to correct it. Since these students would have been underlining finite verbs since fourth grade and would have been bracketing clauses since seventh, many of them would be ready to understand gerundives and the problem. But even for those who cannot, the severity of the criticism is decreased by the teacher’s noting that this error results from something that they are not expected to know.

     Another positive aspect of this syntactic curriculum is the self-satisfaction that students get from mastering it. Jerome Bruner, who would call this an "intrinsic reward," states, "The satisfaction of curiosity seems to be self-rewarding among all primates. So, too, the development of competence." (Relevance 14) Every normal student in our schools can achieve this mastery, especially if the syntax is spread across grades three through ten. I have seen college students who had verbal SAT scores in the 200’s get through clause structure in a single year, and they were working at an extreme disadvantage as members of a class that was way ahead of them. Thus much of class time was devoted to gerundives, appositives, etc., which only added to these students’ confusion. And I have to ask myself if these students would have scored in the 200’s if they had started this instruction in third grade. (See Chapter 11 on "Thinking and Logic.")

     Finally, this approach can help students see their own progress, not only in grammar but in writing. I have regularly suggested the importance of having students do statistical research on main clause length. Increasing clause length is a natural development: even the poorest writers will increase the length of their clauses with age. The eight-grade student who analyzes the words per main clause in papers she wrote in fourth, sixth, and eighth grade will certainly find more words per main clause in the later papers, especially if she has been being taught through the method suggested in this chapter. Such a student cannot possibly then believe that she is "not getting anywhere." Grammar, instead of being an obstruction, becomes a means of supporting the students’ belief in their own progress and abilities.

1. To what extent do the exercises suggested in this chapter differ from those which teachers are currently using? Consider both the individual exercises and the context (grade level, previous knowledge of students, etc.) in which they are used.

2. Select one of the exercises and consider how difficult such exercises would be to make and to grade. Could students make their own (either for themselves or for students in other grades)?

3. Would the approach suggested in this chapter result in a better image for grammar?

4. How difficult would it be to arrange syntactic competitions within a class? Between the different 5th grade classes within a single school? Between fifth graders at different schools?
 

Click here for the directory of my backgrounds based on art.
[For educational use only]