Is grammar instruction really important when teaching children to write?

Great Debates
21

[QUOTE=Paul in Saudi]
Good grammar is essential to meaning. It allows a superior writer to communicate clearly. Does that sound snooty? Try this.

Grammar, like punctuation, is a courtesy a writer pays to the reader. It is a way to be polite.
[/QUOTE]

I agree that spelling and punctuation are a courtesy (and dramatically increase your chances of successfully imparting your meaning).
However there has to be something worthwhile to communicate. Otherwise you end up listening to politicians spouting meaningless (but beautifully formed) platitudes.

We need to inspire kids to think and write, as well as gently ensuring they puncutate correctly.

22

[QUOTE=Harriet the Spry]
I have limited credentials to speak to this issue, but a) I have always been a top-notch English and foreign language student with very high verbal standardized test scores and b) I have recently seen several really frightening freshman English papers.

I don’t see a problem with drills, even out of context. To me, context could be distracting from the main point. Let me see a wide variety of direct objects, and forget the Empire State Building theme. I also really benefitted from learning sentence diagramming. Just knowing that ANY valid sentence CAN be diagrammed is significant. True, this is just my experience. But I don’t think the point of grammar is that it can be made interesting. Grammar is what it is. Writing and reading and speaking are interesting.
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Have you considered that your own aptitudes may be coloring the debate?

I’ve always been a mediocre grammer student, a foreign language failure, a spelling pariah and a verbal standardized test disappointment. However, I’ve also always been an excellent writer. It doesn’t really come out on the dope. But as an example I recently wrote a “help wanted” ad for my work. Several candidates mentioned liking how the ad was written, and one guy who didn’t want the job wrote just to talk about my ad. One of my sophmore year professors suggested I turn one of my term papers in to a thesis. My mom offered to support me while I wrote a book after reading my blog.

Different people need different approaches. For me, all of the out-of-context drills in the world arn’t going to get me anywhere. I just have no mind for anything too exact. Do it enough as a kid, and I might lose my passion for writing.

I believe they already do, at least at the UCs. Incoming students have to take a writing test and people who don’t pass (most) are required to take a special writing class. Students are also required to take several “writing intensive” courses.

23

[QUOTE=even sven]

Different people need different approaches. For me, all of the out-of-context drills in the world arn’t going to get me anywhere. I just have no mind for anything too exact. Do it enough as a kid, and I might lose my passion for writing.

[/QUOTE]

And so teachers are going to need to offer many different approaches to the same materal: the reality of the classroom, however, is that everyone is going to have to spend time working on approaches that may not work for them, as that’s the only way to make sure everyone gets what they need: some kids learn best from more exact approaches, some with more organic. However, you don’t know in advance which kids need which methods, (and it changes year to year within a single kid), so that means every kid is going to spend some time on tasks that don’t really help them much. It’s like when you do research–if you do it properly, half the time you spend reading stuff won’t directly apply to your final product, but that winnowing time is just paart of the process. So teachers can no more cut out the stuff you don’t need for fear it will turn you off than they can cut out the stuff you need for fear it will turn others off, though there are techniques that can mitigate this some and allow some personalization. We have to hope that more variety is sufficient.

24

[QUOTE=blinkingblinking]
I thought there were many spelling rules in English. They do not seem to be taught very well.
http://www2.gsu.edu/~wwwesl/egw/pluralsv.htm
http://www.all-about-spelling.com/spelling-rules.html
I was taught with a spelling reader with 1000 words in it. The words seemed to be in random order.
Why are students not taught the spelling rules of English ?
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There are lots of spelling rules in English. But there are also lots of exceptions to those rules. In a similar fashion, there are lots of rules for constructing tenses. and young children learn them - even when the rules don’t apply to a particular word. It all comes from the various sources of English words, which following the rules of several languages.

The spelling lists kids get in school are often filled with the exceptions - the words that follow the rules come for free.

I’ve found that the best way to learn to spell is to read a lot and have a good enough memory to be able to call up the word spelled correctly.

25

[QUOTE=glee]

We need to inspire kids to think and write, as well as gently ensuring they puncutate correctly.
[/QUOTE]

I agree. The process of writing is first putting words down on the page, and then editing. It is nice when the spelling and grammar are correct the first time, but not essential. Kids learning to transform their own ungrammatical writing to correct writing is better than drill and practice.

In seventh grade I had this dreadful programmed learning book for grammar. Tons of drill and practice, and almost totally useless. I suspect that the poor writing skills people here are reporting might be the result of too much drill and practice, and not enough careful and early correction of actual writing - which takes a lot more time and skill than correcting a multiple choice test.

26

I’ve said this before in other spelling/grammar/punctuation threads, and I’ll say it again here:

All can be highly important in real-real land, because people will judge your credibility based on a number of factors, both conscious and unconscious. Spelling is probably the least important of the three, since typos are so easy to make and say nothing about one’s educational level or one’s background. But grammar and punctuation are what you might call the infra-structure of language - the nuts and bolts. If you demonstrate that you don’t understand one and/or the other, you’re probably demonstrating that you’re not a big reader yourself. And that tends to diminish credibility as a source, particularly of facts, but also of points of view (why should I listen to this uneducated boob?).

I don’t know that drills are the way to teach these things. But I DO know they used to be taught, and that kids who went to school were distinguishable from the kids who stayed home and worked on the farm in part by the way the spoke. Reading a lot is certainly the most effortless way to absorb these basics, but I suspect drilling DID work until we as a society decided that it was okay for kids to do badly in topics that didn’t engage their attention - just blame the teachers! We lost an enormous amount as a society on the whole when that social shift took place, IMHO, and educationally have fallen behind, even though our best schools probably still remain the best in the world.

27

[QUOTE=Paul in Saudi]
Good grammar is essential to meaning. It allows a superior writer to communicate clearly. Does that sound snooty? Try this.

Grammar, like punctuation, is a courtesy a writer pays to the reader. It is a way to be polite.
[/QUOTE]

And this, boiled down to the essence, is the same thought expressed by almost every one of the other eleven people taking the grammar course I’m taking. Most of them are high school English teachers (I and one other student are the only ones not teaching in public schools at this time.)

It’s what we were taught in journalism school and what was pounded into my brain in newsrooms I worked in. If everyone obeys the same rules of the road, we’ll all arrive at our destinations safely.

One caveat expressed almost universally: Grammar instruction should never be taught outside the framework of communication. In other words, good grammar for its own sake is a waste of time. IF it is useful at all, it is only useful as a way of HELPING people communicate.

Y’know, something just occurred to me: As I page back through this thread, I may have my course thesis written for me! Do you suppose the prof will accept “Harriet the Spy” and “Paul in Saudi” as footnotes? Nah, prob’ly not!

28

[QUOTE=Hilarity N. Suze]
…the goal of freshman comp was not to give … students writing skills and access to tools for clear communication. It was to get rid of a certain percentage of the freshman class to make way for serious scholars. Anyway that’s how it was in the early '70s.
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And, honestly, I’m not opposed to this concept. The automatic right to a public education ends at high school. After that, if you want to pursue education, you have to earn it, either by being a serious scholar or by filling the stadium/field house/event center with screaming fans and wealthy alumni.

Seriously, a college education is too often seen as a specialized job skills school, a concept that causes most college faculty a lot of heartache. I see nothing wrong with using a lack of skill – grammar, for instance – to filter out the students who just aren’t going to be able to write a decent college term paper. Science students should be proficient in chemistry, botany, zoology and physics; theater students should already know about getting and staying in character; math students should have no trouble with algebra, geometry and calculus. The purpose of college is not to teach these basics, but to use them to explore the possibilities of each discipline.

But I’m starting a tangent. To stick to the original question, I do believe that, by the time a person is a college freshman, he or she is beyond grammar instruction. If it’s going to be done, it must be done in the early elementary grades.

29

They’re right, spot on.

I actually had the good fortune to study under the president of the NCTE, so I’ve had a good ammount of time to chew this issue over.

In a nutshell: studies have shown, many times, that when kids are drilled on grammar rules, they end up writing sloppier and with more gramatical mistakes than if no grammar books are schlepped out. Instead, if ‘good writing’ is what teachers expose them to, and coach them towards, they do better.

We all have a natural grammar which informs our linguistic abilities. While there are, of course, tweaks to be made here and there, organized memorization by rote isn’t the most effective way of helping students to become good writers.

I’ll dig up the cites for this, by the way. All of my books from my time at UT are packed up and in storage right now… and good gods I don’t really want to go leafing through hundreds of journal articles. Still, I’ll hunt it down in the near future.

30

[QUOTE=FinnAgain]
They’re right, spot on.

In a nutshell: studies have shown, many times, that when kids are drilled on grammar rules, they end up writing sloppier and with more gramatical mistakes than if no grammar books are schlepped out. Instead, if ‘good writing’ is what teachers expose them to, and coach them towards, they do better.

[/QUOTE]

And my point is that there is some middle ground between “schlepp[ing] out” the grammar books and just exposing/coaching kids towards good grammar. I know in my classroom I get better results if I have some vocabulary to work with–things like “parallel structure”, “apositive” and “active voice”, and kids don’t learn those things through any “natural grammar”–it takes some formal instruction. I don’t do worksheets, but I expect them to learn to look at text at a structural level, not just a content level: Why does Dr. King use long sentences for this part and then switch to short, imperative ones over here? How is this paragraph different because Annie Dillard uses almost nothing but participles? How does Paine use parallel structure to emphasize his scorn for the Tories?

If all I want them to do is not make mistakes, sure, I can just correct errors. But if I want them to really be able to understand rhetoric, they need a vocabulary to talk about it. Now, I don’t teach that vocabulary through grammar drills, but I do teach it.

31

I think the whole question is irrelevant as “grammar” is not what is taught in schools, and it never really has been. Most college graduates don’t know anything about grammar, and most teachers don’t either, so whether or not they should be teaching it is a moot point.

I do sort of resent having been taught nonsense grammar; one of my middle-school English teachers - otherwise a very smart and wonderful teacher - taught us that in kitchen floor, kitchen is an adjective. If that’s the sort of nonsense that passes for “teaching grammar”, then the whole discussion is pointless, as children are almost certainly not going to learn to be better writers by being taught incorrect grammar. Teaching some elementary English grammar is a nice idea - the basics, say, of phrase structure grammar would make a pedagogically-defensible substitute for “diagramming sentences”. An accurate explanation of the different parts of speech would be useful; so would teaching enough grammar that people could identify stylistic bugaboos like the passive voice (it’s shocking how often people describe things as “passive sentences” that aren’t - I’ve seen it here on the SDMB a number of times, and if I could, I’d provide links to newspaper articles deploring the use of the passive voice when it’s not there). Teaching basic grammar is hopeless when a large percentage of English teachers have never been taught actual grammar.

Meanwhile, the question under debate seems to be how children should be taught writing. Questions like whether children should be explicitly drilled on the use of the comma are best settled by scientific inquiry - if indeed the consensus of studies on the subject is that punctuation drills hurt students’ writing, then they should be dropped. That’s not something non-experts can really meaningfully debate, though. For all my familiarity with such research, I might as well start a debate pitting the Five Kingdoms model against the Three Domains model in biological taxonomy - they’re both matters best settled factually, and both are matters in which nonexperts’ opinions are unlikely to be relevant.

I certainly have noticed, incidentally, that most of my fellow students are terrible writers. While that no doubt reflects “mechanical” problems like switching tenses at least to some degree, it would be tough to convince me that mechanical problems are really the basis of their inadequacy as writers, since their writing is also lacking in non-grammatical areas like organization and overall coherence to an argument.

32

Me fail English? That’s unpossible!

33

I was taught grammar, so *theoretically * I know what transitive verbs and subjunctive clauses are. Of course I don’t, but I think I can string together a reasonably coherent sentence regardless.

My view is that the appalling writing skills of university/college students is due to the fact that kids don’t read very much unless they’re forced to. This means that they don’t know what language looks like when its written down. Friends of mine (who were engineering honours students and not even a little bit dim) would write things like:

Where did that full stop come from? I have no idea, because they certainly wouldn’t pause there if they were speaking that sentence. It seems that they just don’t know what to do with punctuation.

Sorry, this was supposed to be a grammar rant and it turned into a punctuation rant, but I think that my theory applies to ungrammatical sentences as well as poorly punctuated ones.

(I think this is why people confuse they’re, their and there - because they never see them written down and used in a sentence. Sure, they would have been taught the difference in Year 3, but who remembers minor facts they were taught in Year 3?)

So, my solution: Fewer grammar drills, more reading! :slight_smile:

34

I don’t know whether teaching how to analyze grammar is necessary to learning one’s own language.

But I do know for sure that it shouldn’t be the Organic Chemistry TA (that was yours truly) who teaches American college students what “the passive voice” and “impersonal forms” are!

35

[QUOTE=Excalibre]
I do sort of resent having been taught nonsense grammar; one of my middle-school English teachers - otherwise a very smart and wonderful teacher - taught us that in kitchen floor, kitchen is an adjective.
[/QUOTE]

Well, in a Linguistics class at University, I was taught that kitchen floor is a compound noun with the first part of the compound functioning as an adjective for the second part of the compound.

36

[QUOTE=Excalibre]
I do sort of resent having been taught nonsense grammar; one of my middle-school English teachers - otherwise a very smart and wonderful teacher - taught us that in kitchen floor, kitchen is an adjective.
[/QUOTE]

See, this is exactly my point! Excalibre thinks labeling “kitchen” as an adjective is stupid because he wasn’t properly instructed in grammar. A good grammar instructor would also teach the fluidity of the language. In point of fact, the designation of “kitchen” as a noun or as an adjective depends on its context. Yes, we normally think of “the kitchen” as a noun. It’s a place. So is “the floor.” But the floor in the kitchen is in a different place than the floor in the bathroom. (In that sentence, “kitchen,” “floor,” and “bathroom” are all nouns.) But to describe the floor in the kitchen, we could convert “kitchen” to an adjective and call the floor the “kitchen floor.” If you go to the auto parts store and say you want to buy a filter, you will be asked, “Do you want an air filter or a fuel filter?” Air and fuel, in most cases, are both nouns; but when used to describe filters, they become adjectives. Similarly, everyone would agree that the word “running” is an active verb. But when used thus: “The apartment lacks running water,” the word “running” becomes an adjective, not a verb.

37

I forgot to finish up, sorry.

So, the whole point is that grammatical terminology isn’t assigned to specific words, but to functions. Noun doesn’t describe a word, it describes a function. I wonder sometimes if even English teachers understand this concept, and I’m pretty sure they don’t teach it.

38

[QUOTE=jeffrice]
See, this is exactly my point! Excalibre thinks labeling “kitchen” as an adjective is stupid because he wasn’t properly instructed in grammar. A good grammar instructor would also teach the fluidity of the language. In point of fact, the designation of “kitchen” as a noun or as an adjective depends on its context. Yes, we normally think of “the kitchen” as a noun. It’s a place. So is “the floor.” But the floor in the kitchen is in a different place than the floor in the bathroom. (In that sentence, “kitchen,” “floor,” and “bathroom” are all nouns.) But to describe the floor in the kitchen, we could convert “kitchen” to an adjective and call the floor the “kitchen floor.” If you go to the auto parts store and say you want to buy a filter, you will be asked, “Do you want an air filter or a fuel filter?” Air and fuel, in most cases, are both nouns; but when used to describe filters, they become adjectives. Similarly, everyone would agree that the word “running” is an active verb. But when used thus: “The apartment lacks running water,” the word “running” becomes an adjective, not a verb.
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No, dear, Excalibre thinks kitchen is part of a compound noun, because it fails reasonable tests for being an adjective. Let’s look at loud voice, which is indisputably an adjective plus noun. You can say things like How loud was the voice? The voice is very loud. This voice seems loud. A deep, loud, booming voice.

Let’s try that with kitchen floor. Can you say How kitchen was the floor? Or The floor is very kitchen? This floor seems kitchen. A red, kitchen, dirty floor?

Noun compound like that fail tests of adjectiveness. The idea that they’re “adjectives” is probably a leftover from traditional grammar inspired by Latin; much of what is taught as “grammar” is actually inspired by the Latin grammatical tradition - as with, for instance, the truly bizarre prohibition on “split infinitives” (fortunately not something that’s actively taught anymore.) My suspicion is that this adjective rationalization for what is quite plainly a compound noun comes from the fact that such a construction didn’t exist in Latin.

That’s what grammar as taught in English classes is, though - it’s not inspired by recent research in grammar. In fact, it’s mostly not inspired by research in English grammar. It’s a bit of conventionalized voodoo originally inherited from the Romans and I simply can’t see how it benefits students to be taught that kitchen floor is an adjective plus noun when under any grammatical analysis besides the voodoo grammar practiced by English majors it’s a noun.

Which is why I tend to consider this a moot point. Those most up in arms about children not being taught grammar are usually people who’ve never taken a course in actual grammar or read a book on the subject. I don’t blame you, jeffrice, for this. There’s a long tradition of not teaching anything resembling actual grammar to students. You probably have no idea how your personal ideas about grammar depart from reality. But I guess that while teaching grammar might be a neat idea, I’m satisfied for now if they’ve stopped teaching voodoo.

39

[QUOTE=Marley23]
I agree that grammar drills are useless when it comes to English. Might some basic knowledge of terms like subject and object make it a little easier for students to learn a foreign language, though?
[/QUOTE]
You could ask Kimstu for her thoughts on the matter.

40

[QUOTE=jeffrice]
Whattaya’ think? Is the teaching of grammar essential to teaching kids to read and write, to develop critical thinking and communication skills?
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On the extreme angle, I can tell you that in Japan they teach English almost entirely from a grammar-centric perspective for 12 years (and another 4 years in university, with extra concentrations for English teachers). By my interactions, about 99% of students and 80% of English teachers in Japan are completely incapable of formulating a non-trivial sentence in English without errors that seriously obfuscate the intended meaning. OTOH they’re capable of rendering a lot of English writing into Japanese as long as it isn’t too subtle, slangy, or dependent on cultural subtext.

So I’d say no, grammar instruction as we know it is not essential. I do think it’s an important supplement though, because students are invariably going to ask “Why can’t I write it this way” and grammar can help answer questions like that (within limits).