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Taking the G-R-R-R out of Grammar Stephen Tchudi and Lee Thomas

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Taking the G-R-R-R out of Grammar Stephen Tchudi and Lee Thomas Taking the G-r-r-r Out of Grammar Stephen Tchudi and Lee Thomas rospective secondary English teach- Let us begin by saying that we believe in ers in our state are required to take grammar. We even speak and write it! But a course in “Descriptive Grammar.” we’ve studied the research and know that By the title of the course, one could presenting traditional parts of speech and guess that the requirement can be drilling away at usage items is no way to traced back to the 1960s and the teach children to read, write, listen, and linguistics revolution that displaced speak. We are also convinced that teachers “traditional prescriptive” with the should have a solid understanding of syn- more modern, “descriptive” struc- tactic systems and structures—the rules, tural and transformational-genera- laws, circumstances, and conventions that tive grammars. The title doesn’t govern how we use language. reveal that the course also came into the In the summer of 1995, we decided to Pstatutes under “back-to-basics” pressure: team teach the descriptive grammar course legislators may have thought they were re- and to take a whack at revising it. Specifically, mediating a lack of knowledge of correct- we wanted to make the course a bit more ness on the part of teachers—you know, the user friendly from a linguistics standpoint so The authors mythical progressive teachers who don’t that our students would not be intimidated describe their mark errors and approve of anything that by modern grammars, and we wanted to de- students spel or rite. Although the descrip- velop a course that would give our students course in tive grammar course at our university is in- better preparation for the demands placed on descriptive tellectually much more respectable than a them in real-world teaching. grammar and mere correctness course, students don’t al- With that in mind, we decided to “take suggest ways come to it bubbling with enthusiasm the g-r-r-r out of grammar.” classroom over the prospect of learning the intricacies We found planning the course to be an strategies. of syntax (whatever that is). Moreover, be- enormous challenge, for it asked us to re- cause the course has, in the past, been consider the question, “What is grammar taught mostly by university linguists who good for?” Thus in describing and explain- presented a detailed and technical transfor- ing some of our course (it is not possible to mational-generative perspective, students detail it all), we offer readers our answer to have questioned the usefulness of the this issue’s question: “What should English course and its applications in teaching. teachers do about the teaching of grammar Still, when our students begin their first and usage?” teaching assignments, they often report DEFINITIONS AND AIMS coming face-to-face with teachers commit- On opening day, we announced our slo- ted to a traditional approach to grammar. gan, “Taking the g-r-r-r out of grammar,” Sometimes pressure for parts-of-speech and described that our aims for the course grammar comes from community demands would be to: for basics; sometimes it comes from teach- ers who remain convinced that, despite re- • explore the concept of a “grammar” as a search to the contrary, grammar is somehow system of rules for any language in general and for English in particular; vital in teaching writing; too often the gram- mar pressure comes about simply because • consider the purposes for describing grammars; that’s what’s covered in the standard-issue textbook. Whatever the causes, our stu- • present the basic concepts of English gram- dents have often perceived that their de- mar: the nomenclature of traditional grammar and the philosophical/linguistic scriptive grammar course failed to give principles of transformational-generative them the tools they needed to cope with grammar. student- or first-year teaching. 46 November 1996 • explore the applications of grammar in ever, traditional grammar doesn’t have to be real-world use, including writing, educa- used that way at all. It can offer descrip- tion, literature, and politics. tions, too: that words function in different We wanted our students to come to a ways and can be classified by “parts” of full understanding of the idea of a gram- speech; that sentences include nouns and mar—a system of rules, created by people verbs functioning as subjects and predi- to describe the behavior they observe in cates; that determiners precede nouns; that their language. infinitive phrases are often divided by ad- We wrote on the board: verbs. One of our students observed that in its way transformational grammar is pre- specialists those bearded old scriptive, since it “prescribes” the rules that Lithuanian ten linguistics native speakers must follow to generate We then asked the students to rearrange grammatical English sentences! Point taken. the words into an English phrase, and to a We explained that for the first part of the person, they came up with: course we’d be interested in descriptive grammars, trying to get a handle on how those ten old bearded Lithuanian those hairy old linguists and any other na- linguistics specialists. tive speakers of a language figure out and We noted that “grammar” is what enabled describe the conventions of that language. them to make that decoding, and we asked As a follow-up for each class during the them to articulate, if they could, the rules semester, we had the students complete that require “those” to precede “ten” or “lin- what we called X-squared activities: “Explo- guistics” to follow “Lithuanian.” Their strug- rations and Extensions.” These were hands- gles helped us make the point that the on projects that had the students apply and native speaker of a language knows a lot extend concepts we discussed in class, using more grammar than he or she is necessarily their own resources, their own language, able to describe! We also gave the students a and intuitive grammar. During the week that copy of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” and we explored the idea of descriptive vs. pre- helped them see that their intuitive, native scriptive, we invited the students to: grammar is what allows them to figure out • write a “grammar” for a part of your life: a that “slithy” is a description, not an action, description of the rules, laws, or principles that “toves” is a plural something or other, that you are following to get an education, not the present tense of the verb “to tive.” to raise a kid, to keep or perform well on a job. We carefully introduced the distinction between a descriptive and a prescriptive gram- • write a “how to” grammar of something you do well, say the basics of playing a mar and explained that any grammar could musical instrument or tying your shoes or be either. Any grammar can be used as a sci- making a quilt. entific description of how language func- • write the elements of your ethical gram- tions, and any grammar can be turned into a mar, explaining how you determine what’s set of laws or shibboleths about how people “right” or “wrong.” ought to talk or write. We learned, a bit to • create a fairy tale with a moral or “gram- our surprise, that some of our students had mar” of human behavior. heard about grammars in other language arts methods courses and had developed a sim- We broke the class up into groups and plistic set of formulae in their heads: had them discuss two key questions for the course: Why create grammars? Why study traditional grammar = prescriptive grammars? Students came up with such ex- = bad planations as: transformational grammar = • Grammar is a way of understanding how descriptive = good language and people function. • Grammar helps us understand language Traditional grammar, we explained, has variation and change. often been used to make prescriptions: “Use • Grammar helps us figure out what’s “basic” shall to indicate intent”; “Never say ain’t in a language and how it differs over social north of Little Rock” (that’s a joke). How- and cultural groups. English Journal 47 • Grammar helps us describe developmental spelling, mechanics, vocabulary, the busi- stages in language acquisition. ness letter, and footnote etiquette together. • Grammar helps us make generalizations We claimed that for most people, knowing about how people learn languages. one page of traditional grammar is enough: To wrap up our exploration of the na- a listing of the basic parts of speech coupled ture of grammar, we cautioned that the with usage items that happen to give that word grammar has very different meanings particular person a hard time. We suggested for the linguist, the teacher, the student, and that students get out a sheet of paper and, the lay person (distinctions which we think over the coming weeks, write their own ought to be at the core of the school lan- one-page grammar. guage curriculum). We urged our prospec- We were aided in our effort to make tive teachers, once again, to keep clear the grammar accessible by Karen Elizabeth Gor- distinction between prescription and de- don’s book, The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: scription, and we gave them a few thou shalt nots: peanut • Don’t say grammar when you mean usage; • Don’t confuse “good English” (whatever that is) with “good,” “proper,” or even “cor- shell kernel rect” grammar; • Don’t use the word “grammar” when you mean spelling or punctuation; wrapper nut • Don’t equate knowledge of grammar with high morals or the Queen’s English; • Realize that everybody already knows an The above diagram of transformational grammar is the authors’ adaptation of the activity learned from Elaine enormous amount of grammar.
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