2.6 The Grammar Debate (self-study)

Grammar means different things to different people and in different contexts. Hartwell (1985) identifies five types of grammar:

1. • the internalized rules that speakers of a language share (tacit grammar)

   • the rules known to linguists (focal grammar)

   • linguistic etiquette, usage

   • school grammar (pedagogical grammar)

   • stylistic grammar

One of the arguments against grammar instruction is that explicit grammar knowledge is not necessary for good writing. This may be true to some extent, but many greatest writers do show a profound knowledge of grammar. One example is George Orwell. In his novel 1984, the author writes about how the government attempted to mind control its citizens by imposing the Newspeak by removing words in the Oldspeak. Without explicit knowledge of English grammar and metalinguistic awareness, it would have been impossible for the writer to do so. Here are two experts:

"‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good’, for instance. If you have a word like ‘good’, what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well—better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not." (chapter 5)

"The only classes of words that were still allowed to inflect irregularly were the pronouns, the relatives, the demonstrative adjectives, and the auxiliary verbs. All of these followed their ancient usage, except that WHOM had been scrapped as unnecessary, and the SHALL, SHOULD tenses had been dropped, all their uses being covered by WILL and WOULD." (chapter 6)

"Of course, we want our students to produce clean copy, to avoid distracting errors in punctuation, syntax, and idiom, but cleanliness without liveliness equals sterility. if we want to teach lively writing, effective writing, we must first interest our students in the creative options at their disposal. And to accomplish this goal, we must call their attention to the rhetorical and stylistic properties of the words they use." (p. xxi)

"In its best sense, then, style is not a triumph over substance, not a distraction, like the gestures of a magician. Good style is a matter of directness and clarity, punctuated by occasional moments of emphasis and intensity. Its purpose is to show our information and ideas to their best advantage, to capture our feelings toward our subject, to make our audience attentive and receptive." (p. 5)

• 1. How much grammar instruction have you received in K-12 education? What do you think of it? Did it help you to become a better reader and writer? What do you wish that your English teachers could have done more or less?

• 2. What did researchers and teachers think of formal grammar instruction from the 1960s to the 1980s? What did the experimental research tell people?

• 3. Hartwell talks about five different meanings of 'grammar'. What are they? How is each related to other grammars? How is each related to the teaching of grammar rules?

• 4. What is Hartwell (1985)’s view of formal grammar instruction? What is Kolln and Hancock’s (1985) view of the role of grammar instruction in K-12 curriculum? What’s your opinion of whether grammar should be taught or not at school, and why?

• 5. What are the learning theories behind the traditional and integrative grammar instruction? Why teaching grammar in isolation does not work?

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6. Do you think Ann's mini grammar lessons on sentence fragments are a failure? Why or why not? Do you have a better idea to help students eliminate sentence fragments in writing?

• 7. What do you think of Sarah's prewriting activity on poems to help students write with more adjectives and adverbs? Do you have better ideas to achieve this goal?

• 8. What do you think of Weaver's way of dealing with 'errors' in college students' writing? Has any professor done similar activities to help you improve your writings? If so, what do you think of such activities?

• 9. What is rhetorical grammar? Why should it be taught? (p.717, 720-721)

• 10. The author compared Wilders' and Vogelaar's speeches from four aspects following Leech and Short's (2007) framework:

a. lexical categories

b. grammatical categories

c. figures of speech

d. context and cohesion

What are his major findings for each category? If you were Vogelaar or another government official or political activist, how would you improve the clarity of speech by making changes in each aspect?