Teaching Literature or Grammar

[Petrarch's Love]

Shannanigan--You're certainly not alone. I also got pretty much no formal instruction in English grammar and punctuation. My elementary and middle schools literally threw out the grammar text books a few years before my class came through and instructed the teachers to let us "feel" our way through writing when we were starting out. As a result, though I had an ear for good grammar, almost all the technical grammar terminology I learned (apart from really basic stuff like parts of speech) came initially from my foreign language study. This was sufficient for me to apply to my own writing, but toward the end of my undergraduate years it occured to me, as it has to you, that if I was going into teaching my students might not necessarily appreciate critiques of their papers littered with the odd French and Latin phrases in reference to their grammatical faults, so I got a few books to study and set myself straight about the particulars of English grammar. The most helpful book in my opinion was the one called The Grammar Bible, which pretty much tells you everything you want to know with good examples and explanations. I'm afraid the only way to remedy this is probably to teach yourself.

[Petrarch's Love]

In terms of form, the difference is nil, which makes the term 'gerund' redundant where it refers to a formal category (i.e. the way the word looks).
in Latin, the gerund and the participle actually differ in form (puer loquens - the speaking boy, ars loquendi - the art of public speaking, don't ask me which is which ), but in English they look the same.
I'll tell you more about the function side of the problem after that class

Sleepy--While you're right that there isn't necessarily a distinct gerund form in English, that doesn't mean the gerund doesn't exist. English also doesn't form declensions like some languages, but that doesn't mean there's no such thing as the accusative in English. Last time I checked gerunds were alive and well in English. Are you sure you're not thinking of the gerundive? They are either non-existent or practically non-existent in English to the best of my knowledge.

Edit: Since you didn't seem certain, in your latin examples, "puer loquens" is the participle form, and "ars loquendi" would be the gerund form.

[Jean-Baptiste]

most school text books are based either on Latin grammar (BAAAAAD! explain about it later if anyone's interested )

Sure, I'd be interested.

Thanks for all the suggested reading, Sleepy.

...instructed the teachers to let us "feel" our way through writing when we were starting out.

That sounds awful!

Thanks for your recommendation of The Grammar Bible, PL. You've described my plight very well.

[Gordon Comstock]

Take a look here. It will let you practice and give you some help.

http://www.dailygrammar.com/archive.shtml

[SleepyWitch]

Sleepy--While you're right that there isn't necessarily a distinct gerund form in English, that doesn't mean the gerund doesn't exist. English also doesn't form declensions like some languages, but that doesn't mean there's no such thing as the accusative in English. Last time I checked gerunds were alive and well in English. Are you sure you're not thinking of the gerundive? They are either non-existent or practically non-existent in English to the best of my knowledge.

Edit: Since you didn't seem certain, in your latin examples, "puer loquens" is the participle form, and "ars loquendi" would be the gerund form.

accusative? do you mean case grammar/deep case/semantic roles?

of course I'm being provocative yep, some linguists say there's a gerund in English and some say there isn't, I'll get an update on all the pros and cons in my grammar class on Thursday.

[Redzeppelin]

Oh this is such a sore spot with me. I teach English and am amazed how unprepared the tudents are who step into my AP class. Teachers shy away from grammar because its "boring" and complicated - but a knowledge of it helps you "diagnose" the problems in your own writing. As well, when kids don't know grammar, it's very difficult to communicate to them what kind of writing errors they are commiting. I spent a lot of time in HS diagramming sentences, but it wasn't until I started teaching grammar that it began to make clear sense to me. Once you learn grammar, it's like learning the basic mathematical formulas or musical scales - you suddenly see the "logic" of language - how it works and how it can be constructed/manipulated for maximum effect.

[Virgil]

Oh this is such a sore spot with me. I teach English and am amazed how unprepared the tudents are who step into my AP class. Teachers shy away from grammar because its "boring" and complicated - but a knowledge of it helps you "diagnose" the problems in your own writing. As well, when kids don't know grammar, it's very difficult to communicate to them what kind of writing errors they are commiting. I spent a lot of time in HS diagramming sentences, but it wasn't until I started teaching grammar that it began to make clear sense to me. Once you learn grammar, it's like learning the basic mathematical formulas or musical scales - you suddenly see the "logic" of language - how it works and how it can be constructed/manipulated for maximum effect.

Red Zep, could it be that many if not most teachers at the pre-college level don't really know the finer points of grammar themseves?

[Redzeppelin]

Red Zep, could it be that many if not most teachers at the pre-college level don't really know the finer points of grammar themseves?

That is probably a fair statement to make. I only began to grasp how language linked together grammatically once I'd spent a few years teaching it. The way public education is going, and the way written communication is morphing (e.g. text messaging, email and what not), grammar will probably become obsolete as a HS curricular subject - which is too bad, because the ability to manipulate language effectively is very, very important. Personally, at the risk of bugging all the elementary and middle school teachers out there, I believe that the first 6-7 years of school should be spent learning grammar so that from 8th grade on we can concentrate on writing/thinking strategies - rather than my having to spend precious time teaching basic grammatical concepts to 11-12 graders. How can you teach a student the difficult skill of the persuasive/argumentative essay when he lacks the grammatical skill to write effective, strong sentences? The form and content must work together!

But to circle back to your point - I think a lot of teachers avoid grammar because they don't feel confident about teaching it. But I didn't feel confident either at first! I think precision of written expression matters, so I toughed it out and eventually got to where it makes sense to me (which it must if it is to make sense to your students).

[Shannanigan]

Wow! Thanks everybody! (Funny how I'm gone for a couple weeks and suddenly my months-old post sparks discussion, lol).

I've been trying to brush up on the terms with grammar books in our writing center. It's really mind-numbing because I already KNOW all the rules...it's now just a matter of MEMORIZING the names of all the darned things. Ugh.

How are you feeling about this now, Shannanigan? Have you had time to gain confidence since July?

I do plan to get a couple of books now for when I start teaching, and I want to address this lack of grammar knowledge in our local public schools...it's ridiculous!

[Redzeppelin]

I do plan to get a couple of books now for when I start teaching, and I want to address this lack of grammar knowledge in our local public schools...it's ridiculous!

Oh you are so right. Here's the good part - at the end of each of my courses, I have students evaluate the course, and of course they all vote that they wish grammar would go; but, they all do admit that they found it helpful and that they learned a lot. You'll do them great favors by teaching them how their own language works - don't give up! Writing is powerful, and although you can be a powerful writer without a precise knowledge of grammar, think how good you could be with that knowledge.

[ghideon]

I am not a teacher but I do take learning seriously. My thoughts about teaching grammar?

Play around with the topic.

1. Have your class write for ten minutes. Then have them go back and place a period after every sixth word. Then have them read their writing outloud.

2. Do the same exercise with question marks, exclamation points...

3. Ask them to come up with different words for the terms in traditional grammar...maybe instead of quotation marks the term could be speak marks, talk marks...or perhaps in some different culture the quotation marks would look different depending on what follows...like yell marks, sad marks, demand marks...

4. Have them play around with the difference between a transitive verb and an intransitive verb. It is actually an exciting distinction since the difference between an action that is done to something vs an act that does not have a direct object at the receiving end...it always opens up my understanding of the world and of language. Oh...I just thought of something....was reading a book called Philosphy Of The Mind...the author stated in the introduction that Linguistics and other studies of Language have been seen as the most important concern for the past few decades. How does language work? Are we born with the ability? How does one language present a different reality then another language? And he does not say that these are unimportant questions.

He does, though, offer the interesting premise that before we can really dig into questions of language it seems rational to investigate ideas, assumptions, philosophies, premises that are more fundamental then language, words, communication. How do we know anything at all? How can I prove that I have a mind? If I know I have a mind because I can think then how can I actually know that the other people I meet have similar minds and thus similar mental states? This may be of no help to you regarding the nuts and bolts of teaching grammar but I found it to be a very interesting argument and it actually solved a question that had been bugging me. Why do I keep on getting books on grammar, writing, logic and rhetoric but then find them very dry. Perhaps one reason could be that these deeper questions are actually something I need to spend some time with first.


4. Have the class do a homework assignment where they speak into a tape recorder for 5,10 minutes about any topic they want...or just have them speak strem of thought. Then have them bring the tapes to school and play them back. Maybe have a few students transcribe their tapes and seek if they would know how to use the correct grammar in the written form. This might help them see the reason why grammar is so important in writing...because we actually have a very real grammar of the spoken word, inflection, how loud or quietly we speak, how fast or slow, pauses, gestures...the understanding of grammar simply enables people to use the written word with as much, or even more, flexibility and power as speach.

I just finished reading a book called The Power Of Mindful Learning by Ellen L Langer. To sum up the basic premise: A bunch of studies that she conducted with a whoe variety of student groups seem to indicate that the topic itself is rarely the real reason for learning difficulties. Instead, it is the mind frame of how it is taught, the mind frame of the teacher, and, ofcourse, the mindframe of the students. She makes some brilliant points:

1. Memorizing just for memory sake is not nearly as effective as remembering for a definite and practical reason. By practical I simply mean that the items needing to be remembered are understood to be of real benefit to the students and not just something they are told to learn simply because it is considered, by an authority figure, to be important. Another point she makes is that nobody really has thought about what we mean when we ask people, students in particular, to pay "attention".

Usually it means, or at least strongly implies, give me your unfocused concentration...think of nothing else but what I am saying. This leads to, at best, a kind of begrudging concentration. And by asking someone to think of nothing else they will feel that any ideas, questions, and associations with what is being said are 95% of the time inappropriate, not relevant and thus the topic remains ireleavan

But imagine if attention meant listen to what I am saying but have your attention be open...think about what I am saying, question it, think about what it means for you, what associations does it bring up, what other ideas, thoughts does it remind you of?

In one part of the book she says something like "hey, if someone is daydreaming or seems clearly preoccupied then instead of just saying, hey, stop that, snap out of it there are other ways of handling it." The person is actually paying a great deal of attention to something, but it is not what is being taught. So there is no problem with the individuals ability, capacity, to attend to something. The question is why are they paying attention to X when the class is about Y. Maybe X is more exciting, more visual, full of color and action (thinking about a video game, or a movie, or making out, or a fight they had, or saw...) and in that case the idea would be to think if the class topic could become more exciting, more colorful, more engaging so that there was not such a huge gap between X and Y.

I know that your day to day life as a teacher presents a whole universe of very real difficulties (class size, teaching requirements, mandatory lesson topics, administrators,...) and many of these ideas may just be impossible, not helpful, helpful but not right for your class in particular...I offer them with that awareness in my mind.

sincerely,
Ghideon

[Pensive]

As a student I can not help jumping into this conversation especially when this thing, English Grammar, is my weakest point.

My reasons for being a jerk in this Grammar thing is that I don't even know what these terms mean. For instance, I did not even know what the hell was meant by adjective about half a year ago even though I could use them quite well.

I think that this is because I studied English from novels, not from grammar books, keeping in mind that in our previous school, the English was just a little more than "A B C".

Once our teacher told the whole class rules regarding tenses, like using "ing" and other things, I did not get a single word of it. But in my creative writing, I hardly make mistakes in tenses. Once she was asking us a question and I answered it. She asked me thatn why was the answer the "answer". I was very surprised, I just stood there like a fool. Then another girl answered it because the "answer was the answer" due to some stupid grammar rule.

I have girls in my class who usually have noses in grammar books, but when it comes to writing something, they can't write too well. So I personally feel that grammar is not that much help. Grammar just messes up the whole English language for me.

[ghideon]

I am glad you added your thoughts and feelings Pensive. If you have not read my post above I would love you to check it out and give me your take on it. Do my ideas make any sense?

I also feel like your experience is exactly the type of experience that I had in my mind when I wrote my post.

G

As a student I can not help jumping into this conversation especially when this thing, English Grammar, is my weakest point.

My reasons for being a jerk in this Grammar thing is that I don't even know what these terms mean. For instance, I did not even know what the hell was meant by adjective about half a year ago even though I could use themadjectives quite well.

I think that this is because I studied English from novels, not from grammar books, keeping in mind that in our previous school, the English was just a little more than "A B C".

Once our teacher told the whole class rules regarding tenses, like using "ing" and other things, I did not get a single word of it. But in my creative writing, I hardly make mistakes in tenses. Once she was asking us a question and I answered it. She asked me thatn why was the answer the "answer". I was very surprised, I just stood there like a fool. Then another girl answered it because the "answer was the answer" due to some stupid grammar rule.

I have girls in my class who usually have noses in grammar books, but when it comes to writing something, they can't write too well. So I personally feel that grammar is not that much help. Grammar just messes up the whole English language for me.

[Pensive]

I am glad you added your thoughts and feelings Pensive. If you have not read my post above I would love you to check it out and give me your take on it. Do my ideas make any sense?

I also feel like your experience is exactly the type of experience that I had in my mind when I wrote my post.

G

ghideon,

Thank you for sharing it with us. Yours ideas seem good. These can make the grammar lesson which is thought to be quite boring really interesting.

I will like to hear teachers' comments as well about the points you have mentioned. I wonder if they think that following these methods in the classroom can prove to be an improving way for the students.

[Jean-Baptiste]

Wow! Thanks everybody! (Funny how I'm gone for a couple weeks and suddenly my months-old post sparks discussion, lol).

I've been trying to brush up on the terms with grammar books in our writing center. It's really mind-numbing because I already KNOW all the rules...it's now just a matter of MEMORIZING the names of all the darned things. Ugh.



I do plan to get a couple of books now for when I start teaching, and I want to address this lack of grammar knowledge in our local public schools...it's ridiculous!

Welcome back, Shannanigan! I"m glad to hear of your plan to fix the grammar situation. I'm developing a similar plan myself. Thanks for starting this thread so many months ago; it has helped me a great deal. Sorry that it lay dormant for so long.

Ghideon: These are interesting exercises that you suggest.