DOCUMENT RESUME

ED 397 434 CS 215 403

TITLE Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the .4ssemblyfor the Teaching of English Grammar (6th,Williamsport, PA, July 28-29, 1995).

INSTITUTION National Council of Teachers of English, Urbana, IL.Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar.

PUB DATE Jul 95NOTE 64p.; For Proceedings 1990-1994, see CS 215

404-408.

PUB TYPE Collected Works General (020)

EDRS PRICE MF01/PC03 Plus Postage.DESCRIPTORS Elementary Secondary Education; *English Instruction;

Error Analysis (Language); *Grammar; HigherEducation; Literacy; *Teaching Methods; TechnicalWriting; *Writing Instruction

IDENTIFIERS *Educational Issues

ABSTRACTThis proceedings contains papers presented at the

sixth annual conference of the Assembly for the Teaching of EnglishGrammar. Papers in the proceedings are: "The Politics of Grammar"(Sabah A. Salih); "(Still) Trying to Find an Answer to the Problem of'Error' in Writing" (William McCleary); "Grammar and Literacy:Embedding Outside Sources in Text" (Jim Kenkel and Robert Yates);"The Nine-Question Method of Teaching Grammar" (Glenn Swetman);"Simplifying Tree Structures in the Grammar Classroom" (R.A. Buck);"Teaching Grammar through Technical Documents" (Jim Brosnan);

."Proposal for an Official AETG Bibliographer" (Delma McLeod-Porter);"A Hands-On Non-Traditional Grammar That's Fun" (Anthony Hunter);"Between Restrictive and Nonrestrictive: Amplifying Clauses" (BrockHaussamen); "Using Error Notebooks to Improve Grammar" (JamesBoswell, Jr.); "Surrealism and Grammar: Creatively Reinvigorating theClassroom" (Kevin Griffith); and "Functional Grammar for English (NotLatin)" (Carolyn G. Hartnett). Minutes of the 1994 business meeting,the 1995 conference program, and a list of conference participantsare attached. (RS)

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Proceedings

of the

Sixth Annual Conferenceof the

Assembly for theTeaching of English Grammar

July 28 & 29, 1995

Pennsylvania College of TechnologyWilliamsport, PA

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ContentsIr sroduction 4

The Politics of GrammarSabah A. Sal ih 5

(Still) Trying to Find an Answer to the Problem of 'Error' in Writing

William McCleary 9

Grammar and Literacy: Embedding Outside Sources in Text

Jim Kenkel & Robert Yates 15

The Nine-Question Method of Teaching Grammar

Glenn Swetman 24

Simplifying Tree Structures in the Grammar Classroom

R.A. Buck 28

Teaching Grammar Through Technical Documents

Jim Brosnan 36

Proposal for an Official ATEG Bibliographer

De lma McLeod-Porter, 40

A Hands-On Non-Traditional Grammar That's Fun

Anthony Hunter 42

Between Restrictive and Nonrestrictive: Amplifying Clauses

Brock Haussamen 48

Using Error Notebooks to Improve Grammar

James Boswell, Jr. 51

Surrealism and Grammar: Creatively Reinvigorating the Classroom

Kevin Griffith 53

Functional Grammar for English (Not Latin)

Carolyn G. Hartnett 56

Minutes of the 1994 ATEG Business Meeting 60

1995 Conference Program 62

1995 ATEG Conference Participants 63

3

3

IntroductionEd Vavra

Welcome to the Proceedings of the Sixth AnnualATEG conference. I hope that you find things ofinterest in these pages. I would like to note that theProceedings of all ATEG conferences are still, and willremain available from ATEG. The ATEG copyrightcovers the book; copyrights for individual papersbelong to their respective authors. [For more informa-tion on previous proceedings, contact me at DIF 112,Pennsylvania College of Technology, One CollegeAve., VVilliamsport, PA 17701. e-mail:EVAVRA@PCT.EDU. Or, if I, like the years, havepassed on, locate ATEG's new home through NCTEJ

As "editor," it has been my position to remain asclose as possible to the originals presented to me.Other than compiling, all I have done is to change afew obviously typographical errors. As a result, thereare differences in style (Some authors underline titles;others put them in italics, etc.), and there are sen-tences that are stylistically, even grammatically,questionable. Particularly with writing that is aboutgrammar, I believe that the text should reflect theauthor, not the editor. I apologize in advance for anyerrors which I may have introduced in the process ofreproducing the manuscripts.

Copyright 1996, NCTE Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar

4 4

The Politics of GrammarSabah A. Saiih

Bloomsburg, PA

Fear, imprisonment, torture, and assassi-nation are the common means by which atotalitarian state controls its people. Anotherequally effective mean is language, which thestate turns into an official domain where whatgets said and how it is said requires stateapproval. The aim is of course to force peopleto consume and obey state ideology. A com-mon slogan in most totalitarian states, likeAssad's Syria and Saddam's Iraq, is that "Weall speak one language"a oneness which ismilitantly constructed, protected, and elevatedinto a paralyzing sacredness that no dictator-ship can be without. As an aspect of language,grammar, too, becomes the subject of officialintervention. In the case of Iraq beforeSaddam, speaking grammatically, howeverunnatural considering how different spokenand written Arabic are from one another, wasconsidered patriotic. Because the dictatorAhmad Hassan al-Bakr had decided thatgrammar was a good thing, violating its rulescame to be seen as a treacherous act, imply-ing, disloyalty to the state and its leader,among other things. But when this dictator fromthe upper class was replaced with another fromthe lower class, grammar came to be seen asreactionary, repressive, and elitist, and thus thestate paved the way for a war on grammar.

To understand the politics of grammarunder Saddam Hussein and his predecessoral-Bakr, we fi r s t need to see how their dictator-ship redefined the role and direction of educa-tion in Iraq. Before the Ba'athists came topower in Iraq in 1968, education was profes-sion-oriented. There was a huge demand fordoctors, engineers, scientists, and teachers;but as the country's then four universities couldnot meet the demand, professionals werebrought in from wherever they could be found:Egypt, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bulgaria,the former Soviet Union, even Cuba. The statehad no problem with that. It was simply atechnical need. That was all. The country

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needed more teachers, more doctors, moreengineers, and importing them was simply abusiness matter, there was nothing ideologicalabout it. A profession was simply a profession;it did not entail anything else. One went toschool to get a training in this or that field.Universities were not in any other business,and the assumption was that this was howsystems of education worked the world over.Professionalism was the goal.

After 1968, however, education began toundergo a revolution in Iraq. Education cameincreasingly to be seen as an ideological,rather than a professional, enterprise, and assuch, the state concluded, it could be made toserve a political purposes as well. But first thestate had to make sure that it had a monopolyon education. Almost overnight, all schools,from kindergartens to universities, were nation-alized. Now it was considered criminal tooperate a school independently. But to makeeducation serve a political purpose, the statehad to do more; and it did. In the past, forexample, if one chose to study medicine, thenmedicine, along with courses in related fields,were all that the person needed to study. Nowthe state required every university student, nomatter what his/her field of study, to takecourses in Arab history, sociology, and litera-ture. But these were not courses that just aboutany professional with a graduate degree couldteach. No, these were courses designed insideout by the state; the state had a particularversion of history, of sociology, of literature;and it wanted to pass it on to students at everylevel, but especially at the university level,where students were considered more ripe forindoctrination. The ideological goal was clearcreate a new generation of loyal consumers ofstate ideology: people who more or lessthought alike and looked up to the state fordirection.

5

To extend its ideological hold on educa-tion, the state also moved simultaneously inthe areas of primary and secondary education.Here, too, private schools were abolished;here, too, a new curriculum for the humanitieswas developed; here, too, the aim was thesame: to control and direct what went intostudents' heads about history, sociology, andpolitics. These goals were clearly laid out in theruling Arab Ba'ath Party's Political Report for1970. The educational system, said the report,had to be compatible with "the principles andaims of the Party and Revolution." New syllabihad to be.prepared at once "for every levelfrom nursery school to university"; they had tobe "inspired by the principles of the Party andRevolution." That meant rooting out "reaction-ary bourgeois and liberal ideas" from educa-tional institutions, but above F!* 'reefing ageneration who would speei - language,the state's official language cr. ran-Ambism.

Briefly, Pan-Arabism is the belief that theArabs of the Middle East, North Africa, and theSudan are one people, divided into so manystates only because Western imperialism, in anelaborate plot to plunder their wealth andextend its hegemony over them, had decidedthat it was in its best interest to keep the Arabsdivided. This dMsion has to end. Arab oil hasto be shared by all. And Arabs should be ableto live and work in whatever part of the Arabworld they choose. To turn words into deeds,the Ba'ath Party (which controls Iraq since1967) abolished all borders among Arab statesin the maps it now put out; it also gave allArabs the same rights the Iraqi people had;more important, it made Pan-Arabism itsultimate goal, which still is despite the fact thatall the many efforts at unity by Iraq had gonenowhere.

But to make an entire nation speak thestate's language, think according to its Pan-Arab ideology, more effort was needed thanjust politicizing and nationalizing schools. Morethan half of the nation's population could notread or write. These were mainly older people,scattered in hundreds of small villages allacross the country, villages with no runningwater, electricity, or roads connecting them to

the cities. Now the challenge was how to givethese people some very, very basic education.Simultaneously the state embarked on anambitious program to, on the one hand, extendroads, electricity, and running water to thesevillages, and, on the other, open up schools.Because these people were mainly farmerswho needed their children to work in the fieldsduring the day, the schools had to open in theevening. The aim, at least on the surface, wasto teach these people basic skills in reading,writing, and arithmetic. But the real aim wasentirely political. After all, the state wanted tobring about a revolution in the way peoplethought and dealt with the government. Sowhile the farmers were learning how to writetheir names, how to multiply, add, divide, andsubtract figures, they were also learning aboutPan-Arabism, about imperialism, about loyaltyto the state, about the leader. The exercises onthe surface were about how to say this or that,how to write this or that, but on a deeper levelthey were about political indoctrination. Alllearning activities, for example, involved in oneway or another making some very positivestatements about the state's ultimate texts, thatis, the president of the county (then AhamdHassan al-Bakr) and his vice-president (thenSaddam Hussein). Other texts included abarrage of proclamations, denunciations,adulations, among other things, written all overschool walls, in support of the state and its twinleaders. There were also daily classes in whicha party official would more directly tell thesepeople about the party and its goals and why itwas necessary for all to join. But this processof indoctrination through the guise of educationdid not stop when the students went home; thestate had insured that it would go on there aswell, thanks to all the free television sets thatthe government had distributed. When theywent home, these people could hardly taketheir eyes off this novelty: they could see everynight how generous, courageous, benevolent,and intelligent the twin leaders were; howstrong the country's army was; how artificial allthe borders dividing Arab countries were; howpatriotic it was to join the Ardb Ba'ath Party.Whereas in the past most of these people hadnot had the slightest idea who their presidentwas, let alone what their government was all

6

about, now they felt they knew "the leader andhis deputy" first hand. They would see themacting human: visiting with friends and families,barbecuing, shopping, showing compassion, orjust enjoying a relaxing day in the country.They would also see them acting as leaders:receiving heads of state and foreign diplomats,though not hearing the words they wouldexchange; inspecting an industrial or agricul-tural project; viewing an army parade; orsigning a decree.

Now let me be clear about this: indoctrina-tion through education was not offered as anoption; it was a mandate. Everyone, male andfemale, not younger than six, not older thanfifty, had to attend some type of school. Toinsure that, the army, the state's massivesecret police, and the Party's numerous politi-cal and cultural organizations were brought into keep a watch. Punishment for skippingschool would start with an admonishment froma Party official. If it did not stop, then wouldcome an interrogation by the secret police,which would be held in a basement full of toolsof torture. Next would come the army to takethe person away and possibly confiscate his/her property as a punishment and deterrence.

So this is the context within which the Iraqistate in the late 1960s set out to bring about arevolution in education or more precisely arevolution in the relationship between the stateand the people. This was the mother of allinvasions, for the state was not simply trying tooccupy all private spaces; more important, asKenan Makiya has meticulously documented, itwas trying to eliminate them. Televisionbrought the state inside the home. Togetherwith school, they turned the home into a placewhere state ideology acquired a monopoly ondiscussion, where the fear of torture by thesecret police insured that there was no dissent,and where family members lost trust in oneanother, as the state now decreed that it was apatriotic duty for one to spy on his/her family.

But to the outside world this systematicand at times ruthless campaign to control andsilence a people was seen as a genuine effortby a government to educate its people. As far

7

as the United Nations and others were con-cerned, it was just that, a commendable under-taking to eliminate illiteracy and backward-nessa point, incidentally, that was also madeby the Egyptian feminist Newel al-Saadawi. 2

Now, you might ask, how all this control-ling affected the teaching of grammar? In twoways. During Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr's presi-dency, which lasted from 1968 to 1973, thestate embarked on a vigorous campaign topromote classical Arabic, that is, the Arabic ofthe Koran, which is very different from thedozen or so Arabic dialects spoken in the Arabworld. AI-Bakr himself was a lover of classicalArabic; he, unlike Saddam Hussein, came froma prominent well-to-do tribe which had nothingbut disdain for spoken Arabic. For him, classi-cal Arabic was pure, beautiful, correct, andorderiy; spoken Arabic, by contrast, was im-pure, ugly, incorrect, and disorderly. ClassicalArabic represented a glorious past, the timewhen the Arabs were strong and united andwhen their empire stretched all the way toSpain. Spoken Arabic, by contrast, representeda prilsent marked by defeat and paralysis, atime when the Arabs were in disarray andretreat. And so for al-Sakr there was no ques-tion which Arabic was superior and which wasinferior. It was time to return to classical Arabic,and he pushed for that with such a fanfare thatalmost overnight a standard of correctness wasdeveloped; and because it was sanctioned byhim, that is, by the man at the top, it carriedwith it an authority that no one would dare tochallenge, at least not as long as he was inpower. After all, he was constructed not just asan ail powerful leader, but also as "The GreatFather," one that knew it all, one who had to beobeyed. The end result was that "Say it thisway; don't say it that way" became the dictumof the day as schools, radios and televisionstations, and newspapers now gave dailylessons on the virtues and benefits of writingand speaking grammaticallyor more preciselywriting and speaking in ways demanded by thedictatorship.

But the change of guard in 1973 broughtwith it a dramatic change in attitude towardgrammatical correctness. That year Ahmad

7

Hassan al-Bakr in a bloodless coup was re-placed by his deputy Saddam Hussein, thepoor Bakr was even made to announce his"retirement for health reasons" on television.As life-size portraits of Saddam started replac-ing Bakes, change became inevitable. Rightfrom the start, the new leader began usinglanguage very differently from his predecessor,it was unmistakably the language that theupper class Bakr had frowned upon asungrammatical, provincial, and impure. But itwas a language that the population at large,including the new dictator, felt native to; it wasthe language of their dreams, aspirations, andfrustrations, containing and expressing the veryessence of their being. By contrast, Bakesversion came to be seen as artificial andrestrictive, privileging the upper land-owningclass which the new dictator was swiftly movingagainst. In no time all lessons about correct-ness that were the hallmark of the previousdictator started to disappear from radio andtelevision, schools and newspapers. They werereplaced with nightly poetry recitals, literary

and political discussions, dramatic perfor-mances, and songsall in the very languagethat only years before the state had consideredbad, ugly, and ungrammatical.

Saddam's purpose of course was not awhole lot different from Bakes. Both usedgrammar politically: Bakr promoting a standardof grammatical correctness based solely onKoranic Arabic and upper class usage of it,Saddam promoting a non-standard version thatmore or less did away with grammatical cor-rectness.

1 Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear (Berkely: Uof California P, 1989), 171-72.

2 See Flan Hazelton,ed., Iran Since the GulfWar (London: Zed P, 1994). This bookcontains an excellent collection of essaysthat discuss the impact Saddam's dictator-ship has had on Iraq's culture and society.What is so interesting about the collectionis that all the contributors are Iraqis whoknow their subjects first hand.

8

(Still) Trying to Find an Answerto the Problem of 'Error' in Writing

William Mc DewyLivonia, NY

If it can be said that there was a singlemotivating event for this paper, it may havebeen an e-mail message I received from ahigh-ranking administrator at my college. In it,the administrator spelled "a lot" as one word.Although this could have been an a.crAent, Ifell to fantasizing about how many times thiserror had been cornacted by the writer's formerEnglish teachers. Tan times? Twenty times?Whatever the real number was, why didn't ittake? Spelling "a lot" as two words seems likesuch a simple thing to learn.

Whether or not a common little error like"a lot" justified my dismay, it was not a newfeeling. Perhaps the most traumafic incidentoccurred when I was reading through a collec-tion of student essays, fourth grade througheleventh grade, that my wife was using toteach holistic scoring to public school teachers.What struck me was that the same errorsoccurred at every grade level. Comma splices,fragments, antecedent problems, misspellingsof the same old words like separate, allowed,laid, and said, and on and on. Never beforehad the collective failure of English teachers toteach one of the basic subjects they are re-sponsible.for been laid out so clearly. I sud-denly got a vision of English teachers markingall those errors year after year, explaining thesame concepts over and over, and assigningexercises that were supposed to help studentscorrect the errors but didn't As one of thepeople who did that, I was overwhelmed by asense of futility. All that work for what seemedto be so little impact

We could multiply these examples andcall upon much research to show that much ifnot most instruction in what we generally call"correct usage" has been ineffective. But Idon't think there's much argument about it.Let's consider, instead, why efforts to teachcorrect usage have generally been unsuccess-ful. The theme of this conference is "explicit

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teaching of language structures," and here is aclear example of the failure of such explicit .

teaching. I might dispute the claim that teach-ing large language structures such as organi-zation and genres is ineffective, but it seemsthat the explicit teaching of small languagestructures such as spelling, vocabulary, andusage doesn't work very well, at least not as itis usually done.

Why doesn't it work? Everyone has afavorite list of reasons. One reason on my listis that there are too many rules and structuresfor anyone to learn them all through explicitteaching. Most of them must be learned implic-itly through wide-ranging reading and writingand through growing up around people whouse the socially prestigious dialect.

The corollary to this problem of too manyrules to learn is that the people who must learnthem in some kind of remedial program tend tobe those who have the most to learn and,often, are the least able to do so. It's notsurprising, then, that the "deeply remedial"students, by whatever euphemism onechooses to call them, are most at risk of notsucceeding in college. They must try to learnexplicitly what the other students learnedimplicitly, a nearly impossible task. Also, as ReiNoguthi says in his book Grammar and theTeaching of Writing, "It stands to reason thatthe more conventions that have to be taught,the less attention that each particular conven-tion receives, and eventually, the less each islearned."

A second reason the usual methods ofteaching correct language structures areineffective is explained by Mina Shaughnessyin Errors and Expectations. The gist of herargument is that teachers incorrectly diagnosethe roots of errors. Shaughnessy points outthat students have a logic behind most of theirerrors, and teachers must be able to figure out

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that logic in order to correct it. This s notalways easy to do, nor does it even occur tomost teachers that such a step is necessary.To illustrate this principle to my own studentsall of them pre-service English teachersI pointout that many members of the class, usuallyclose to half, put their periods and commasoutside of the quotation marks. Now, I say, I'mtelling all of you who do that that it's wrong.Periods and commas always go inside quota-tion marks. Then, without asking students thelogic behind their punctuation, I illustrate therule, and I reiterate the rule every time a paperis due. At the end of the semester we find thatonly a few who made that error have changedtheir ways. This, I say, shows how hard it is tochange even the simplest language habitespecially if you don't know the reasoningbehind that habit.

Then there's a third reason that ourteaching is ineffective, and that is that ourexercises are explained in terms of grammar,and the grammar used is inadequate andsometimes incorrect in the first place, and inthe second place too elaborate to be a goodteaching tool. We need a pedagogical gram-mar but we teach something else. This is, forexample, one of the reasons given by EdVavra in his book, Teaching Grammar as aLiberal Art. Vavra makes the point that bothtraditional grammar and the modem scientificgrammars are not up to the job. Not only areboth mom elaborate than necessary, buttraditional grammar has inaccuracies andscientific grammars were never designed to beteaching tools.

Finally, we come to my main point fortoday, which is that our teaching of usage hasdeteriorated to the point that many of ourcolleagues refer to it as drill-and-kill. The drillskill interest in English by being required ofstudents who don't need them and by beingboring besides. In theory, we could get rid ofdrill-and-kill by assigning each exercise only tothe students who make the particular error thatit covers. This would be a large problem inlogistics but not impossible. However, even ifwe did that, the exercises would often not beup to the job, and they therefore would not helpstudents to overcome their errors.

While various reasons have been given toexplain why the exercises don't work, I'm goingto discuss them collectively by referring to anarticle by Muriel Harris and Katherine Rowanon the application of concept learning, anaspect of cognitive psychology, to learningcorrect usage. The article appeared in the Fall,1989, issue of Journal of Basic Writing. Harrisand Rowan give at least four problems withmost exercK3s, and to those I'll add a couplemore that I've run across while trying to carryout the advice given in their article. For thisdiscussion I want to use as my example theexercises on subject-verb agreement in yourhandout, which I took from the third edition of abook entitled College Writing Skills by JohnLangen. I chose this example not because it'sworse than the rest but because it's typical. Italso must be considered adequate by manyteachers since Langen's book is in the thirdedition. I should add that in addition to theexercises you have here the lesson includesthree exercises that Langen calls review tests.

In the first place, Harris and Rowan say,the theory of concept learning requires that thelesson include any background knowledgenecessary for students to understand theconcept to be learned. For the example athand, this would require that Langen explain orre-explain the grammatical terms he uses, suchas subject and verb, singular and plural, prepo-sitional phrase, and indefinite pronouns. Youcan see that he does define singular and pluralin the parentheses next to the terms when theyare first introducedalthough the definitions arevastly oversimplified; for instance, the defini-tions don't cover mass nouns. He also tries toget around the need to define indefinite pro-noun by listing all of the common ones and theproblem of applying the concepts of singularand plural as defined in the introduction bysimply saying that all indefinite pronounsexcept "both" take the singular verb. However,according to Harris and Rowan, even if weaccept his oversimplifications as a worthyattempt to avoid grammatical jargon, hn shouldhave re-explained subject and verb and prepo-sitional phrase if he's going to use these wordsand make them the keys to correct agreement.True, these terms are covered elsewhere in the

101 0

book, but there's no guarantee that teacherswill have assigned the relevant material or thatstudents will remember it. In Langen's book,subject and verb are explained forty pagesbefore this lesson on subject-verb agreement;that's P long gap between explanation and thisapplication. He does, of course, give examplesthat might jog students' memories, but to usesuch important terms without a greater effort toensure that students understand them mayinstead ensure that students will fail to under-stand the lesson. If students can't find thesubject and verb, they can't follow the rest ofthe directions.

In the second place, Harris and Rowansay, traditional exercises are inadequatebecause the concept to be learned is often notadequately defined. A concept may be over-simplified or the textbook writer may not list allof the attributes critical to understanding theconcept, while at the same time perhaps listingattributes that are not necessary or askingstudents to use criteria that are variab,as andnot critical attributes. In this case, the conceptto be defined is subject/verb agreement Wehave a rule that subjects and verbs must agreein number, but what are the attributes thatmake up this agreement? In other words, whatare the attributes that give the subject and verbnumber? Are they the forms of the subjectsand verbs or are they something else? Doesthe attribute that makes a subject singular orplural lie in the head noun alone or in the entiresubject? And do the attributes that make upnumber in nouns also make up number inpronouns? You will note that Langen's intro-ductory explanation of the rule does not an-swer such questions. Instead, he goes right tofour situations in which he says that studentsoften make mistakes: "When words comebetween the subject and verb"; "When a verbcomes before the subject"; "With compoundsubjects"; and Mth indefinite pronouns."Now, Harris.ano Rowan say that limiting alesson to those areas of a concept in whichstudents make errors is a fine idea, but we cansee that there are some puzzling aspects to1.1ngen's brief lessons. Note, first of all, that,he implies in the first exercise that grammaralone determines whether a subject and verb

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are singular or plural and that only the headnoun counts as the subject. These are unten-able rules, for structure is a variable, not acritical attribute. In a sentence like "Two centsis the price of a gumball," structure says pluralbut common sense says singular. Also, thelesson begins with the rule that "words thatcome between the subject and the verb do notchange subject-verb agreement, but the onlykind of intervening structure he gives examplesof is the preposition phrase, and the easiestkind of preposition phrase to recognize, at that.What about appositives or relative daures?Even harder to deal with, according to BrockHaussaman, in a book I will discuss in aminute, are intervening phrase that begin with"as well as" or "in addition to." That grammaris a variable and not an attribute can also beseen in the lessons on compound subjects andindefinite nouns. Both items in a compoundsubject can be singular and yet they count asplural, and all indefinite articles count as singu-lar, as we might evect of words in a singularform, except the mysterious case of "both,"which has singular form but counts as plural.And these are not the only problems, but timeprevents me from continuing.

We can see, then, several reasons whythese exercises don't work. Not only are thosestudents most likely to need such exercisesleast likely to have a sound grasp on suchbackground information as subjects, verbs, andprepositional phrases, but the rules are notreliable, depending sometimes on meaningand sometimes on structure but without anyreliable to guide to which is which. The rulessound sensible to English teachers, but that'sbecause we have very little need for reliablerules. We learned almost everything weneeded to know about subject-verb agreementimplicitly and have only a little need for explicitlearning. Furthermore, we get exposed to therules in every class we teach and all throughour time of grading papers, year after year. Inother words, we have fewer rules to learn andvastly more opportunities for learning than anystudent. No wonder it all seems to easy to us.

Why don't textbook writers improve theirdefinitions of the concepts they teach? There

1 1

are probably several reasons, beginning withthe fact that textbook writers who want to makemoney write what teachers want to buy, notwhat they know to be the truth. But a secondreason is that there has until recently been littlesystematic study of grammatical concepts asthey relate to correct usage. Textbook authorseither imitate previous books or rely on theirown unscientific intuitions as to the nature ofconcepts for there were few studies of the truenature of the concepts. Fortunately, however,we now have at good start at remedying thisproblem with Brock Haussaman's book that Imentioned above, Revising the Rules: Tradi-tional Grammar and Modem Linguistics.Haussarnan has made a detailed study ofmany concepts behind errors in usage. In thecases of subject-verb agreement, he points outthat the subject is so complex that someonehas written a whole book on it. According toHaussaman, Wallis Reid, author of Verb andNoun Number in English: A Functional Expla-nation, takes the position "that the number ofthe subject and the number of the verb are twoseparate features that each play a role incommunication." The gist of Reid's theory isthat meaning, not grammar, determines agree-ment. In our present terms, meaning would bethe actual critical attribute. If the writer meansplural, then the su, ject is plural, regardless ofits structure. I kind of like Reid's idea. Using agrammar-based rule instead of meaning isoften counter-intuitive and makes the rulesmore difficult to learn than they should be. Forinstance, in cases where the singular andplural forms are semantically identical, whyshould anyone care whether the writer choosesto make the verb singular or plural? Note #2 onpage 1 of the Langer) handout, where "costs"is interchangeable with its singular form. Is itreally necessary to change the verb to singularif we use "cost" instead of "costs"? I don't thinkso. Students who know their usage will prob-ably opt for structural agreement, butHaussaman criticizes such a view in thesewords: "Such a process may help a studentmeet the obligations of traditional grammar inthe narrowest sense, but it is not an effectivestep toward the higher goal of encouragingstudents to look hard at the meaning they arecreating for the reader (69).

Harris and Rowan's third principle is thatthe examples used by most authors need to bemuch more extensive than they usually are.Ideally, they should exemplify all of the com-mon problems students will encounter, andthey should be drawn from actual studentsentences containing the errors, not written bythe textbook author. Furthermore, examplesshould come in pairs with one correct exampleand one incorrect. To the common objectionthat many teachers don't want students to seeincorrect sentences for fear that they willinternalize the wrong version, the authorsanswer that the evidence from concept learn-ing does not support such a notion. Also, theauthors say that every pair of correct andincorrect examples should be followed by anexplanation that will point out the critical at-tributes of the concept that are being used todiscriminate between the two kinds.

From the explanations and the criticalattributes, then, the writer of the lesson shoulddevelop a list of questions for students to askthemselves as they try to figure out the correctanswer to a new problem. These should thenbe used in what Harris and Rowan call"inquisatory practice," in which students aregiven some practice sentences, are told toapply the questions systematically, and thenare given feedback. Feedback is particularlyimportant. We might note from personal experi-ence that if students aren't given feedbackwithin the printed exercise, they depend on theteacher to give the feedback, and this leads tothe teacher assigning the exercise to the wholeclass so as to give tris feedback only once.Furthermore, teacher-based feedback is oftenso delayed that students have forgotten thelesson. Feedback within the lesson allows thelesson to be somewhat self-teaching.Haussaman, I might note, also advocates thatstudents be taught to ask themselves a se-quence of questions in order to figure out thebest agreement to use.

We can see that Langen, like most au-Mors, has partially fulfilled these guidelines. Hedoes have examples, and some of the ex-amples are explained, though most are not.But there are no incorrect examples and

12 12

therefore no pairs for students to compare.Langen also suggests some questions forstudents to ask themselves, but he's not verysystematic about it. Students would not belikely to learn to ask themselves a systematicset of questions. Next, he gives no feedbackon the exercises, no discussion of the answers,not even a list of correct answers. Furthermore,there are only five practice sentences for eachsection, some of which are high/y unlikely toreflect errors actually made by native speakersof English. Does anyone really expect that thistiny bit of practice is going to correct such adeep-seated problem as subject-verb agree-ment, if indeed a student has the problem?

Finally, Harris and Rowan also supportbetter exercises than the usual isolated sen-tences in which students are to underline thecorrect answer or fill-in-the-blanks. In fact, thesample given in their article has no such fill-in-the-blank exercises, although in both of theexercises they do include students need do nomore than add punctuation to a paragraph. Iwould think that an exercise requiring completerewriting of a paragraph would be even betteras a replacement or a supplement.

If Harris and Rowan are right about theiridea of applying the principles of conceptlearning to English usage, this would substan-tially change how we work on usage in compo-sition classes. We would have a bank of thesefairly elaborate lessons, and after carefullyidentifying the sources of errors made byindividual students, we would select the appro-priate lessons for each student Where wouldwe get this bank of lessons? There's the rub,for while some commercian .1 published materi-als are better than others, none that I haveseenor that Harris and Rowan saw in thebooks they examinedfully meet the require-ments. And even if we were to borrow andreproduce the best lessons from variousmaterials, most would still be far from greattosay nothing of getting us in trouble for copy-right violations.

The answer would seem to be fairlyobvious. Why don't teachers write their ownlessons? If an individual were to write several

lessons a year, over the years that teacherwould build up a bank of lessons to be admin-istered to individual students for their individualproblems. Even better, a group of teacherscould go together and create the needed bankof lessons more quickly.

This seemed such a simple idea that I hadmy students in the teacher-prep program try it.My idea was that each student in the classcould create one lesson and then everyonecould share lessons. That way, everyone couldbegin their teaching careers with a small bankof lessons already prepared. It will probably notsurprise you to find out that this proceduredidn't work very well. The biggest trouble wasto find really good explanations of the concepOsto be covered. Even though they were Englishmajors, students had very little formal knowl-edge of the concepts, and the explanationsthat they found in the existing handbooksgenerally turned out to be less than satisfac-tory. In fact, when students wrote questions forthe more difficult aspects of a concept andthen tried to write the answers as well, theyoften got the wrong answers to their ownquestons. We forget, I think, how en that newteachers know about these things and howslavishly they must therefore depend on teach-ers' manuals to give them the answers and toteach them the concepts. I can rememberwhen I started teaching ninth grade back in1961. It took me fully two years to figure outwhat a dangling participle was and the officialway to correct it. Until then, I just told studentsthe answers given in the teachers' manual. (Itis, by the way, one of the ironies of teachingthat new teachers learn grammar as much fromthe answer book as from the textbook; yet wedon't give an answer book to the students sothat they can do likewise.)

As my students worked on creating les-sons, they asked, rather peevish:y, why wedidn't contact Harris and Rowan to get somemodels of their lessons and see more preciselyhow it should be done. There is a model intheir article, but because of space limitationsit's an abbreviated one. I also wrote my ownmodel for them, but it was on a subject thatstudents considered so esoteric that it didn't

count. So I sent an e-mail to Mickey Harris andasked how extensively she and KatherineRowan had tested their model and if she wouldshare some of their lessons. Well, she con-fessed that they haven't tested the model at alland have written no lessons. However, Rowanwrote later to point out the researchers fromwhom they drew their model had often andsuccessfully used grammatical concepts forlessons. Of course, these lessons probablywouldn't be appropricte for use in actualclasses.

Despite this newsreally not all thatunusual in the world of publish or perishIcontinue to ask students to write these lessons,for it seems the most practical way for them tolearn to recognize weaknesses in lessonswritten by others. I have also begun to requirethem to add some paragraph-style exercises tothe lessons such as sentence combining,controlled composition, and the like. In otherwords, we will try to write some lessons that wecan try out. Perhaps we can even do someteacher research, since that seems to be the"in" thing these days. Maybe at some point wewill come up with a successful model.

That's why I say in my title that we are stilltrying to find an answer to the problem of errorin writing. This model looks promising, espe-cially now that we have Brock Haussaman'sbook to help us figure out the tue nature of theconcepts we are trying to teach and pedagogi-cal grammars such as Noguchi's and Vavra'sto help us teach the background information.However, we are still a long way from havingsomething that will truly work.

References

Harris, Muriel, and Katherine E. Rowan. "Ex-plaining Grammatical Concepts." Journalof Basic Writing 8:2 (1989): 21-41.

Haussaman, Brock. Revising the Rules: Tradi-tional Grammar and Modem Linguistics.Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt PublishingCo., 1993.

Noguchi, Rei R. Grammar and the Teaching ofWriting: Limits and Possibilities. Urbana,IL: NCTE, 1991.

Shaughnessy, Mina. Errors and Expectations:A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing.New York: Oxford UP, 1977.

Vavra, Ed. Teaching Grammar as a LiberatingArt. Williamsport, PA: Rose ParisellaProductions, 1994.

1414

Grammar and Literacy:Embedding Outside Sources in Text

Jim Kenkel(Eastern Kentucky)& Robert Yates(Central Missouri)

The Problem

In the last ten years or so, work byDeBeaugrande (1984), Noguchi (1992), andKenkel and Yates (1992) has argued thatnative speakers can operationalize their tacitgrammatical knowledge and apply it in an effortto resolve persistent errors in written usage,such as fragments, run-ons, and subject-verbagreement. Kolln (1991) demonstrates that thistacit knowledge or "sentence sense" can beexploited by students as part of strategies toimprove written style. In this paper, however,we discuss a persistent language problem infreshman writing for which our students haveno pertinent sentence sense, namely, theembedding of outside sources into text atask for which they lack the needed languageknowledge and skill. The rhetorical strategiesand language structures involved in this taskare relatively rare in spoken language; indeed,their presence usually indicates high levels ofliteracy reflecting either extensive reading orexplicit instruction.

It is natural, then, that our studentsstruggle with incorporating outside material intheir text as they will have had little relevantexposure in their reading nor will they have hadoccasion to use outside materials in much oftheir writing.

The rhetorical side of the issue has al-ready been the focus of research. Kantz(1990), for example, in an excellent discussionof student use of outside sources, describesthe reading snd writing strategies of the typicalcollege underclassman enrolled in a writingfrom sources course. She suggests that thistypical student is proficient at reading andwriting narrative. Moreover, she believes thatthis typical student controls an impressive

15

range of study and writing skills includingreading for the main idea, choosing relevantsource material for her work, and skilled sum-marizing and paraphrasing. However, suchstudents cannot overcome the difficulty theyexperience in writing papers based on outsidesources. These students, according to Kantz,do not establish enough rhetorical distancefrom their sources. They tend to confuse anarration of their research reading with agenuine argument. In so doing, they don'tdifferentiate the rhetorical stance of theirsources from their own purpose. These stu-dents do not analyze their source material tofind information which they can use to supporttheir own point of view. Kantz suggests ahierarchy of the writing difficulties which thesestudents confront.

It is usually easier to write a paper that uses allof only one short source on a familiar topic thanto write a paper that selects material from manylong sources on a topic that one must learn asone reads and writes. It is easier to quote thanto paraphrase, and it is easier to build theparaphrases, without comment or with randomcomments, into a description of what one foundthan it is to use them as evidence in an originalargument It is easier to use whatever one likes,or everything one finds, than to formally select,evaluate, and interpret material. It is easier touse the structure and purpose of a source as thebasis for one's paper than it is to create astructure or an original purpose. (pp. 75-76)

In this view, the typical student sees outsidematerial as a mass of information to be directlyincorporated in the student's writing. It is to beexpected, then, that these papers resemblereports more than arguments.

Kantz stresses that more incisive, pur-poseful reading strategies are needed toresolve these writing problems. We agree, butfeel that increased rhetorical awareness, while

15

necessary, is not sufficient. In our samples ofstudent wilting, we have texts which reveal thatthe writer is certainly aware of (what we call)her rhetorical obligation, but is unable to meetit because she lacks control of the lexical itemsand syntactic structure necessary for integrat-ing material from outside sources into her text.

We repeat that it is not surprising that thetypical underclassman would encounter difficul-ties with these structures peculiar to higherforms of literacy. Perera (1986), in a summaryof the language difficulties encountered bychildren as they learn to write, identifies vo-cabulani and sentence structures which schoolchildren do not control. Perera believes thatthis lack of control reveals that children do notrecognize that writing is different from speak-ing. Perrera observes that structures whichgive children difficulty include certain adverbialclauses, ellipsis, and what she calls heavysubject NPs, in other words, NPs that functionas subjects that have modification or aredependent clauses. These structures rarelyoccur in the spoken language. Rather, theyoccur almost exclusively in the written lan-guage. Perera speculates that only childrenwho have been exposed to a lot of reading usesuch forms in their own writing. Simi laily,typical first year college students have difficul-ties with the language needed to embedoutside sources into text because they havenot been exposed to large amounts of aca-demic reading.

If we are correct that only students withextensive reading experience control advancedliteracy structures and if we are correct inassuming that many of our students have nothad the relevant academic reading experience,then teachers are dealing with more thanmerely recognizing differences between spo-ken and written language. In fact, we areclaiming that typical students have a deficit intheir knowledge of the relevant grammaticalstructures and that this deficit needs to be metby appropriate pedagogical intervention.

Of course, as Kantz' work makes clear, itwould be simplistic to suggest that studentproblems in integrating outside texts into their

writing are strictly grammatical. The problemhas interdependent grammatical and rhetoricalelements. However, although rhetorical andlanguage knowledge is interdependent in texts,it is useful to analyze the rhetorical and lan-guage knowledge needed to integrate citedmaterial skillfully into text. From a rhetoricalperspective, writers need to distinguish be-tween the perspective and purpose of the citedsource and their own. Lack of this recognitionis reflected in student wilting where outsidematerial is directly incorporated into the text ina (quasi) plagiaristic fashion and in writingwhere cited material has no prefatory or postcomment. However, this rhetorical awarenessis not sufficient for producing appropriate text.To integrate outside material into their textssuccessfully, students must not only recognizethe rhetorical obligation to distinguish betweenoutside text and their own, but they also mustcontrol the appropriate grammatical structures.These include control of specific lexical items,namely, signal verbs such as "state," "argue,""emphasize," and "conclude." Of course, useof inappropriate signal verbs frequently co-occurs with errors in direct and indirect speech,which include problems with reference rela-tions, the grammar of complementizers, andtense choice. Finally, writers must control thegrammar associated with prepositional phrasessuch as "according to X" and "In X's book,"which are used to topicalize information. Oftenassociated with student use of thesetopicalized structures are errors in subjectgrammar, relative clauses, and referencerelations between a topica!ized antecedent andits anaphor.

We emphasize that the rhetorical andlanguage problems referred to above are non-separable in practice. Students are unlikely todevelop the needed language skills if they areunaware of the rhetorical necessity of distin- :

guishing between their texts and that of thecited material. However, we believe that recog-nition of the rhetorical imperative is not suffi-cient in itself to solve the students' writingproblem. Indeed, students who understand the .

rhetorical issue but who lack control of thecorresponding language structures will stillwrite non-felicitous texts. In sum, our general

16

contention is that development of advancedliteracy skills in our students involves a linguis-tic as wsll as a rhetorical component.

In the remainder of this paper, in order tounderstand and better respond to the complexlanguage challenge confronting our students,we first situate student writers within a twostage developmental sequence for embeddingoutside sources into text. Second, we analyzeexamples of student writing, illustrating howtypes of error reflect students' stages of knowl-edge and skill development. Third, we discusspossible pelagogical responses to theseproblems by critically reviewing several hand-books and discussing the extent to which theyprovide useful guidelines for integrating outsidesources. Finally, we suggest a straightforwardpedagogy to supplement handbooks

DISCUSSION

We surveyed approximately 50 papersdrawn from student populations from EasternKentucky University and Central Missouri StateUniversity enrolled in writing from sourcescourses. Through the significant difficulties thatthese writers experienr-ed with embeddingoutside sources into their texts, we discerned atwo stage developmental sequence reflectingstudents' growing rhetorical awareness and thedeveloping language knowledge and skill to acton that awareness. Stage one describes astage where the writer does not recognize therhetorical problem, namely, the need to distin-guish the perspective and purpose of thesource text from the perspective and purposeof the writer. This stage itself can be character-ized by two writing problems. Problem A refersto student writing revealing that the studentmakes no distinction between h..: text and thesource; in other words, Problem A describesoutright plagiarism. In these texts, the studentindicates no source, uses no signal expres-sions, uses no quotation marks, and includesno prefatory or post comment. Problem B ofStage One refers to texts where the writer usesquotation marks or cites the source but is stillinsufficiently aware of the need to distinguishbetween her text and the source through use

17

of signal expressions and prefatory and postcomments. We refer to such citations as"parachuted." Problem B of Stage One, then,describes a student who is beginning to de-velop the needed rhetorical awareness but whodoes not yet have sufficient knowledge andconfidence in the lexical and syntactic re-sources needed to show the rhetorical relation.

Stage Two describes a student who hasacknowledged her rhetorical obligations butwho nonetheless fails to meet them. Generallyspeaking, the difference between a Stage Onestudent and a Stade Two student is that inStage Two, the student attempts to fulfill herrhetorical obligations but does so inappropri-ately. This stage includes four problems perti-nent to embedding outside sources typical ofnovice writers: use of inappropriate prefatoryand post comments, use of inappropriatesignal words, lack of control of the grammarand conventions of direct and indirect speech,and lack of control of the grammar oftopicalization.

Inappropriate prefatory or post commentsare typical of students who understand theneed to avoid parachuted citations but lackeither an adequate understanding of their topicor sufficient control of the content and func-tional vocabulary needed to develop theirdiscussion clearly. The obstacles presented bya limited knowledge base, of course, are notpeculiar to the problem of integrating outsidematerial. However, the use of appropriatesignal words to introduce citations certainly is.At an earlier period in Level 2, the student willtend to draw on words common to the spokenlanguage such as "say," "tell," and "goes."Later, she uses signal words more appropriateto writing such as "state," "oppose," and"conclude," but still may have difficulty with thegrammar and conventions of direct and indirectspeech requiring her to decide whether or notto use a complementizer, to choose the appro-priate tense, and to control punctuation con-ventions. The grammar of topicalization alsopresents considerable problems to studentwriters. Use of topicalizing phrases such as"according to X" raises problems of referenceand subject grammar.

17

The above brief description of studentdifficulties indicates that we are dealing withissues of literacy for which our students' lan-guage sense cannot help them. They do nothave the needed linguistic knowledge to dealwith them. Therefore, a responsibility of writingfrom sources courses must be to offer explicitinstruction on both the rhetorical and languageissues involved in embedding outside sourcesinto text. In general, the problems which stu-dent writers have in skillfully integrating outsidematerial into their own discussions arise fromtheir lack of familiarity with the written lan-guage. For example, the conventions of spo-ken discourse require neither prefatory or postcomments; a small number of signal wordssuffices for ordinary instances of direct orindirect speech as the ordinarily rich spokendiscourse context will provide the listener withinformation to make appropriate inferences;topicalization presents few problems to speak-ers and hearers as fragments are appropriatein speech and reference is more easily deter-mined within the context of the speech interac-tion.

DATA ANALYSIS

The student difficulties mentioned aboveare more clearly illustrated by the examplespresented below drawn from student writing.'For ease of reference, we summarize the twopoints in the developmental process and theproblems that characterize each.

The skill level that we designate as Level1 reflects a lack of reCognition of the writer'srhetorical oNgation to her readers. We per-ceive two typical problems in this level. One isoutright plagiarism; in other words, the writermakes no distinction between the source textand her own, as illustrated in (1) below.

(1) For three years the spotted owl hasbeen a thorn in the sides of the loggers when itcomes to the battle over National Forests, whichuntil recently, they had been allowed to log asmuch as they desired. Some of the public landis what is known as old forest growth. The owlsneed these forests in order to survive, so underthe Endangered Species Act, the government isresponsible for protecting these birds' habitat.(5 April 1993 Newsweek 53). Since 1991, thecourts have banned logging on millions of acresin 17 National Forests and 5 Bureau of Land

Proposed Developmental Sequence for Embedding Outside Sources

Level 1 - Lack of recognition of rhetorica; obligation: plagiarism.Problem IA - outright plagiarism; no distinction between source text andwriter's text.Problem IB - signaling of distinction between source text and writer's textwith quotation marks or by paraphrase; lack of prefatory or post comment,that is, parachuted citations.

Level 2 - acknowledgment of rhetorical obligations but failure to meet themdue to inadequate linguistic knowledge and skill.Problem 2A - use of inappropriate signal words.Problem 2B - lack of control of the gra-mmar and conventions of direct andindirect speechProblem 2C - use of inappropriate prefatory or post comments.Problem 2D - lack of control of the grammar of topicalization

Table 1

18

18

Management parcels in Northern California,Oregon, and Washington (5 April 1993: 53).

Thetimberworkersarechangingthetermsof the debate and rattling the old bones of pastallegiances. Many rank-and-file forest and mill-workers are still angered at "extreme" environ-mentalists and harbor a deep resentment ofgreens who drove spikes into trees in order toprevent cutting. They fell that not only were theyvictims of the spotted owl but of the environmen-talists as well.

What marks this example as Level 1 is that inspite of the fact that there are only two citationsand no quotations marks, three of the sevensentences are exact copies, three are nearexact copies, and one, the last , is so badlycopied that its intended meaning is obscured.In this text, there is certainly no distinctionbetween the stance of the source and that ofthe writer.

The other problem typical of Level 1 is thelack of signaling phrases to mark a distinctionbetween the source text and the writers text.Another feature of this lack of rhetorical aware-ness is the absence of any prefatory or followup comment to the citation. We call suchcitations "parachuted citations." In both (2) and(3) below, the writer signals the reader that theinformation comes from an outside source, butdoes not establish a relation between thatsource and her own text. It is as if the citationwere "parachuted" into the text, with no explicitindication to the reader as to how it furthers thewriters purpose.

(2) Anti smoking advocates say the evidenceundermines the industry's libertarian argumentthat smoking is an individual choice involvingindividual risk. 'Driving without a seat belt is a lotmore dangerous than secondhand smoke, butpeople think it's their right to go through thewindshield,' says Stanton Glantz, a cardiovas-cular specialist at the University of California atSan Francisco. 'Passive smoking is not a volun-tary risk."

(3) Where do children get these guns and why?Youth can buy, borrow or even rent these gunseasily. They can go to the black market on astreet corner or to someone's house wherearsenals are for sale. Many are even obtained intheir awn homes. "Street gangs are a majorsource of weapons used by kids" (Newsweek,March 1992, 25). Good weapons are expensiveand drug money is fast.

There are writers who produce partial para-chuted citations as in (4) below, where there isan introduction to the citation but no follow-upcomment.

(4) On the best reasons for censorshipwas applied in 1913 by Judge Curtis Bok. Bokstated that censorship is permitted, "only wherethere is reasonable and demonstrable cause tobelieve that a crime or misdemeanor has beencommitted or [is] about to be committed as aresult of the publication and distribution of the.writing in question : The opinion of anyone thata tendency thereto exists or that such a result isself-evident is insufficient and irrelevant. Thecausal connection between the book and thecriminal behavior must appear beyond theshadow of a doubt." (CQ Feb 1993 p. 154)

Why would people want to take knowl-edge away from our society? One major reasonin the past . . .

The source of Level 1 writing problems isthe lack of student awareness of her rhetoricalneed to differentiate the purpose of the sourcetext from her own. In so doing, the writer willforeground her own argumentation whilekeeping the argumentative direction of hersource in the background. We believe thatthere are student writers who fully understandthis imperative but are still unable to writefelicitous text due primarily to deficits in theirlinguistic knowledge and skill. In fact, of thefour types of Level 2 problems that we identify,three are linguistic in nature. We feel thatstudents who are unaware of the rhetoricalissues are likely not to notice their linguisticdifficulties, which arise from student confusionof speech and writing.

The four problems typical of Level 2 allarise from a lack of experience with academicreading arid writing. Students tend to rely onsignal words appropriate to speech, for in-stance, "say" or "goes" instead of "argue" or"contend." Frequently associated with use ofinappropriate signal verbs is confusion be-tween direct and indirect speech. Studentsoften don't know the difference between directand indirect speech. Their confusion is a resultof the optionality of the COMP position insentences such as the following.

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(5) John said ihat I'm coming.(6) John said I'm coming.(7) John said, "I'm coming."

In speech, (5) is ambiguous, having the inter-pretation of both (5) and (7). It is the presenceof COMP that renders (5) unambiguous. Onthe basis of sentences such as (8) and (9)below, students tend to think that the presenceor absence of COMP does not affect meaning.

(8) Harry believes that the earth is flat.(9) Harry believes the earth is flat.

Use of inappropriate prefatory or postcomments comes from student extension ofthe rich context of spoken interactions to themore constrained contexts common to writtencommunication. The lack of control of thegrammar of topicalization also can be attrib-uted to the overgeneralization of the norms ofspeech to writing. For example, topicalizedstructures such as "according to Newt, hebelieves" or "Newt, he believes" are commonin speech and hearers do not have difficulty indetermining the intended reference of thepronoun "he" because of the richness of theimmediate context. However, in writing, thereference is intolerably ambiguous.

Through the examples drawn from studentwriting that we present below, we support ourcontention that even students who understandthe rhetorical imperatives involved in writingfrom sources can still be unable to write ac-ceptable texts due to deficits in linguisticknowledge and skill.

Examples (10) (11) and (12) illustrateProblems 2A and 2B. These show that stu-dents overgeneralize the conventions ofspeech into writing by using spoken languagesignal verbs and lack awareness of the con-ventions of direct and indirect speech.

(10) . . . [Perrault] is also known for changing hisstories to be acceptable to the French court. Inthe beginning of his story hetalks of Cinderella'sfather remarrying a woman with two childrenand that is how Cinderella ended up with the twostepsisters who treat her badly.

(11) Regarding the treatment Columbus gavethe Indians in return Sheiwood says that when

some Indians came aboard Columbus' flagship,"he entertained them with great honor."

(12) Shannon Brownlee from the U.S. News andWorld Report stated that, "In at least two dozenlegal battles, the courts . . ."

Example (13) given below is interestingbecause even though the writef s syntacticcontrol is deficient, her writing is more sophisti-cated than that in (10), (11), and (12).

(13). On the subject of the indigenous people,Pro-Columbus writers sort of slide right over.They mention the Indians with pleasant de-scriptions such as "The naked savages greetedthem kindly, kissed their hands and feet andtried to follow them when they went away,"describes Sherwood in "Columbus and theIndians.

This writer clearly understands function ofoutside sources. She uses them as support forthe argument she is pursuing rather than asforegrounded material. Unfortunately, hercitation is pulled in two directions by the signalexpressions she employs. The fact that herlanguage skill has lagged behind her rhetoricalawareness is not cause for dismay. Instead, wefeel that she is the type of student who couldaccelerate her development with direct instruc-tion.

A third type of problem typical of studentsin Level 2 is the use of inappropriate prefatoryor post comments to their citations. This type ofproblem can have as its cause either a non-rhetorical reading strategy (cf. Kantz 1991) orthe assumption of the presence of a richcommunicative context typical of speechsituations, both of which result in what Flower(1979) calls "writer-based prose." In example(14) below, although the student skillfullyintroduces her citation, she has used theinappropriate strategy of following it up bytacking on yet another citation. Even thoughshe recognizes her rhetorical obligation tofollow up her citation, she does not realize thatusing a second citation is an inappropriatemeans of doing so. By merely sequencingcitations, she has not privileged her ownargumentative purpose. She has wronglyassumed that a research paper is but series ofcitations, proving to her audience that she read

20 20

her sources. From the alternative perspective,the use of this relatively incoherent post com-ment reveals that the writer believes that a richcommunicative context of shared assumptionstypical of speech is in place, allowing her toevaluate her post-citation comment as coher-ent.

(14) Columbus tried to convert the Indians toChristianity. Columbus writes in his log, "I knowthsy are a people who can be made free andconverted to our Holy Faith. They can easily bemade Christian, for they seem to have no reli-gion." Because of Columbus and the Chris-tians trying to convert the Indians to Chris-tianity, it caused the destruction of thenative's cultures and religions, according toJames Muldoon, professor of history ztRutgers University.

Probably the most persistent of the stu-dent writing problems typical of Level 2 arethose associated with the grammar oftopicalization, in particular errors made withstructures such as "in X's book, he" and"according to X, she states . . ." These struc-tures are not as simple as they seem, and, inusing them, student writers make errors ofreference and of subject grammar.

Examples (15), (16) and (17) containerrors certainly familiar to writing teachers. Inboth, the writers have established distancebetween their own text and that of the sourceby topicalizing the source text, but have thenmistakenly assumed that the pronoun non-ambiguously refers to the source author.

(15) Greed should have been Columbus middlename. He knew that the land that he discoveredhad what he needed to make him a very richman. In Bill Bigelow's writing he claims thatColumbus was not sailing to prove the worldwas round. .

(16). .. The Indians wanted to trade their parrotsand cotton yam for beads. According to Co-lumbus' log he wrote, "I warned my men totake nothing from the people without givingsomething in exchange."

(17) Kohn also quotes the libertarian authorStephen Arons as he suggests that often par-ents have "an articulated feeling the child be-longs at home and not in an institution." (p. 21)

21

Similar problems occur with the morecomplex task of citing a source which citesanother source, as in (18).

(18) In Bigelovis writing he quotes passages outof a book written by Hans Koning. in the bookhe wrote, 'There were no gold fieids, and thus,once the Indians had handed in whatever theystill had in gold ornaments, their only hope wasto work all day. . . "

In this case, the student writer topicalizes themain, or matrix, source but fails to signal therelation between her source, Bigelow, and thesource cited by Bigelow, viz, Koning. As in (16)and (17), she is referring not to a particularauthor but rather to the topicalized information.

In addition to reference problems, studentwriters also confuse topicalized informationwith the grammatical subject as in (19), (20),and (21).

(19) According to Women's Right Advocate,Shirley S. Segawa, senior counsel for theNational Women's Law Center, will try everyresource and technique to change V.M.I.'s ad-mission of only male students.

(20). According to the Civil Rights laws wereintended to insure that women and minority-group members have opportunities to get agood education.

(21) According to People For the Americanway (P.F.A.W.) a group that researches andreports annually on this subject for the pastnine years believe that, these examples indi-cate, books are being challenged across thecountry hot because of the fabric of their being,but for anything that might in any way offendsomeone.

The confusion between topic and grammaticalsubject is also apparent in (22), where thewriter misanalyzes the topicalized informationas the head noun of a relative clause.

(22) According to the United States Depart-ment of Education which argued that Statesupport of a single-sex college violates theconstitution's Fourteenth Amendment clauseinsuring equal protection for ail citizens.

Also frequently associated with the confu-sion of topic and grammatical subject arefragments, as in (23) and (24).

21

(23) Judge L Kiser, who in a previous casecited the work of three of the nation's mostprominent educators. Judge Kiser feels thatthese three researchers will playa key role in thefederal court decision, upholding the right ofV.M.I. to admit only male students.

(24) Another attempt to identify home edu-cators was made by Dr. Mary Hook, re-searcher and author of HSLDA, she studiedand identified four philosophies with the homeschool community: "essentialism, progressiv-ism, perennialism, and existentialism."

In (23), the writer, unsure of how to integratethe topicalized information into the matrixsentence, tries to solve the problem by startinga new sentence to her assertion. Thewriter of (24), more sophisticated, skillfullypassivizes the verb in the topicalized clause inorder to establish an appropriate head noun forthe following clause. However, she stumblesover the grammar of relative clauses.

PEDAGOGICAL RESPONSE

The above examples provide abundantevidence that many student writers lack thenecessary grammatical knowledge and skill tointegrate outside sources into their text. How-ever, it is interesting to nate that college hand-books often required by freshmen writingcourses provide little help with this problem.None of the four texts we consulted (The Allyn& Bacon Handbook (1994), The St. Martin'sHandbook 3rd ed. (1995), The Holt Handbook4th ed. (1995) and the Simon and SchusterHandbook for Writers (1993)) discuss thesyntax of "according to" or other kinds oftopicalizing form such as "in the book/article/etc." All four texts advise students to integratetheir sources "smoothly" into their writing.Usually this advice is accompanied by ex-amples. The best discussion of how integrationis done is in The St. Martin's Handbook. Forexample, Lunsford and Connors note, "Intro-ducing a quotation with the author's name anda signal verb is clear and simple way of inte-grating the quotation into your text." By signalverbs, Lunsford and Connors mean.suchwords as suggest, claim disagree, etc. TheAllyn and Bacon Handbook contains a similarlist.

The only text which offers any kind ofexercise which has passages with problems inintegrating sources is Handbook for Writers.The exercise has passages with a parachutedquotation, tense shifts, and an inaccuratequotation among others. The exercise has thefollowing directions.

Read the original material. (A paragraph followsthese directions.] Then evaluate the passagesthat show unacceptable uses of quotations.Point out problems, and write a revision of each.End your quotations with this MLA parentheticalreference: (Siwolop 111). (p. 562)

There are two problems in this exercise. Thefirst problem is an example of a parachutedquotation while the second is a problem oftense.

A. Many problems are caimed when sensitiveequipment overheats. "Most microchips de-velop amnesia long before the temperatureclimbs to the boiling point of water' (Siwolop111).B. Several new developments have taken placeat North Carolina State University in Raleigh"have successfully made microelectronic tran-sistors that operate at temperatures of up to1,200 F" (Siwolop 111).

Both of these problems at least reflect the kindof difficulties we have found in our students'swriting.

Our explanation for the problems studentshave is that students have not had enoughexperience with the written language. Althoughthis exemplary exercise has problems we havefound, it still does not provide students with agrounding in the rhetorical problems they facein using written sources in their writing and, justas importantly, the necessary GRAMMATICALforms that are available for smoothly integrat-ing other texts into their writing.

Our pedagogical suggestions aregrounded in this explanation. First, we believethat students need to become aware of howwritten sources are integrated into publishedsources. Following Campbell (1990), westrongly recommend that students must readarticles not only for their information but forexamples how the rhetorical function of citedsources and the grammatical forms used to

22 22

integrate such sources into the text. Second,we like the lists of "attributive" or "signal"words in The St. Martin's Handbook and TheAllyn and Bacon Handbook. Finally, we believethat students need to practice solving thegrammatical issues posed by integratingsources into their text. Ideally, these exercisesshould be based on the students's writing.Because of the impracticality of such exerciseswe recommend the kind of exercise citedabove.

Note

1. Some of the samples are drawn fromstudent responses to the material on Christo-pher Columbus and Cinderella found inBehrens and Rosen (1994).

References

Behrens, L., and Rosen, L. (I 994). Writing andreading across the cuMculum, Fifth Edi-tion. New York: Harper Collins.

Campbell, C. (1990). Writing with otherswords. In B. Kroll (Ed.), Second languagewriting: Research insights for the class-room (pp. 211- 230). Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press.

DeBeaugrande, R. (1984). Foiward to thebasics: Getting down to grammar. CollegeComposition and Communication, 35,358-67.

Flower, L. (1979). "Writer-based prose: Acognitive basis for problems in wilting."College English, 41, 19-37.

Kantz, M. (1990). Helping students use textualsources persuasively. College English, 52,74-91.

Kenkel, J. & Yates, R. (1992). Grammaticalcompetence and the teaching of grammar.In Ed Vavra (ed.), Proceedings of the 3rdannual conference of the Association forthe Teaching of English Grammar (pp. 16-25). Williamsport, PA: Association for theTeaching of English Grammar.

Kolln, M. (1991). Rhetorical grammar Gram-matical choices, rhetorical effects. NewYork: MacMillan.

Noguchi, R. (1991). Grammar and the teachingof writing: Limits and possibilities. Urbana:NCTE.

Perera, K. (1986). "Language acquisition andwriting." In P. Fletcher and M. Gaman(Eds.), Language Acquisition. 2nd Ed. (pp.494-518). Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press.

23 23

The Nine-Question Method of Teaching GrammarGlenn Swetman

(Biloxi, MS)

To use traditional grammar in teachingcomposition one must ensure that his studentsunderstand the basic structure of the simplesentence (clause). In order to use informationin most college and many K-12 textbooks, astudent must know the terminology. It doeslittle good for a student to learn that "a linkingverb agrees with its subject, not with itscomplement (predicate noun)" when sub'ectivecomplement is defined as "A word (or words)that completes the meaning of a linking verband that modifies or refers to the subject"adefinition that includes subject complementsbut does not exclude, especially in the mind ofthe student, detached appositives, adverbialnouns, and other elements that knetimesfollow linking verbs.'

Furthermore, a student often has difficultyin making the connection between the abstractdefinition in the book and a real sentence hehas written.

An approach that I find useful is to ignore(but not eliminate) the definitions and insteaduse discovery procedures consisting of aseries of nine questions, which, when askedproperly, and in order, reveal the basic struc-ture of the sentence with no chance for error.

For example, to determine if the sentence"The apple turned red" has a predicatecomplement the student first asks Question#1: "Is there an element in the predicate thatanswers the question 'What?' (including whoor whom) directly to the verb?" Because theanswer is "yes," the verb has a predicatecomplementred.

To determine if the predicate complementis a subjective (subject) complement or anobject, the student asks Question #2: "Can anyform of be or become be substituted for theverb without significantly changing the mean-ing of the sentence?' Becau-,e the answer is

"yes," the student knows that the predicatecomplement is a subjective (subject) comple-ment.

On the other hand, if the sentence were"John hit the ball," then the answer to question .

#2 would be "no"; and the predicate comple-ment, ball, would be an object.

Once it is determined that the complementis an object, then one asks Question #3: "Is thesubject doing the action?" If the answer is"yes," then one has a direct object as in "Johnhit the ball." If, on the other hand, the answeris "no," then there is a retained object as in"John was given the ball." When a retainedobject is found, then one skips Questions #4and #5 and asks Question #7.

lf, however, there is a direct object, thestudent asks Question #4: "Is there an elementon the predicate that tells 'to whom or what' or'for whom or what the action is performed onthe direct object?" If the answer is "yes," as in"John threw Tim the ball," then there is anindirect object; and one asks Question #5 tosee if there might also be an objective comple-ment Question #5 is "Is there an element inthe predicate that tells what the direct objectbecomes or sfiould become as the result of theaction of the verb?" If the answer is "yes" asin "The cook fixed him hi: soup cold," thenthere is an objective complement as well as anindirect object; but even if there is no indirectobject (the answer to Question #4 is "no") onemust still ask Question #5, for most objectivecomplements occur without indirect objectsasin "The president appointed him ambassador."

Question #6 ("Is the subjective comple-ment used as a noun or an adjective?") isasked only if the answer to Question #2 is"yes," for example in the sentences "Thathouse is red" and "That house is my birth-place." If the answer is "adjective" (IN), then

24

24

the complement is a predicative adjective; ifthe answer is "noun" (birthplace), then thecomplement is a predicate nominative.

After the first six qL,tionswhich identifythe subject verb and complementone asksQuestion #7 to help classify the verb: "Doesthe verb show action passing to a receiver?" Ifthe answer is "yes," then the verb is transitive;and the student asks Question #8: "Who orwhat is receiving the action, the direct object orthe subject?" If the answer is "direct object,"the verb is transitive active. If the answer is"subject," the verb is transitive passive.

If, however, the answer to Question #7was "no," the verb is intransitive and thestudent asks Question #9: "Why?" ('Why isthe answer to Question #7 'no"?"). If theanswer is that there is no action, then the verbis a linking verb (-verb). If the answer is thatthere is action but no receiver, then the verb isintransitive complete.

The advantages to this system are many.By learning t questions, the student obtainsan understanding of sixteen elements of thesentence. The student learns all of the majorelements of the clause (the basic framework of

25

all sentences). The knowledge learned can beput immediately to use in understanding thesentence: the student obtains enough informa-tion to read and understand any grammar 500kthat uses the usual traditional terminology.Furthermore the information can be explainedby the use of a very simple branching treediagram. The method has "exceptions": ifthe student asks.the right question, he gets theright answer every time. Finally the system issemantically based; and by using the ques-tions, the student is using his own naturalunderstanding of the language.

Last, by participating (through the ques-tions) in his acquisition of the understanding ofthe structure of the clause, the udent gainsself confidence. Grammar is no longer some-thing invented by English teachers to confusehim. It becomes a simple system that enableshim to understand the rules of proper usage. Itworks!

I The quotations are from Hodges, JohnC., et a). Harbrace Cog Handbook, 12th ed.New York: Harcourt, 1994. . G-34.

25

THE NINE QUESTIONS

(List ofY = yesN = no= = equal(s)-> = proceed toQ = QuestionPC = Predicate ComplementSC = Subjective Complement0 = ObjectDO = Direct ObjectRO = Retained Object

abbreviations)10 = Indirect ObjectOC = Objective (Object) ComplementPN = Predicate Nominative (Noun)PA = Predicate AdjectiveTV = Transitive VerbIV = Intransitive VerbLV = Linking (1s-)VerbIC = Intransitive Complete VerbSU = SubjectTA = Transitive ActiveTP = Transitive Passive

#Q1: Is there an element in the predicate that answers the question "What?" (includ-ing who or whom) directly to the verb?

Y=PC->Q2 N=->Q7

#4:12: Can any form of be or become be substituted for the verb?Y=SC->Q6 N=0->Q3

KM: Is the subject doing the action?Y=D0->Q4 N=R0->Q7

#Q4: Is there an element in the predicate that tells "to whom or what" or "for whomor what" the action is performed upon the direct object?

Y=10->Q5 N = -> Q5

KM Is there an element in the predicate that tells what the direct object becomes orshould become as the result of the action of the verb?

Y=0C->Q7 N = -> Q7

#Q6: Is the subjective complement used as a noun or an adjective?Noun = PN -> Q7 Adjective = PA -> Q7

#Q7: Does the verb show action passing to a receiver?Y=TV->Q8 N =IV -> Q9

An: Who or what is receiving the action, the direct object or the subject?DO = TA SU = TP

#Q9: Why? (Why is the answer to Q7 "no"?)No action = LV No receiver = IC

[See Diagram on next page.]

26 26

SENTENCE

LSUBJECTI

I

'VERB]

*7 Does verb show action

passing to a receiver?

no

yes

INTRANSITIVE

(TRANSITIVE.'

49 Why no action

#8 Who receives

passing to

the action

rece

ivpr

?from verb?

(--- no action

(subject

nore

ct. t

ver

---)

Direct 0.

INTRANSITIVE

11710

COMPLETE

27

ACTIVE

(VOICE))

TPREDICATE1

not'

when

where

what?

15TECTITTEiiiiii:iiiii1why

how

(who/whom)

degree

condition

(SUBJECTIVE COMPLEMENT]

1.---1101114

AD

J E

CT

IVE

42

Y ES

NO

L.__

JI

PREDICATE,

(VREDICATE

NOMINATIVE

6JECCIYE

BE

ST C

OPY

AV

AIL

AB

LE

OBJECT(

to whom'

'for whom'

to what:

for what'

*3

subject acting ?

yes

no

DIRECT/RETA!NED

05

what DO

becomes

should

become

or'

INDIRECT

[OBJECTIVE 1

BJECT

COMPLEMENT

the action as a result

performed

upon DO

of the

action

of the

verb

Simplifying Tree Structures in the Grammar ClassroomaA. Buck

(Eastern Illinois University, Charleston, IL)

A considerable number of teachers ofgrammar prefer using traditional diagrams toillustrate the structure of English sentences inthe classroom because they consider treestructures to be too theoretically complex andabstract for beginning college students, manyof whom are learning about grammatical formand function for the first time. I propose in mypaper that there are ways to get around thetheoretical issues posed by generative gram-mar and that, with a bit of ingenuity, teacherscan easily modify tree structures to represent insimple terms the structure of English sen-tences.

There is, of course, considerable debateabout the advantages of using one type ofvisual representation of structure over another.I do not wish to debate this issue here, butcan propose several reasons why I believebeginning students from the outset respondwell to tree structure representations. First,they are forced to write down labels of catego-ries on their paper, in a traditional diagram thisinformation must be retained in one's head andconverted onto paper into another level ofabstraction of line representation. Second,constituent structure is more visually obviouswhen captured under labelled nodes. Third,because of reasons one and two, doing acomparison of multiple sentences, studyingstructural ambiguity, etc., is easier for thestudents to grasp since all the necessaryinformation is on paper (students do not needto retain information in their heads).

In terms of theoretical background knowl-edge that is important to an understanding oftree structures, in a beginning grammar class,it is possible to explain to students that the goalof the tree structure model is to visually repre-sent our unconscious and abstract knowledgeof structural units without having to introduce tothem the notion of phrase structure rules andtheir operation in generative grammars. More-

over, we can simplify our understanding of theEnglish sentence by allowing students topresume that our starting place of the sentencewill always be with a noun phrase and a verbphrase and by focusing throughout the courseon the fact that the verb phrase is thepowerhorse of the English sentence. These arebasic concepts, but they allow us to work withbasically only three phrasal categories off themain sentence (S): the pre-subject adverbialphrase, which we explain as modifying thewhole S or the verb phrase specifically, thenoun phrase, and the verb phrase. Kolln's(1994) ten basic declarative kernel sentences,the three other sentence types, and adverbial,nominal, and adjectival clauses can all beillustrated by using these three phrasal catego-ries uff the main S.

Kolln's ten basic sentence patterns do agood job of introducing students to phrasalform categories and beginning notions ofgrammatical functions. These are easily repre-sented in tree structures. (For people notfamiliar with Kolln's textbook, Sentence Pat-terns #1-3 capture Be verbs plus adverb, andsubject complement adjective or noun phrase;Patterns #3-5 capture linking verbs plus subjectcomplement adjective or noun phrase; Pattern#6 captures intransitive verbs as opposed totransitive verbs in Pattern #7; Pattern #8captures sentences which include both directand indirect objects). With continued practice,students get more adept at recognizing phrasalunits because they are obliged each time theydraw a tree to label the form class of eachconstituent and conjecture its relationship toother ones in the sentence. Sentence Patterns#9 and #10, object complement constructions(for instance, in The students painted theirpictures blue and The students considered theteacbe_r_cs_q Jrolar, ;Ire more challenging, butthey are particularly important because theyintroduce the students right away to the idea ofabstract elements in tree representation, in this

2829

case an abstract underlying S. Imperative sentences provide a nice transition from SentencePattern #10 to other sentence types, since we can easily continue this idea of abstract elements ina tree representation. The fact that a deletion rule operates on imperative sentences is not reallywhat is important to the students' understanding here of syntactic structure; what is more impor-tant is that our students see the relation between the underlying and surface structures and recog-nize that, as in Sentence Patterns #9 and #10, certain elements in underlying structure may notmanifest themselves in the surface construction.

The focus of my paper is on other structures such as sentence type transformations (inter-rogative and exclamatory) and adverbial and nominal clauses. I will show how the following modifi-cations can simplify our representations.

Issue 1.

We can draw trees that visually represent the connection as well as the divergence of thetransformed surface sentence to the basic underlying kernel. What is difficult for students is thatcurrent models connect transformed elements back to the S. I propose instead that the basicunderlying kernel be represented under the S but that transformed elements be left to the side,connected only to the kernel by dotted movement lines in order to better show the relationship.This allows us not to worry about abstract categories like COMP, for instance, that force us tomake a connection back to the main S.

For example, in the exclamatory sentence How peaceful Charleston is!, we start with thekernel Sentence Pattern #2, tt declarative (a) Charleston is peaceful.

(a) /\.NP ypN

1i64.a. is peateCui

Illustrated in (b), we can easily show that the adjectival element has shifted its syntactic position.

(b.)

paceiuk./%.L

t4j ODY 1/144 r

1 Haili0,411.166k 'a I

14.

293 0 BEST COPY AVAILABLE

By not connecting the shifted adjectival node to the kernel S we can keep the kernel S distinctfrom elements that get shifted in surface structure: How can then just be added to the front of thesentence to show that it has no position or plays no role in the kernel declarative S; we can simplylabel it as an exclamatory marker, whose function is simply to signal that what follows is no longera declarative sentence:

The 'expletive there' transformation works in a similar fashion. In There is a fly in mv soup,students will recognize Sentence Pattern #1, A flv is in my soup, illustrated in (c).

fteiti ?TIP

-P

DeVitit% (9 Souis-

In (d), we can note Be-verb fronting, and the expletive there whose outright function is simply tomark the sentence as stylistically emphatic rather than simply declarative.

(d) NPIty11 1

II I

I

I t

is A cq iSiCtotpl.).

MAPP?f)tiP

1 eeNiettA-1-P

Again, allowing there to float in front rather than attach itself to the kernel S allows students tograsp its nonexistent role in the kernel and its emphatic function in terms of delaying the realiza-tion of the real subject.

The interrogative movement and aux inversion transformations, it seems to me, do not needto get too complicated. What is important is that students can identify underlying basic kernelstructures and recognize which elements shift position to form a neiiv sentence type. Again, keep-ing the underlying S distinct from shifted elements helps the students to visually distinguish under-lying from surface structures. In the interrogative What have you been reading?, for example,students should recognize Sentence Pattern #7, (e) You have been reading what.

30 31

Pi I

PSI 1St 4

1

YP

1 II r1Y°44". tN233663°\ kiftit t.01Nat

They can transform without needing to worry about how the shifted NP and Aux theoretically link

up with the S (f).(d) ler.

ozt AdArP

NPIN/

Tikatek

The point here is that if students learn to recognize categories of words, their form and function inrelation to each other, and grasp the relation of a kernel to more complex constructions, they will

have gained a lot for a beginning course in grammar.

Issue 2.

Certain words simply mark particular elements in the sentence (i.e., after in She left the roomafter he finished the exam and that in I remembered that she went to Florida). Again, rather thanidentifying a grammatical category for these markers, I propose a structure that shows theseelements as simply inserted markers that function to signal the succeeding embedded clause.Each S1 clause gets marked as ADV or NP with the marker off to the side of the S1 so studentsdon't need to worry about labeling markers such as that or after. What is important is that thestudents recognize 1) words that mark and 2) what the word marks (i.e., nominal clauses or adver-

31 32BEST COPY AVAILABLE

bial clauses). This allows the students, too, to more readily identify the sentence patterns of themain S and the embedded S.

To begin, let us look at a sample embedded S adverbial clause, (g) Sue ate breakfast beforeshe took that exam. The main point for the students to grasp is that before functions to mark afurther embedded S as subordinate or dependent to the main S. Some students have a hard timerecognizing that there is indeed "a little S" in the sentence. An improvised tree structure can helpthem to visualize the relation between S and Sl.

(g)

wsP

wfAA,,\rww

I IiJp'IP

Sue ctie-bralak v NP

I TINTShe. 4cck-gva-

By putting before off to the side of the Si, the students are able to recognize that before simplyfunctions to mark the "lithe S" as subordinate and as adverbial. Having the students write (ADV)next to the S1 forces them to distinguish different functions of SI (as adverbial vs. nominal vs.adjectival).

We can visually represent a distinction, then, between the adverbial when as part of anadverbial subordinate clause construction, and the adverbial when that functions as an interroga-tive in a nominal clause. In (h) When you take the stairs ou benefit your bod , when functions asan adverbial marker, floating off to the side in order to show that it really plays no role within theSl.

sP

welt" 1

k1PYP V NI PN. 1 f

NIP1 I Del- t1/4)vitt tenta I I

yco-4Atittslaku,

P"- 64-8I 403

In (i) When you arrive is none of my business by contrast, the students can more readily see thatthe interrogative when plays a specific role as adverbial in the embedded Si, an SI that fills theusual NP subject slot.

BEST COPY AVAILABLE 32 33

U)

Ma( PAda

tst.Si NO VPis.

Nip j'sitY hilp

a ,11 ritav p; K PP

I 1 i pildsi 1 I T 1.1P1 LN

ou, affite _1 Is we cg riaiieF. WOI ir I WI 1

Again, among the non:SUIS (Ara* rtai rm that versus certain constructions that

hold no markers. In (j) I hope that the quests will rriv so. z.;.ivaxample, that functions to mark

the embedded Si as nominal so it can be placed ff t4 the e underlying Si, and the Si

can be labeled with the (NP) function.clf th

she- 4cek4ui- acv-Pe,"--

(i) NPVPI

V 441/412L_Si (P)

1.IP\ak-Av

1htlea-

Area (AA asivescor.

02)In (k) My brother enjoys playino video aames, on theOther hand, the nominal gerund phrase has

no particular marker; it is rather the form j9fraceifirin the embedded Si that changes andtherefore marks that verb (claiis4A sula4

7*.kW VP 14 V NIP

S iNILI Deir 11/41,le j V NWf N roma 1

eakteltM ( y bDell

I I 4LLpDzi.

(ktit.0

33 BEST COPY AVAILABLE3 4

Again, the change in the verb can be easily represented and therefore visualized on the page bysimply crossing out underlying elements and then showing surface changes.

We see a similar type of tree construction with the adjectival participial embedded clause in (I)The students taking the SAT look nervous. It also has no particular outward clause marker otherthan a surface change to the main verb of the embedded clause.

tei-1>*st04)1

ri 1' 'NIP LkPdinet moms

I

'The 51484,145 i14.41

(s.ksHiki cfaio 1 1

0 4gdii 4he SAT'

Again, requiring the students to label each S as having an adverbial, nominal, or adjectival func-tion forces the students to criticaliy analyze the relation of the S to the embedded Sl.

Of course, my simple technique here is not aimed at beginning students of linguistics. Manyof my students, as perhaps some of you have experienced, enter my Structure of the EnglishLanguage course unable to differentiate a noun from a verb from a preposition in a declarativesentence. One thing that tree structures do is force the students to practice their knowledge overand over (one thing that these students in particular especially need), so that by the latter part ofthe semester the constituent elements of a noun phrase or verb phrase or prepositional phrasebecome automatic, allowing the students to face the more complicated challenges of gerund andparticipial phrases. With modified tree structures, junior and senior level high school students Iwould think would be able to succeed just as well.

In my experience, students who have learned traditional diagramming in high school say theyprefer the tree structure approach. It is true, though, that one disadvantage, as they see it, is thattrees take a lot of time, especially the more complex the sentence construction. I think, though,that slowing down, taking one's time to analyze a highly complex sentence reaps all kinds ofintellectual rewards. Sentences extracted from poetry or literary prose are worth the time andtrouble to analyze, if not just to show how literary text unfolds an analytic depth and complexitythat we simply don't encounter in everyday speech. Martha Kolln's workbook includes a wonderfulsentence from Robert Frost's poem "Birches" that unfolds, yes, a very complex tree structure and,yes, one that takes much time and trouble to produce (m):

When I see birches bend to left and right,Along the lines of straighter, darker trees,I like to think some boy's been swinging them.

3534

(m) s/ ----------------

St (k) la NI e

S3 030F4P VP 11r viI1---"------ .

tt4 v Nit.... (i) 14 NIP 41).....,,.....

I ".VI

Slik)40P1 1

14

iscrkes.,op , i-----' NPfust VN

iI

0 1004 net* ixt.t SStrp4 bli IS ixein. Zu.r.60 444e,

(bei

e Pthe siiiittag

41 1.4P,Aatevf- skral

Slowing down to analyze how all the pieces fit together is worth the time and trouble, for we trulydo, at the end of it all, feel as if we've accomplished an intellectual work-out, a feat of some sort.And we understand much better why we find the language of Frost in this particular poem soappealing.

In short, my point is to appeal to my colleagues who believe there is only one way toproduce

a tree structure and who are afraid that they will produce "a wrong one." By allowing ourselves tobe flexible with the basic concepts that tree structures allow, we may more readily think up allkinds of alternative representations for a single sentence; even this is a teaching strategy, in itself,for having students argue the benefits or disadvantages of one type of representation over an-other challenges them, and us, even further in our critical thinking.

References

Kolln, Martha. Understanding English Grammar. 4th ed. New York: Macmillan, 1994. Sentencesused for illustration in this paper are from Martha Kolln's textbook.

35 36

-Teaching Grammar Through Technical Documents

Jim Brosnan(Providence, RI)

Before I begin a discussion of how to usespecific samples of writing to teach grammar, Ithink that a little background about the selecteddocuments would be appropriate. First, thesamples which are being illustrated representsome of the more "troubled" student writingsamples that I receive, and they do not repre-sent the average responses which are gener-ally submitted. Over the years I have fourid thatgenerally most students demonstrate a specificproblem area in their papers and not a total"grammar illiteracy". However, the writers ofthese "error pieces" are clearly individualsneeding the most writing assistance. By exam-ining these anonymous photocopied writingsamples in class, the student authors gainvaluable insight as their classmates suggestvalid changes in sentence structure, subject/verb agreement, etc. Other class membersmay also recognize similar error patterns intheir own papers during the evaluation.

Second, the number of internationalstudents on the undergraduate level at theuniversity constitutes about 17% of the studentpopulation; they originate from 82 differentcountries. On the graduate level, the percent-age rises to about 50% international. This factalso contributes to the awkward wording foundin some of these samples. However, generalstudent exposure to these differences is ben-eficial to everyone's future since in the twenty-first century your students will be dealing withindividuals from a multitude of cultural back-grounds.

The purpose of this discussion on teach-ing grammar through the use of technicaldocuments is to demonstrate that grammar canbe taught using a method other than thedreaded "drill and kill" exercises. My approachis to use the contents of various "real world"documents to reinforce grammatical knowledgein my varied teaching assignments at Johnson& Wales University. In the discussion thatfollows I will illustrate various approaches usedin,both my undergraduate and graduate writing

courses. The concepts could obviously beused on the secondary or even middle schoollevel. The only difference is the complexity ofthe writing assignment.

Since the phrase "America's CareerInstitution" frequently follows our universityname, the curriculum includes a businesswriting review for a couple of weeks. In thisintroductory Composition class, students writevarious letters and memos. In one class exer-cise students write two memos in response to a"staged scenario" in which they participate.Students attend this "classroom meeting"where employee tardiness is discussed; stu-dents are involved in brainstorming solutions.They are then given the task of writing a memoto all employees informing them of the groupdecision that was reached regarding tardiness.A second memo is sent to the board of direc-tors explaining how they, as supervisors, havesolved the problem. A sampling of anonymousstudent papers are photocopied. Class discus-sion focuses on content and tone, as well asgrammatical errors (Figure 1).

F GURE 1

GRAMMAT I CAL FO C U SON QUE S T I ONNA IRE I TEMS

1. SENTENCE STRUCTUREFRAGMENTSRUN ON SENTENCESCOMMA SPLICES

2. AGREEMENTSUBJECT & VERBPRONOUN & ANTECEDENT

3. PARALLELISM4. MODIFIERS

DANGLINGMISPLACED

5. PUNCTUATION6. WORD CHOICE

CONNOTATION & DENOTATIONSEXIST LANGUAGEJARGON

37

In Technical Writing, an advanced courseat the university, students complete a numberof writing tasks which are examined not onlyfor content, but more particularly for form andgrammatical structure. In this course studentscomplete short descriptions, definitions, andprocesses. Students also respond to a job ad.Sample letters are reproduced and critiqued bythe class either as photocopied samples and/oras overheads. Students soon realize that thosewriters who lack a knowledge of grammaticalstrtictures are more likely to confuse the readerand usually detract from their message.

In Advanced Composition and a graduatecourse in Research Methods, students con-struct a questionnaire. Survey items help toreinforce the importance of grammar mastery.Statements or questions must be completesentences. Close attention is given to frag-ments, run-on sentences, and comma splices.Survey items can be examined for agreementof the subject and verb and the pronoun andthe antecedent. Parallelism can be also taUghtusing questionnaire statements or questions,as well as the identification of dangling .andmisplaced modifiers. Punctuation also be-comes important particularly with topics like thecorrect use of the comma. The actual selectionof words can be examined by discussing theconnotation of words used. Sexist languageand jargon can also be discussed.

As a class exercise, a general topic canbe chosen for illustrative purposes. In myResearch Methods for hospitality students, wechose the general topic of customer satisfac-tion at a hotel. In Figure 2, there are sampleresponses to this assignment Many grammati-cal topics can be discussed using these ex-amples. I might suggest a review of parallelismin the first example. There is also a problem ofasking the respondent to answer more thanone question in the first example (helpful withreservations, tee times, etc.). In the secondexample there is an awkward verb phrase (Did... satisfy) and an unnecessary phrase (to you).The third question could lead to a discussion ofthe difference between nouns (efficiency) andthe intended adjective (efficient). The fourthexample could be used to illustrate parallelismwith the similar phrase constructions (knowl-edgeable about the area and helpful with

37

tourist information). All of these topics can bediscussed once copies of survey items areshown on an overhead and/or copies aredistributed to the students in class.

F I GURL: 2

SAMPLE RESPONSESTO QU ESTI ONNA I R E ITEMS

1. WAS THE GUEST SERVICES PERSONHELPFUL IN MAKING DINNER RESER-VATIONS, TEE TIMES, OR ANYTHINGEXTRA YOU NEEDED DURING YOURSTAY?

2. DID YOU SATISFY THE SERVICE THATOUR EMPLOYEE PROVIDED TO YOUDURING YOUR STAY?

3. HOW EFFICIENCY DO THE FRONTDESK WORKERS COMMUNICATEWITH YOU?

4. THE FRONT DESK CLERK WASKNOWLEDGEABLE ABOUT THE AREAAND HELPFUL WITH TOURIST INFOR-MATION.

In Figure 3, we have an example of asurvey conducted in the Hospitality Researchcourse. Many mini grammatical lessons can begleaned from such a student sample. Forexample, the fifth item illustrates an awkwardstatement which could easily be rephrased to"Have you ever attended a hospitality school?"In items six, seven, and thirteen, the verbs(attend/help/need) are riot in the correct form.In item nine, there is a mix of singular andplural choices; some of the plural choices areincorrect (employee job satisfactions / cus-tomer satisfactions). Once again consistencycan be stressed.

Another valuable and brief assignment isto have students summarize in an abstract ofabout 50 to 75 words the essence of theirresearch. In Figure 4, what is presented andpunctuated as the first sentence is actually afragment. Further, we could point out that "thisresearch is (not) trying to find out" anything; itis really the researcher. In the next sentencethe phrase "more of training programs" is

38

FIGURE 3

1) How long have you been working. in the hotel?

a) less than 3 months

b) 3-6 monthsc) 6-12 mothsd) more than 1 year

2)Your job tide is

3)You are a a) Male b) Female

4) What is your age!

a) under 20

b) 20-29c) 30-39

440 and up

S) Have you been in any kind of hospitality school?

a) Yes

b) No

6) Have you ever attend the employee training Ingram

provided by your hotel?

a) Yes dme(s)

b) No Please go to NO.8

7) Ham much did you think training help you improve

yotr lob performance?a) did not helpb) help a litde

c) help a lot

8) How often do riu think the hotel should provide an enyloyee

training?

a) Noneb) Only for the job orientation

c) Once a yeard)Twke a yeare) More than twice a year

writing a thesis proposal in the Hospitality Admostration program at

.t.

:4#.-, : ,a1,17.4"? -..

Directions:Please check the appropriate answer(s) or flU in the blanks).

9) What factor(s) do you think influenced by employee training?

(Please check all that Wit)

a) Emplore Sidis

b) Employee Knowiedge

c) Employee Mot'ffation

d) Employee Attitudes

e) Empbyee Teamwork

f) Employee 'Rammer

g) Employee job Satisfactions

11) Hotel Profits

i) Reduced Operating Costs

Customer Satisfactions

10) How 4, you feel about being able to work in more than

one podtion?

a) My wet is already hard

b) Go3d. so I an earn more moneyc) am not sure but I would like to try

I I) if you got a new position in a hotel,which would you prefer?

a) Being trained on-the-job

b) join a saki: program before taking the new position

2) What would you Ike to Imow more for your job improvement?

a) Deciskms making

b) Hotel Standards

c)WorkingTedutiques

d) Communication Skills

13) Who do you think need training the most?

a) Management Executives

b) Department Managers

c) Fulltime Empoyees

d) Hourly workers

38 bY CHAVEWAN TilARASIRICAKUL

39

awkward because of the insertion of the prepo-sition "of". In the same sentence the phrase"to their employees" should read "for theiremployees". The final statement in the abstractis not clearly stated and could possibly beinterpreted as a two-part question by thereader.

FIGURE 4

SAMPLE ABSTRACT

A STUDY ABOUT HOW TRAININGAFFECTS THE HOTELS EMPLOYEES.THIS RESEARCH IS TRYING TO FINDOUT IF HOTELS SHOULD PROVIDEMORE OF TRAINING PROGRAMS TOTHEIR EMPLOYEES. IT WILL FOCUS ONWHAT COULD BE IMPROVED BY EM-PLOYEE TRAINING. IF HOTELS SHOULDPROVIDE MORE TRAINING, WHAT KINDSOF TRAINING THE EMPLOYEESNEEDED.

In Figure 5, we could focus on subject/verb agreement (employee deal) in the firstsentence. In addition to the awkwardness ofthe second sentence, we might discuss usageciting "effect" and "affect" as examples. Thethird sentence clearly opens the discussion ofparallelism. Finally, the last sentence can beused to discuss misplaced modifiers and clarityin general.

FIGURE 5

S AMPLE ABSTRACT

MY RESEARCH PROBLEM IS ONHOW THE EMPLOYEE DEAL WITH CUL-TURAL DIVERSITY IN THE HOTEL INDUS-TRY. THE DIFFERENCE IN CULTURECAN BE EFFECT THE EFFICIENCY OFWORKER TO PROVIDE THE GOODSERVICE TO THE CUSTOMER. MORE-OVER BETWEEN THE CO-WORKERSWHO COME FROM DIFFERENCE BE-LIEVE, ETHIC AND ATTITUDE CAN HAVETHE PROBLEMS WITH COMMUNICA-TION, LANGUAGES, STREOTYPE ORDISCRIMINATION. TO FACE THE PROB-LEM, TRAINING EMPLOYEES CAN RE-DUCE OR SOLVE THE DIFFERENT CUL-TURE IN WORKPLACE.

Therefore, it becomes clear that usingtechnical documents creates a heightenedinterest in the correct use of grammar. Thestudents can understand and connect with thereal world writing situations that are trulysimulations of their future writing concerns inthe workplace. Thus, grammatical topics canbe interestingly presented using student writ-ing.

Proposal for an Official ATEG BibliographerDelma McLeod-Porter

(Lake Charles, LA)

I. Description of BibliographyThe ATEG Bibliography will resemble The

Bedford Bibliography for Teachers of Writing,prepared by Patricia Bizzell and BruceHerzberg. With input from members andcolleagues interested in publications relating togrammar issues, entries could eventually bearianged topically. For example, the bibliogra-phy could include such sections as the follow-ing: traditional grammar, which might beginwith brief annotations of early grammars (i.e.,Reed-Kellogg) and continue with those gram-mars today that embrace what we have cometo know as traditional grammar, though thebulk of these texts might have been publishedprior to 1950, interest in and teaching of tradi-tional grammar still fimishes and such textswould be included in tHs section; structuralgrammar, which might include an overview ofthe texts published in the forties, fifties, a, idsixties; transformational - generative grammar,which would provide a brief overview of the T-G grammars. The historical section wouldconclude with annotations of work (functionalgrammar, government-binding, etc.) since thesixties and seventies.

Following the historical section, the bibli-ography would then be arranged topically. Onesection might be called grammar for middle-school teachers and focus on texts and articlesthat dealt directly with that grade-level; anothermight address grammar and composition at thecollege level. Topics would be dictated by thetexts being generated by teachers/scholars.

II. Collection of Citations for Bibliogra-phy

Citations could be collected in a numberof ways. ATEG members who run acrossinteresting books and articles could sendcitations to the bibliography through mail, byphone, fax, or e-mail. Publishers' representa-tives are always eager to provide updates onnew texts. Texts are often advertised in schoi-

arly journals and at conferences. Scholarsthemselves network so that colleagues knowwhat is being done in the discipline. Computersshould facilitate collection and recording ofcitations.

Dissemination of Bibliography toATEG Members

The bibliography could be initially distrib-uted through e-mail, on diskette, or in papercopies. Eventually, we might be able to providea more professional document (again, TheBedford Bibliography for Teachers of Writingcomes to mind), should we find a publisherwilling to accept our document as, perhaps, anancillary text to something like a grammarhandbook. In time, we could present it as amonograph to NCTE for publication.

IV. Sample Bibliographic Entry

Haussamen, Brock. Revising the Rules. Tradi-tional Grammar and Modem Linguistics.Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt PublishingCo., 1993.

Haussamen begins by providing a connectionbetween the grammar that we teach in ourclassrooms with some of the historical andlinguistic events that have shaped currentpedagogies. The introduction is brief andunderstandable. Using the historical/linguisticframework, he then examines grammaticalconcepts (tense, pronoun agreement, adverbs,punctuation, and the like) within that frame-work. However, instead of simply tracing thegrowth of these linguistic features, Haussamenuses this framework to explain idiosyncrasiesthat may have, heretofore, seemed arbitrary.Not satisfied with just grounding the grammati-cal elements in the past, Haussamen offerssuggestions for teaching in the here and nowand, in some cases, predicts the directionlinguistic change is heading.

Revising the Rules is a useful text for a

4041

methods course for English majors and wouldbe helpful to any teacher who has felt the needto answer his/her students "But why do we dothat" questions. The extensive bibliographymakes the book even more useful in thecollege classroom where undergraduatesfrequently need a jump-start to get them goingon research projects.

Editors Note: This proposal was acceptedat the conference. For more information,contact Professor Porter at:

McNeese State UniversityDepartment of LanguagesLake Charles, LA 70609

Office phone: (318) 475-5337/475-5326FAX: (318) 475-5189E-mail: DPorter@McNeese.edu

41 4 2

9

A Hands-On Non-Traditional Grammar That's FuilAnthony Hunter

(Delhi, N.Y.)Copyright Anthony D. Hunter, Sr. 1995

My goal in this paper is to give an introduction to the strategies of a systematized way tomake students owners of thi structure of English sentences. This approach to teaching grammarhas become crystallized in the books that make up my text The Hunter Witting SystemTM: Sen-tence Sense (Delhi, N.Y.: Hunter & Joyce, 1991), which also includes paragraph and essay in-struction. This work is the fruit of thirty-two years of teaching English: nine at the junior-high leveland twenty-three at the college level.

My treatment will.cover the following topics: the basis for this paper's title, the origins of theapproach, the philosophy of the approach, some supporting data, flaws in most traditional treat-ments, some precautionary notes, the methodology in skeletal form, the basis for the need for twostrategies to find verbs, how students are taught to find verbs, how students are taught to findsubjects, applications to identifying fragments, and outcomes of note.

Basis for the Title

There is justification for the title of this paper. This approach is hands-on/mind-on in naturebecause students make substitutions in sentences, rearrange them (and then make comparisons),and do continual labeling. It is nontraditional because it is strategybased rather than definition-based. It is fun-like Nintendo, according to one teacherbecause it makes sense; it makes Englishmake sense; and students go from success to success at progressively deeper levels of under-standing and expression.

Origins of the Approach

The source of my interest in glammar as an aid to improving use of English was a stint ofteaching I did in the Philippines. Because the seventh grade ESL-students could not understandthe only text available, a ninth grade American text, I managed the best I could. At the end of theyear, the average number of books read per child was but one. During the second year, I startedteaching grammar by building each new lesson on an earlier one and requiring diagraming. At theend of that year, the average number of books read per child had increased to eight. I becameconvinced of the efficacy of grammar.

However, it was when I was teaching seventh grade in the States that I made my best discov-eries about how English worksfailproof strategies for finding not only verbs but also several ofthe other parts of speech and of a sentence. (The slight knowledge I had acquired of two Filipinotongues gave me a unique vantage point from which to better understand English.)

At Teachers College, Columbia University, the linguist Robert L. Allen, who was head of mydoctoral committee, accepted my innovative material unchanged but insisted that I combine it withhis sector analysis at its "sentence level" as a basis for my dissertation. The resultant textbookmaterial proved an idea! instrument for empowering students as writers and readers.

Philosophy of the Approach

By way of background, let me clarify for you the philosophy that underlies the grammaticalcore of this work. Its goal is to make students owners of the "tools" of our languagethat is, of itsstructure. The means to achieve this goal are the following: the verb is taught as the sentence'shub; the definitions are practical in nature and true to English; the exercises require hands-on,

4243

mind-on involvement; initial emphasis is on chunkingthat is, on learning the roles of groups ofwords; the instruction and exercises cause immersion in structure; the exercises are cumulativeeven across chapters; and occasionally there is insistence on some simple memorization. Theoutcomes of the instruction are writing and reading that are spontaneous and accurate.

Statistical Underpinnings

There is proof that instruction based on this text can cause markedly improved writing. Forher Master's dissertation at Rowen College of New Jersey, Barbara Stubbs carried out a controlledexperimental study with seventh graders in which her slightly learning disabled students weretaught the process approach to writing and ten chapters of The Hunter Writing SystemTu: Sen-

tence Sense while the control students were taught the process approach to writing and traditionalgrammar. The pre- and post-tests used were Forms A a;id B of the Test of Written Language-2'sfifteen-minute spontaneous writing sample. The following gains from pre-test to post-test of theex,erimental group (the group taught this system) were statistically significant: +103% in punctua-tion and capitalization (the Contextual Style subtest score); +59% in overall writing competence(the overall Spontaneous Writing Quotient); +39% in subordination (the Syntactic Maturity subtestscore); +18% in organization (the Thematic Maturity subtest score); and +39% in nuMber of wordsproduced. These students improved both in the spontaneity of their writing and in the success withwhich they revised and edited. By the way, in contrast the control group went backward in punc-tuation and capitalization, scoring -5%, and backward in organization, scoring -35%.

Inaccuracies in Traditional Strategies

It is important to be aware how flawed the traditional definitions of the two centrally mostimportant concepts in grammar (those for the verb and the subject) are. Suppose you wereiskedto write down five verbs. Your list would probably include from two to four words that could func-tion as either a nom. or a verbwords like laugh, jump, and run. If words like these that showaction can alternatively function as nouns (as in My RUN around the block tired me), how validespecially from a benighted student's vantage pointis this definition of a verb? Consider, too, that

some verbs (like lack and own) show no action; that helping verbs show no action; and that wordsthat stem from verbs can function as a noun or adjective ;nsteadthat is, when in their gerund orparticipial form (words such as eating, speaking, and broken).

The traditional definition for a subject as what a sentence is about is just as flawed. In the

eyes of students, what wording in this sentence best indicates what the sentence is about: In thethird inning, Ed hit a home run with two on base? There is plenty of justification for their choosinghome run as the answer. However, upon close examination, what this sentence is really talkingabout is "Ed's hitting a home run with two on base in the third inning." In fact, every sentencewhen put in gerund formis talking about all the words in its sentence in the same way.

Two Items of Note

For the sake of brevity, the exposition here of the initial techniques of this system will be ahighly condensed version of how students learn them. In addition, some of the lesser points will of

necessity be omitted.

Skeletal Introduction to the Strategies

One can appreciate the simplicity, order, and effectiveness of the strategies of the text byseeing them applied to a skeletal (or would-be) sentence. Such a sentence might have ten words

as in this example:

43 44

Word word word word wordword word word word word .

[The words that are bolded are functioning as verbs.]

The reason the verbs have already been marked is that this is the very first task for students; theyfind verbs by using the strategies that will be explained below. They next find the one helping verbwhichwhen shifted to the front of the sentencecauses the whole sentence to be an acceptableEnglish question. If the sentence were to begin Borrowers of things can forget .... students woulddiscover that they can rearrange the wording to read Can borrowers of things ... forget ...? Thepoint, in part, is that the wording between the two positions of the helping verb that shifts (betweencan and can) will by this very fact always be the subject of the sentence. The point, too, is thatbecause there is a second verb phrase, that other verb must be standing as an anchor for adependent clause. Students will be able to find the boundaries of the clause becauseby the timethey read the last chapter when this is taughtthey will have memorized the most important of thewords that mark the start of a dependent clause and because dependent clauses commonly endat a natural boundary in a sentence, one of which is the end of the sentence.

Basis for the Need for Two Strategies to Find Verbs

When verbs stand as the nucleus of a clause, they either do begin with a helpi% verb or theydo not. Each type of occurrence requires its own strategy. (Each strategy requires itsown chapteror chapters in the text.)

How Students Find Verbs When There Is a Helping Verb

Introduction: This strategy has three steps, three exceptions, and a special case.

Step 1: Students must learn to recognize the twenty-three helping verbs on sight Here they aregrouped in a way in which they should be easier to remember.

from the verb DO: do, does, didfrom the verb HAVE: have, has, hadfrom the verb BE: be, being, been, am, are, is, was, wereRemainders: will, would; can, could; shall, should; may, might, must

Here is a sentence for practice. Your task is to double underline all (but only) the helpingverbs.

A boy who is good atjumping, who can usually shoot well, and who does have skill at dribbling will be a goodbasketball player.

Of course, your sentence will now look like this (the bolded words are the helping verbs):A boy who is good at jumping, who can usually shoot well, and who does have skill at dribbling will bea

good basketball player.

Step 2: Next students learn to repeat the words of the sentence to and through each helping verbor helping verb setthat is, each multi-word helping verb groupand ask what. The word thatanswers whatit must be the most sense-completing word, one word, and a reasonably nearbywordwill be a verb candidate. Students label such words initially by placing a small circle undereach. Try this with the above sentence; the answers are supplied below (with capital letters usedin place of an underneath small circle):

A boy who is GOOD at jumping, who can usually SHOOT well, and who does have SKILL at dribbling willbe a good basketball PLAYER.

Step 3: Third, students test each word that answers what to verify whether or not it is in fact averb. For such a word to be a verb, it must have an ing way it can be writtenin the same rootsenseas part of the English language. They test this word by adding ing to itjust as it standsand outside the sentence. If the test works, the word is functioning as a verb; otherwise, studentsplace a check mark under it to indicate that they have tested it and found it to not be a verb. Dothis testing for yourself with the sentence that you worked on above; the answers are suppliedbelow (with words that are verbs bolded, and those that are not unbolded).

A boy who is good at jumping, who can usually shoot well, and who does have skill at dtibbling will be agood basketball player.

Exception 1: Whenever the word to be tested already ends in ing, students do not add ing;instead they detach it. If they can detach ing (and the sense does not change), the word is a verb.

In the sentence He is coming, the word coming (come) is a verb.

Exception 2: Whenever the word to be tested ends in ed, students do not add ing; instead they

substitute ing for ed. If they can substitute ing for ed (and the senses does not change), the wordis a verb. In the sentence He was needed, th3 word needed (needing) is a verb.

Exception 3: Whenever the word to be tested is an irregular verb in its pastparticiple form, stu-

dents do not add ing; instead, they must recognize all such words as stemming from irregularverbs and label them as verbs (as long as their sense in their ing spelling does not change). In the

sentence He was told, the word told (telling) is a verb.

Special Case in Which the Sense Changes: Occasionally the sense changes when you add ing;

in such cases, the word is not functioning as a verb. For example, in the sentence That box is

empty, the word empty means "content-less"; however, when you test empty by adding ing (emp-

tying), the root sense changes to "spilling out."

How Students Find Verbs When There Is No Helping Verb

Basis for the Success of This StrategyWhen verbs have no preceding helping verb, they are in either their presenttense (such as

want or wants) or in their past tense (such as wanted). In English, we have a back-up present and

past tensethe do /does /did substitution. This enables us to add the negator not to sentences (He

wanted more becomes He did not want mote) and to turn statements to questions (He wantedmom becomes Did he want mote)transformations that students have used since they firstlearned English.Principle Governing the Type Word That Can Follow Do, Does, or Did: When students are

asked to choose see, sees, seeing, saw, or seen as the right choice after do, they will choose see;after does, they will again uhoose see; and after did, they will once again choose seethere are noother correct answers.

The Rule: Whenever the do /does /did substitution for a word can replace the word and thesentence is still English, the word is a verb. For example, inthe sentence He wanted anotherpiece, you can replace wanted with did wantHe did want another piece.

Corollary to the Rule: Whenever the do/does/did substitution for a word cannot replace the wordbecause the sentence is no longer acceptable English, the word is not a verb. For example, in the

sentence He wanted anotherpiece, you can not replace anotherwith do another because He

wanted do another piece is unacceptable as English. Therefore, the word another is not function-

ing as a verb in this sentence.45

46

Creating a Do/does/did Substitution for Words That End in Ed. Whenever students find a wordthat ends in ed in a sentence-such as the word needed in He needed a dollar, they must choosedid because did alone (of the choices do, does, or did) carries past tense, which the ed that nowhas gotten dropped also carried. They would substitute did need for needed. Did is the onlycorrect substitution for such a word.

Creating a Do/does/did Substitution for Words That End in S or Es: Whenever students find aword that ends in detachable s or es in a sentence-such as the word needs in He needs a dollar,they must choose does because does alone (of the choices do, does, or did) carries the s / esagreement (that signals third person singular present tense agreement), which the s or es that hasnow gotten dropped also canied. They would substitute does need for needs. Does alone is thecorrect substitution for such a word.

Creating a Do/does/did SubstitUtion for Words That Are Irregular Verbs in Their Past Tense:Whenever students find in a sentence a word that is the past tense form for an irregular verb-such as the word lost in He lost a dollar, they must choose did because did alone (of the choicesdo, does, or did) carries the past tense meaning that of necessity gets lost when a verb accompa-nies did. They would substitute did lose for lost. Did is the only correct substitution under thesecircumstances.

Creating a Do/does/did Substitution for Words That Have No Ending and Are Not IrregularVerbs in Their Past Tense: Whenever students find a word that does not end in ed or s/es andis not an irregular verb in its past tense-such as the word need in We need a dollar, they mustchoose do because do alone carries present tense without third person singular agreement. Theywould substitute do need for need. Do must be chosen as the only acceptable substitution.

Here is an example sentence to try for yourself-try the test just on the words that end inied:She achieved her desired goals.

Notice how the did substitution works for achieved-She did achieve her desired goals. In contrastnotice how it does not work for desired-She achieved her did desire goals (these words constituteunacceptable English). In this sentence achieved does function as a verb but desired does not.

How Students Learn to Find Subjects

Of necessity, the subject-that is, the whole subject-always falls between the two positions ofany lead helping verb that can shift to cause or undo a question. Here are two examples.

In the sentence The man on the left has dropped a glove, the lead helping verb has can beshifted to the start of the sentence to create the question Has the man on the left ... dropped aglove. The words between the original and shifted positions of has are the man on the left. Be-cause of these words' position, they must be the (whole) subject of the sentence.

in the sentence The seedling that I am planting will become a lilac bush, the lead helping verbam can not be shifted in this way because the resultant wording would be unacceptable as En-glish-Am the seedling that I ... planting will become a lilac bush. On the other hand, for this samesentence the lead helping verb will can be shifted-Will the seedling that I am planting ... become alilac bush. Therefore, the (whole) subject for this sentence must be the seedling that I am planting.

Application of These Findings to Identifying Fragments

Whenever a group of words lacks a lead helping verb that can be shifted to the start of thewording, that group of words must be a fragment. For example, for the wording Whenever he wasthe first at bat, the lead helping verb was can not be shifted to the start of the wording-note: was

4647

whenever he ... the first at bat (a non-English compilation of words). Because there is no otherlead helping verb available for testing, the very fact that the only lead helping verb was cannot beshifted indicates unmistakably that this group of words is a fragment and, therefore, cannot becapitalized and punctuated as a sentence.

Benefits from This Approach

When students have been asked (in anonymous questionnaires) whether instruction of the

sort just described was of "no help," "some help," "much help," or "very much help" for theirwriting, 80% consistently responded that it had been of much or very much help. When asked thesame question relative to its help for their reading, up to 75% responded that it had been of much

or very much help. In fact, one freshman composition student (in a Veterinary Science program)said that whereas she used to have to read material three times to understand it, nowbecause ofthis instruction in grammarone reading was enough.

I want to conclude by mentioning another phenomenon I experienced as a public speakinginstructor. I noticed that the students to whom I had taught freshman composition (where I always

included this kind of instruction in grammar) and who then took my introductory public speakingcoutseused unmistakably clear English when speaking extemporaneously: In contrast, over halfof the other students (who had also taken the freshman composition thurse but without either anystress on grammar or on this kind of immersion in sentence structure) spoke so uncleariy that thelistener either could not understand what they said or could not do so without a struggle.

This approach is a breakthrough method for empowering students to be efficient and coffect

writers, readers, and speakers of English.

[Editors Note: For more information, contact Hunter & Joyce Publishing Companyna, Federal

Hill Rd. 1, R,R.2, Box 54, Delhi, NY 13753. Phone: 800-745-3377; Fax: 607-746-2408]

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Between Restrictive and Nonrestrictive:Amplifying Clauses

Brock Haussamen(Bridgewater, N.J.)

My talk today will focus mainly on restric-tive and nonrestrictive elements but I want toset this topic in the context of the larger ques-tions and issues about grammar that we havebeen considering. I see these as three.

General Questions

The first is that we need to keep workingour way toward a body of grammatical knowl-edge-that is accurate and informative. Peoplerefer to grammar as if it were a set, static, andself-evident body of knowledge. They say, andwe say, that students 'learn grammar or thatwe 'teach grammar,' but the knowledge that istaken for granted by that term is varied, and inthe case of many of its basic terms and ideas,extremely old. Manyof the terms for the partsof speech and syntactic principles go back tothe middle ages or the ancient Greeks. Nowonder it is difficult to pull school grammarbooks away from the notional dethition of anoun; that definition has two thousand years of'Western culture behind it So part of our on-going job is to give these terms and ideas ofgrammar renewed attention, rigorous scrutiny,and revision where necessary. My talk willillustrate this, and this is an issue that interestsme a great deal.

The second general question is, of all thegrammar that we do know, what portions do weteach to students? What do young writers needto know about grammar, and why, and howcan we verify that we are coming up withsensib/e answers here? This is the generalquestion that raises all the heat in discussionsabout grammar. My talk will illustrate thisproblem also, but I want to point out here that Ithink that one reason why we have difficultygetting a handle on it is that it involves morethan the concerns with writing and languagethat are always brought up. Writing behavicr isin part social behavior, and so grammar is a

social issue, a matter of social class and evenpolitical orientation,- end I think these are theaspects of grammar that we should not avoid ifwe are going to have thorough discussionsabout why we are teaching it.

The third and final question is that oncewe decide what portions of grammar ourstudents can benefit from, how do we teachsuch grammar effectively? What strategieswork, and which don't? How might we deflectsome of the enormous influence that thecurrent grammar publishing establishmentcarries in order to open the way for new ap-proaches? The question of teaching strategieshas been dealt with in a number of presenta-tions here.

A History of Restrictive and Nonrestrictive

Now to turn to the more concrete issue ofthe contrast between restrictive andnonrestrictive modifiers. I offer this discussionas an example of the kind of examination andconsideration for revision of common grammarterms that we need more of.

The contrast between restrictive andnonrestrictive has historically been one of themost successful conceptualizations of recentgrammar theory. It is relatively young as gram-mar terms go, dating back to Goold Brown'sfirst use of the term restrictive in 1823. Theterm emerged from discussions of the lighten-ing of punctuation. That is, in the 17th and 18thcenturies, ALL relative clauses were borderedby commas. An example from a 1785 book onpunctuation: "Never open your heart to per-sons, whom you do not know." But ten yearslater, in 1795, Lindley Murray included in hisgreat grammar text a mention of an exceptionin the changing practice of the time. 'When twomembers are closely connected by a relative,restraining the general notion of the anteced-

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ent to a particular sense, tho comma should beomitted." Murray's word, restraining, wasreplaced by Brown's use of restricting in hisversion of the rule shortly after, and the newterm stuck. So the inconvenience of having apositive term, restrictive, refer to an absence ofpunctuation arose from the description ofconditions under which certain traditionalcommas should be left out. Without shiftingpatterns pf punctuation in the 18th century, wemight not have the terms at all.

One sign of the success of the two termsis that they have spread from conventionalgrammar to linguistics, a field which has beenvery careful about its terminology. Linguisticgrammars use the terms, as conventionalgrammars do, to describe not only relativeclauses but modifiers of all kinds in their rela-tion to the term they modify. The main idea isthat all modifiers have one of two qualitiesthey are either essential, tightly bound, defin-ing, and not separated by punctuation, or theyare unessential, parenthetic, loosely bound,and separated by commas.

Amplifying Clauses

A couple of linguistic works have pointedout briefly that this duality is not as neat as itappears, but I think that the problem calls formore attention. The two terms are, I believe,polarities, not categories. The conventionalgrammar books give the impression that allmodifying clauses fall under one heading orthe other, but many seem to me to fall inbetween. That is, not all clauses are eitherdefining and essential on the one hand, orparenthetical on the other, as the handbooksstate. Many clauses contain information thatdoes not restrict or define the antecedent, yetthese clauses are important, essential, some-times even primary information in the sentence.I will refer to them as amplifying clauses.

Let me give some examples. One type ofamplifying clause is that which amplifies an

_adjective that precedes the antecedent noun.Such clauses are mildly redundant and arevery common in speech and informal writing.

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Some examples from students:

The main character was a rich, egotisticyoung man who seemed to think of himself asbetter than those around him.

We often have to find forgiving employerswho will allow us to work unusual schedules sothat we can met our nursing obligations. I havea strict schedule that does not allow manydeviations.

Without the marked modifiers, the relativeclauses would be much more restrictive: "aschedule that does not allow many deviations."With the underlined modifiers, however, thenouns have been restricted and defined, andyet one cannot say the relative clauses afterthem are therefore nonrestrictive to the qxtentthat they are unessential. We might chreacter-ize these sentences by saying that the writerhas spread.the task of description over boththe general adjective coming before the nounand the more detailed clause coming after it.

More frequently, however, there is nopreceding adjective, the antecedent itself isidentified intrinsically or in context, and theamplifying clause makes an important com-ment about it. Some examples from The NewYork Times:

How fitting, then, that the Nobel Prize in Litera-ture comes to Ms. Gordimer as her countrybegins to dismantle the system that she hasopposed with such urgency.

Now the prospect of housing them is looming inmany more neighborhoodssome of themmiddle-class enclavesunder a new City Char-ter that requires that all city pmjects be spreadequitably among its neighborhoods.

The committee continued several hours of openhearings today, followed by a closed session inwhich the panel's members discussed a varietyof classified intelligence matters.

And from students:

Construction included masonry work of sand-stone blocks which were roughly shaped andlaid in thick mud mortar.

They had their own little bottle of Ice-nine whichkept them estranged from the rest of the world.

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Every day in the newsrapers one can read aboutthe increasing number of homeless families,neglected children and poverty-plagued pock-ets of people who seem, by their continuedexistence, to represent a necessary condition inour otherwise affluent society.

Because we are so accustomed to theconcepts of restrictive and nonrestrictive, theseexamples may seem at first to fit into onecategory or the other. And it is true that theymay each be closer to one pole or the other.That is my pointthat the terms representpoles. But in each case the current definitionsas presented in the handbooks do not fit easilyif at all; even when the antecedent appears tobe indefinite, as in a closed session, the follow-ing clause does not restrict or define as muchas it comments and describes. Even when theantecedent is fully specified, as in the bottle ofIce-nine, the following clause is essential to thesentence and not parenthetic; the sentencewould be very different without it. These ampli-fying clauses are generally not separated bycommas; this makes sense because althoughthey are not restricting the antecedent, they arestill closely linked to it.

The concept of the amplifying clausewould not be interesting if the term non-restric-tive meant just what it saidanything other thanrestrictive. But it is not defined that way; itmeans instead a modifier that is nonessential,and the reason it is defined in this somewhatextreme way has to do with punctuation: theterm has its roots in, and has remained prima-rily, guidance about the use of the comma. If aclause is judged to be nonrestrictive, thePractical consequence is that commas sepa-rate it from the antecedent. But as long asrestrictive and nonrestrictive serve as punctua-tion guides, they are compromised as precisedescriptions of the syntax or semantics ofmodifiers, which include gradations in therelationship to the antecedent. If we want toretain the present terminology as a guide tocommas use, a concept such as the amplifyingclause would be helpful to describe a greatmany sentences.

Conclusion

This sort of reexamination of the familiarterms of grammar is an important process, andI hope that my book Revising the Rules: Tradi-tional Grammar and Modem Linguistics mightserve as an informative starting point for afresh look at a wide range of grammar con-cepts.

But such reexamination quickly leads usto the second question I raised at the begin-ning: Which topics of grammar do we passalong to students, and why do we choosethose? The reconsideration of restrictive andnonrestrictive modifiers that I have presentedshould lead us to consider not only their accu-racy as grammatical concepts but also theirpedagogical usefulness. Some might feel thatthe amplifying clause should be added to themass of abstractions already heaped on somestudents. But I think that the practicalities ofpunctuation are the real writing issues here,and that we should consider telling students inwriting classes to put commas around extra,nonessential information and letting it go atthat, dropping from those classes and theirtextbooks the baggage of the restrictive andnonrestrictive concepts. We can retain them ofcourse in grammar and linguistics courses, butwe as grammarians perhaps need to becomebetter than we sometimes are at distinguishingthe grammar information that we could teachwriters from the grammar information thatwriters really need.

[Editors Note: Revising the Rules (1993,ISBN: 0-8403-9032-7) is available fromKendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 4050Westmark Drive, Dubuque, Iowa 52002.]

505 1

Using Error Notebooks to Improve GrammarJames Boswells Jr.

(Harrisburg, PA)

An article published in Eno fish Journalnotes:

Grammar is very often taught but veryseldom learned.... Yet despite the efforts madeon various fronts, the grammar of their ownlanguage remains a mystery to most students.(1990) p. 66.

The authors also point out that 'Traditionalgrammar instruction is bound to fail because itis given without any realistic context." (1990) p.55. (Meyer et al.) "Language is often divorcedfrom reading, literature, vocabula, and spell-ing: although traditionally grammar has beenconnected to writing, this link is often poorlyconceived." (1990, 66)

As far back as 1966 when colleaguesacross the nation gathered at Darmouth Col-lege to set a new agenda for the teaching ofEnglish, there were arguments over the placeof grammar in the teaching of English. Somepartidpants believed that time was wasted inthe "teaching of obsolete grammar resting onoutmoded assumptions about language."(1967, 72) Ann Warner felt that the teaching ofgrammar was futile even though "it continuesto play a significant role in English language-arts Curriculum" in public schools "often con-suming nearly half of the available instructionaltime." (1993, 76)

Arguments have shown traditional gram-mar instruction to be ineffective. There has notbeen sufficient work on how writing instructioncan be improved. In all the arguments againstgrammar in the last thirty or so years, in prac-tice grammar is still in the curriculum.

NCTE passed an "anti-grammar" resolu-tion in 1985 that noted that ample evidencefrom fifty years of research has shown that theteaching of grammar in isolation does not leadto improvement on students' speaking andwriting and that in fact it hinders developmentof students' oral and written language. Patrick

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Hartwell in "Grammar, Grammars and theTeaching of Grammar' wrote that "most stu-dents reading their writing aloud, will correct inessence all errors of spelling, grammar, and byintonation, punctuation, but usually withoutnoticing that what they read departs from whatthey wrote." He also notes that errors occurbecause of instruction. Brosnahan and Neuleibin "Teaching Grammar to Writers" state that"when writers learn grammar, as opposed toteachers merely covering it, the newly acquiredknowledge contributes to writing ability."

Those of us who work at the communitycollege are often tempted to conclude thatgrammar instruction is needed for most stu-dents. One may be apt to agree with the 1963Braddock, Lloyd-Jones and Schorer study that"instruction in formal grammar is an ineffectiveway to help students achieve proficiency inwriting." This study is often mentioned whengrammar is discussed. One could argue thatdouble-think pervades the discipline of lan-guage arts. Since students need to producetext that will engage a reader and demonstratetheir knowledge or mastery of a subject, stu-dents need to be helped to discover ways toedit and correct their texts.

Grammar must be taught in the context ofwriting. Students who do not know the conven-tions of edited standard American English arelikely to do poorly. At Harrisburg Area Commu-nity College students are placed into writingclasses according to their ability to recognizecorrect sentences. We use a writing sampleand computerized sentence skills test Errors ina text or poor grammar determines in part thestudents success.

For a number of years, I have used theerror notebook to help students correct andimprove papers they have written. Each stu-dent has a grammar handbook as one of theirtexts. What they are to do is correct each

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paper after it has been evaluated with theerrors notated. The student is to keep a list ofthe errors in a notebook. Then the student is touse the handbook to find ."the rules" and toenter into the notebook any corrections to thesentence. The student is expected to study theerror. Some students may elect to rewrite thepaper. The expectation is that the paper willimprove in both content and grammar. Stu-dents are also to do exercises in the grammarhandbook. There are times when I will discussa major problem in grammar most students arehaving. Students are also encouraged todiscuss their papers and/or use the writingcenter. Bonus points are offered to papers thatimprove. At the end of the semester all papersare returned with the error notebook. A finalgrade is given to the portfolio.

I agree with the authors of "Grammar inContext: Why and How." "Grammar instructionshould be concentrated on the proofreadingstage of writing assignments." (1990, 57)Those students who take the process seriouslydo improve. The students who correct eacherror and try to learn from those mistakes tendto earn higher grades in the course and subse-quent courses. The process of languageacquisition is rather complex. Students whounderstand how language works are empow-ered. These students are able to make connec-tions and see patterns in the language. Stu-dents who read and who are sensitive toreaders' needs tend to make much progress.

I believe that the error notebook works forsome students because they are-forced torewrite and change their texts. They are con-fronted by their grammar problems, and theycan learn to solve them. The best studentstend to make tremendous progress. Those whoneglect to do the assignment make little to noprogress. Essentially, they have chosen not toimprove. Once students commit themselves toimprovement, they can discover ways to suc-cessfully correct their papers. While this tech-nique does not address all the issues involvedwith grammar instruction and its place, it doeshelp some students to become more commit-ted to their writing. Warner is right when shesays that "Good Writing is, however, more than

mechanically correct writing." Nonethelessunderstandable writing tends to be correct(1993, 79) Furthermore, Renwick reports that"where grammar skills are concerned, theresponsibility of an English teacher is to createin students an awareness in their grammar andto allow them to see the choices they have inusing standard over non standard usage."(1994, 29)

Martha Kolln wrote "there is probably nota school district where grammar is not taught,either because it is mandated by the currictilumor because individual teachers believe in itsimportance. NCTE must be hiding its head inthe sand when it comes to actual teachingpractices." Effective pedagogy will help stu-dents to create successful prose. Grammarinstruction should help students in achievingthis goal. Poor writers with poor grammar skillsmay have limited their intellectual growth aswell as their academic futures.

SELECTED BIBUOGRAPHYHartwell, Patrick. "Grammar, Grammars, and

the Teaching of Grammar." CollegeEnglish. 47 (1985): 105-127.

Harris, Muriel and Rowan, Katherine. "Explain-ing Grammatical Concepts" Journal ofBasic Writing 2 (1989): 21-40.

Kolln, Martha. "The Politics of Grammar."Syntax in the Schools. 3 (1994): 1-4.

Muller, Herbert J. The Uses of English Holt,Rinehart and Winston: New York, 1967.

Meyer, Jim et al. "Grammar in Content: Whyand How." English Journal. Jan. 1990, pp.66-70.

Neuleib, Janice and Brosnahan, Irene. `Teach-ing Grammar to Writers." ,loumal of BasicWriting 1 (1987): 28-35

Renwick, Mitzie. "Real Research Into RealProblems of Grammar and Usage Instruc-tion." English Journal. Oct. 1994, pp. 29-32.

Warner, Ann. "If the Shoe No Longer FitsWear It Anyway?' English Journal. Sept.1993, pp. 76-80.

52 53

Surrealism and Grammar:Creatively Reinvigorating the Classroom

Kevin Griffith(Columbus, OH)

As a poet who also teaches advancedEnglish grammar for future teachers, I amalways looking for ways to bring the excitementof the creative writing class to the grammarclass. Every semester, it seems, the samestudents who were so excited and motivated tolearn creative writing dread the proposition ofhaving to take a state-mandated course ingrammar_ The key to making this coursestimulating, it seemed to me, was to importcertain creative techniques into the grammarcourse, techniques which would illustrate tostudents the intrinsic excitement of languagecreation, an excitement shared by both gram-marians and poets, but one for which only thewriters get the notoriety and "glamour." Inother words, I felt it was my duty to show mystudents that doing grammar was as fun asmaking poetry, a feeling they could pass alongto their students. As the new collection ofessays, The Place of Grammar in WritingInstruction, points out, the future of the teach-ing of grammar depends on teaching iteffectively, getting students to like grammar(Brosnahan & Neuleib 208). The best place tostart in a course is to get students to progressfrom their innate unconscious grammar toconscious. To that end, it is important to pro-vide "interactive group tasks, which enablestudents to generate the patterns and struc-tures unconscious knowledge of the language"(Brosnahan & Neuleib 209). This paper de-scribes what I have found to be some usefulstrategies for tapping that unconscious knowl-edge, language games borrowed from theFrench surrealists poets and artists.

Surrealism, a movement started by AndreBreton, which had its origins in the first worldwar, and which had its own manifesto by 1924,is noted for its attempts to transcend logic,borrow the language of dreams, subvert bour-geois notions of artistic taste and standards,and generally to fly in the face of Westernlogic. The games invented by Breton and his

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followers have the following characteristics:

They are freely entered into; separatedfrom the run of ordinary 'serious' life, they arecircumscribed bytheirown time and space; theyare uncertain, their outcomes not predeter-mined; they are economically unproductive andnot concerned with material interest, they aregoverned by rules; they are associated withimaginative projection and make believe.(Gooding 11)

One notes in these characteristics the oneseemingly anomalous one that, just as lan-guage itself, the games are governed byspecific rules. Chomsky's famous "Colorlessgreen ideas sleep furiously," which in itself hasa surrealist ring, demonstrates the rule-boundand yet, innate, structures which govern lan-guage produc don. Surrealist games do thesame, allowing students to compose their ownpoems by adhering to a few rules.

The Exquisite Corpse

Perhaps the most famous surrealist gameis "The Exquisite Corpse," named after one ofthe noun phrases generated by the game.ClasSified as a "chain game," the Corpse mustbe played by at least two people, preferablythree. The object of the game is for each of theplayers to follow a set sentence pattern suchas the following:

indefinite or definite article, adjective, noun,transitive verb, article, adjective, noun.

One person in the small group must writedown, in column form, three versions of thefirst three slots jarticle, adjective, noun); he orshe then folds the paper so that the nextperson cannot see what the writer has written.The second person then writes three verbs,folds the paper again, and passes it to the thirdperson who writes out three versions of thefinal noun phrases. The key is that in writingthe words, each person must fold over the

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paper so that the next person cannot see what the previous person has written. When the paper isfinally unfolded, students discover some witty, yet strangely poignant lines which embody thesmealist spirit

Writer #1 Writer #2 Writer #3The exquisite corpse drinks the new wine.A dying man drips the pale bird.The dead fighter hammers the ghostly fog.

As one can see, this activity underscores the underlying, mechanistic nature of language. Thoughthe poems may not make semantic sense, they do make grammatical sense, and The i.:orpse is aparticularly useful game when reviewing form and structure classes Of course, this activity can bevaried to accommodate different lesson plans. For instance, I had a number of students in myadvanced grammar course who, for some inexplicable reason, were confusing prepositionalphrases with direct objects. In this case, I had them construct one "Corpse" poem using preposi-tional phrases in the final position, and then one in which they had to generate a noun phrase inthe direct object slot. This variation also underscores the difference between transitive and intran-sitive verbs.

Conditionals

In the game called "Conditionals," a pair of players take turns inventing sentences whichcontain an opening adverbial clause beginning with "if" or "when" and then a main clause in theconditional or future tense. Again, the student writing the opening clause must fold over the paperso that his or her partner can not see what is written. For instance, here is a group of sentencesmy students generated with this activity:

If you never had to change your underwear,you would have mail on Valentine's Day.

If hearts gave birth,then all the flowers in the world would die.

If I jumped out of the window,ghost stories would come true.

If everyone ran around naked,then I would sit upside down.

If tears were made of sand,then water would rain back into the sky.

This game is not only valuable in teaching concepts such as conditional tense, two-partsubordination, etc.. it can be used to discuss the issue of putting a comma after a "presentencemodifier," the error that Lunsford and Conners in their 1988 study "Frequency of Formal Errors"identified as the error marked most often by writing teachers The problem of the presentencemodifier is also addressed in Rei Noguthi's Grammar and the Teaching of Writing (1991). Hismethod is to transform declarative sentences containing presentence modifiers into yes and noquestions (57), an effective method, but one which may confuse students because two operationsare required. In the "Conditionals" game, students need just to write the sentences, rather thantransform them into questions.

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Other Activities

To review many Major grammatical concepts, entire stories or poems can be constructed ingroups or collaboratively by the whole class by designing exercises in which each student isinstructed to produce a certain line using a certain formula. For instance, one student might beasked to write a sentence beginning with a gerund phrase, fold the paper and the pass it to an-other student who writes a sentence containing a that-clause functioning as a direct object, and soon. When each group or the class is finished, they can then tinker with and rearrange the sen-tences to produce a poem or story that has a surreal feel, but is held together by some narrative

thread.Another option is to design a handout listing various instructions for students to compose

lines following certain grammatical structures. For instance, one might ask students to write a ten-line poem following ten specific steps such as "Create a metaphor using the following construc-tion: 'The (adjective) (concrete noun) of (abstract noun). Jim Simmerman's poem "Moon Go Away,

Don't Love You Anymore," was written using this activity. Simmerman first wrote out twentyinstructions to himself and then created the poem by following those instructions (Simmerrnan122). Here are the first few lines from that poem:

Morning comes on like a wink in the darkIt's me it's winking at.Mock light lulls in the boughs of the pines.Dead air numbs my hands.

"Moon Go Away. . ." was eventually published in Poetry, which illustrates the generativepower of this kind of activity.

Conclusion

Though I have used them only in college-level courses, I am sure that surrealist games wouldbe useful for almost aU grade levels. They illustrates the almost computer-like structure of gram-mar, while allowing students an enormous amount of creative flexibility. Students are ostensiblywriting poems, but they are really "doing" grammar, understanding how the form and structure oflanguage coalesce in any language act.

Works Cited

Brotchie, Alastair. Surrealist Games. Boston: Shambala Redstone, 1993.Brosnahan, Irene, and Janice Neuleib. "Teaching Grammar Affectively: Learning to Like Gram-

mar." The, Place of Grammar in Writing Instruction: Past, Present, Future. Edited by SusanHunter and Ray Wallace. Portsmouth, NH: Boyton/Cook: 204-212.

Conners, Robert J. and Andrea Lunsford. "Frequency of Formal Errors in Current College Writingor Ma and Pa Kettle Do Research." College Composition and Communication (39):

Gooding, Mel. "Surrealist Games." Surrealist Games. Boston: Shambala Redstone, 1993: 10-12.

Noguchi, Rei. Grammar and the Teaching of Writing. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1991.Simmerman, Jim. "Twenty Little Poetry Projects." The Practice of Poetry. Edited by Robin Behn &

Chase Twichell. New York: Harper Collins, 1992: 119-122.

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Functional Grammar for English (Not Latin)Carolyn G. HartnettTexas City, Texas 77590

The Australian government has strongeconomic motives for developing an educa-tional system that will prepare citizens foremployment that requires much higher levels ofliteracy than in the past. Its citizens includerecent immigrants from Asia and elsewhere,descendants of earlier European immigrants,and Aboriginal populations. These people donot have the tradition of Latin grammarschools, but they do need to learn to writeeffectively. Therefore the government recog-nized the work being done in functional linguis-tics and has underwritten efforts at developingand applying it. Although this approach is toonew for statistical research studies of its effec-tiveness, it does present some interestingideas worth considering and perhaps applying.

The New South Wales Board of Studieshas prepared for K-6 teachers a backgroundon this approach to grammar, A Handbook ofGrammar For Teachers of English K-6. Many ofthe examples referto the Australian culture,but the charts are useful as they are. I want toreview the contents for you, with occasionalexpansions from the academic background forit, An Introduction to Functional Gtammarby M.A. K. Halliday. I shall also highlight how itdiffers from what we traditionally teach in theU.S.A., commenting on how some of thevariations help me in my understanding of howEnglish grammar functions. Thus, they help inmy teaching of college courses in Englishcomposition.

The foreword summarizes the differencein this approach:

While traditional grammar tends to focus on thenaming of parts of speech and the appropriatesyntax of sentences, functional grammar de-scribes the relationship between language andmeaning, describing how the grammatical re-sources of the language enable us to makedifferent kinds of meaning in different contexts.(1)

In this functional approach, meaning in contextis the beginning and the end.

As theoretical framework, Chapter Onelists the functions of language as expressingideas and information, interacting with people,and creating a text. Texts include greetings,grocery lists, messages left on answeringmachines, radio advertising, speeches writtento be read, memos, essay exaths; book re-views, national constitutions and much muchmore, of course. These all have a context ofsituation, which involves the subject matter orfield, the roles and relationships of the peopleinvolved, and the method of communication.The context of culture provides the world view,and it narrows to the view of any particulargroup of people occupationally, religiously,socially, ethnically, or geographically. Withinthe specific context, communicators makechoices how to express themselves. Thechoices develop three types of patterns. Thesemantic level organizes the information. Thegraphological level organizes the physicalaspects such as spelling, punctuation, andsound patterns. In between, connecting thetwo, the grammatical level structures words,phrases and clauses to realize the ideational,interpersonal, and textual functions. This levelis what the handbook deals with.

Chapter Two begins with grammar as werecognize it, defining a sentence as consistingof at least one clause. Then the terminologydiffers, because the clause is defined as agroup of words containing a verb of any type;minor clauses have only an infinitive or aparticiple. (In my teaching I conform to localusage.) Simple illustrations show how clausesare connected and included in complex sen-tences. Charts also show how clauses aremade up of groups of one or more wordsincluding noun groups, verb groups, preposi-tional phrases, and adverbial groups.

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Chapter Three begins less traditionally. Itshows how sentences express ideationalmeanings about theirparticipants (our subjectsand objects), their processes (our predicates),and their circumstances (our adverbial oxpres-sions and prepositional phrases). More tradi-tionally, the noun groups in participants andcircumstances include nominalizations. Theycan be expanded with determiners,numeratives, describers, classifiers, and em-bedded phrases and clauses. Classifiers differfrom describers in that the former cannot have"very" inserted before them. Nouns are distin-guished as mass, count, or proper nouns.Singular and plural forms of nouns are pre-sented in a simple chart that we could usewithout adjustment. The determiners aredivided according to their purposes of asking,pointing out, or snowing ownership. The otherterms are also charted in familiar elementaryways.

Circumstances include space, time,manner, means, cause, extent, accompani-ment, matter, and role. Charts carry examplesof how prepositional phrases, adverbial groups,and noun groups indicate these circumstances.This list of circumstances can suggest tocollege students what kinds of informationmight expand their drafts.

Although the treatment of tenses is tradi-tional, much of the treatment of verbs is distinc-tive. Verbs as processes are divided into threetypes. (1) Material processes are our prototypi-cal action verbs of doing or behaving. (2)Mental processes of thinking, perceiving, andfeeling and verbal processes of saying, asking,and telling form the second group. (3) Rela-tional verbs express being, having, becoming,and representing. I find this three-way distinc-tion useful in teaching basic and standard first-year college English courses. Material pro-cesses carry the action in narratives, instruc-tions, and much other expository writing.Mental processes project facts, ideas, andquotations both direct and indirect. Thus, theyoccur often in stories and news reports. Rela-tional verbs describe well, although they leavethe situation static. These three types of verbsuse different unmarked present tenses, so

distinguishing them semantically helps non-native speakers of English to make the rightchoices.

As a word order language, English rear-ranges the order of parts of a sentence tochange a statement into a question, and itomits some information to create a commandwith only the infinitive form for the verb. Theomitted parts are the subject and the part ofthe verb that "locates the process in time, orshows the speaker's or writer's judgement onthe matter" (25). This part is called the finite. Itis the first auxiliary or the root form with an ed,s, or null ending. (Simple charts show theforms for both regular verbs and for "be" and"have.") The separation of the concept of finiteenables the haadbook to illustrate a declarativeclause as "subject + finite," an interrogati,,eclause as "finite + subject," and an imperativeclause as without either finite or subject. In thisway the functional approach focuses on mean-ing rather than rules, reflecting here the impor-tance of time in English.

Another way to change the type of sen-tence is with tone of voice; a rise at the end .

changes a statement into a question. A furthermethod is adding a tag question to the end of asentence. Tag questions remind the audienceof the core of the sentence, the subject and itsverb, don't they? They begin with the finite inan auxiliFry form to refer to the predicate of thesentence; the content of the verb is omitted.Then comes a negative, if the original sentencelacked one, and a pronoun referring to thesubject. I like using tag questions as a shortcutfor checking for complete sentence by seeing ifit is possible to make a tag. Tags also identifythe major parts of a sentence that need num-ber agreement, because the pronoun andauxiliary refer to the subject and predicate.

Our traditional teaching does not paymuch attention to the mood system, which hasa bigger role than most of us are aware of.Besides negatives, the mood system has twoprimary means of expression: auxiliary verbsand certain adverbs. The auxiliary verbs arecalled modals: can, could, may, might, must,ought to, and has to. Charts show how they

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indicate degree of prooability or usualness orof obligation or inclination. The adverbs arecalled modal adjuncts and include terms suchas certainly, probably, possibly, always, usu-ally, sometimes. These terms allow us todiscuss what is may not be true, and they alsoexpress our attitude toward it. Therefore, theyenable us to modulate the effects on theaudience. Illustrations half a page long showhow exposition uses high degrees of probabil-ity for persuasion and low degrees to explorephenomena, opening topics for discussion. Themood system has a great effect on tone and onwhat a writer is actually doing to the audience:Send me . . . . versus Could you please sendme . . . ? Should we pay more attention to whatwe do to the audience and our attitudes aboutthe truth of the content?

The chapter on textual meanings beginswith a warning:

Teachers also need to be aware when they arereading aloud to students that the lexical densityof written language may make it difficult forstudents whoare only listening without a copy ofthe written text in front of them. (33)

Lexical density is the number of content wordsper clause. It is a major difference betweenspeech and writing, contrary to popular belief,but easily tested in recorded conversations.Speech has fewer content words yet moreintricate grammar and more grammaticalfunction words, such as prepositions. On theother hand, writing has simpler, diagrammablegrammatical structures packed with a higherproportion of content words. One reason forthis is that since speech is mostly face-to-fPrxt,spoken words like hem and this do not neL,dclarification. A comment about young childrenapplies to many of my first-year college stu-dents:

One of the most important things for youngchildren is to learn that written language is notsimply spoken language written dawn. Theymust learn that written language has to beindependent of the physical context, that writtentexts are independent and cohesive. (34)

In writing, the terms of reference like here, this,and other pronouns refer to other parts of thetext. Writers must remember to include thoseother parts and to make the relationship clear.This specification contributes to higher lexicaldensity. A sequence of references to the same

participant creates cohesive reference chains.Lexical chains not referring to the same entityalso reflect cohesion with their linked strands ofcontent. The strands contain repeated words,similar meanings, contrasting meanings,classes of items, or part-whole relationships.Other indicators of cohesion are theconnectives that indicate logical relations ofsequence, addition, time order, causation, andcontrast All these are charted and illustratedclearly.

Finally, this handbook explains howEnglish exploits word order to arrange the flowof information for easy understanding. Thestarting point of a sentence, called the theme,contains everything through the first partici-pant, circumstance, or process in the clause.Although the theme is most often the subjectparticipant, the subject may be preceded by aninterpersonal element such as a term of ad-dress (vocative), a continuative such as any-way, a connective, or any sort of circumstance(worded with a prepositonal phrase or adver-bial expression). In imperative sentences, the.theme is usually the process, the verb. Theremainder of the sentence after the themecontains new information that is the point of thesentence. It contrasts with the information inthe theme, which the audience already knowsor can interpret. This pattern from known tonew is illustrated in a narrative where thesubject of each sentence is a character andthe predicate tells what the character does.Such a pattern develops a smooth style that areader can easily follow.

Features of word order are fundamental togood English style. Because they are sopervasive, they are subconscious in goodwriters and thus not taught. Students trying tolearn to write without a background of exten-sive reading can benefit from having thepatterns pointed out explicitly. Since Englishdepends more on word order than on inflec-tions, it makes more sense to teach the wordorder patterns, I believe, than to teach onlyLatinate inflections, which nouns usually omitanyway. As a word-order language, Englishneeds plenty of devices to alter word order tofit patterns of known themes at the beginning

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of sentences and noteworthy new informationat the end. The only further such device dis-cussed here is the alternation from active topassive. The many other mechanisms forcontrolling word order are not mentioned in thisbrief handbook for elementary teachers.

Explicit explanation of word order patternshas advantages. It can clarify misleadingadvice. For example, traditional handbooksoften recommend varying sentence begin-nings. Random variation, however, can createdifficult reading if not absolute incoherence.What is good, however, is matching the begin-nings of sentences to meaning. When meaningis a series of actions by a single character, thatcharacter is logically the theme, repeatedly.When the meaning is a contrast or sequence,some sort of connective or continuative show-ing that may precede the subject and thusbecome part of the theme. Circumstances orconditions can become themes when they arerecognizable. Matching themessentencebeginningsto the meaning can lead to parallelstructures when the meanings are parallel andto varying structures when the meanings differ.

We can further apply functional principlesto issues like comma splices and fragments.Comma splices are a partial carryover fromspeech (called "paratactic secondary orality"by people like Lester Faigley in Fragments ofRationality, 201-3). Since speech does not usepunctuation, it does not have any consistentindication of the ends of sentences. Speechcan pause effectively, but often speakers rushon to their next point, or they may pause in the

middle to emphasize the next word or just tothink of it. In speech, comma splices andfragments are not a problem; the audienceunderstands from context, without eithercommas or periods. Comma splices create aword order problem because the first sentenceloses the force of end focus. An advantage offragments in advertising is that they provide formore ends of focus. Advertising frequentlyprovides models of written language followingspoken normsmodels that make our tradi-tional teaching of written composition harder.

This short review cannot fully develop theconcepts introduced here. It cannot cite ex-amples for clarification. But perhaps it can alertyou to some different ways of examining,explaining, and teaching English grammar. Iwould be delighted to discuss this approachfurther either via e-mail or by other means.

Board of Studies NSW. Handbook of GrammarFor Teachers of English K-6. Sydney:Erudition Teaching and Training Materials,1994. (You can probably purchase thisbook as I did for about $10 by sending acredit card number. Erudition's address isLevel 6, St. James Centre, 111 ElizabethStreet, Sydney NSW 2000, Australia)

Halliday. M. A. K. An Introduction to FunctionalGrammar, 2nd ed. London: EdwardArnold, 1994. (St. Martin's Press Scholarlyand Reference Division distributes Arnoldbooks in the U.S.)

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MINUTES OF THE 1994 ATEG BUSINESS MEETINGUniversity Room, Best Western Motel, Normal, Illinois August 12r 1994-7:30 p.m.

After Martha Kolln, President, welcomedthose present and thanked local hospitalitychairpeople for the pre-meeting social hour,discussion began on a variety of topics.

RESOLUTIO-J ( S ) Information: After athree-hour discussion, NCTE's resolutioncommittee rejected ATEG's 1993 resolution,refusing to bring it before the annual meetingon the grounds that (1) it was essentially arequest for research funds and as such shouldbe directed to the research grants committeeand (2) the resolution had no chance to passand so should not be brought before theconvention. Following the resolutionscommittee's advice, ATEG people proposed aworkshop on the rhetoricaluses of grammar.Although interest in grammar was indicated bythe thirty people who attended a 5:30 Saturdaynight meeting and by standing-room-onlyaudiences at 4-C's grammar sessions, theNCTE program committee rejected the pro-

/posed workshop on the grounds that it wouldhave no audience. suaaestions: -ATEG shouldencourage applications to NCTE for researchgrants. -ATEG should submit resolutions toCCCC. Decisions: -Martha Kolln will presentATEG's resolution(s) to the 4-C's committee inOrlando. -A new resolution drafted during themeeting was accepted: WHER-S researchsuggests that the formal teaching of graloamarseldom has a positive effect upon students'writing, and WHEREAS an emerging body ofresearch suggests that relevant aspects ofgrammar are learned and applied more effec-tively when taught in the context of students'writing than when taught in isolation, BE ITTHEREFORE RESOLVED that the WCTEencourage teachers to explore effective waysof drawing upon students' grammatical compe-tence in helping them in the writing process. -Martha Kolln will discuss the new resolutionwith Ma NCTE resolutions committee chair andtake appropriate action.

DECIDIWG ATEG PRIORITIES Deciding

on ATEG's priorities yielded much discussionbut no decisions. Basic is whether the goal isto influence schools or to promote ATEGmembers' research.

IDEWTIFYIWG ATEG'S WARKET Discus-sion centered around the possibility ofwidely distributing a brief but telling question-naire, possibly through NCTE, other profes-sional organizations, next year's ATEG meet-ing notice, and a (non-existent) master list ofschool principals, etc. Suggestions as to thequestionnaire's contents included the ques-tions used by researchers reporting at thisconference. Who would approve the wordingand distribution of such a questionnaire wasnot decided. Paula Foster drafted a question-naire during the meeting and gave it to thepresident

INTERWET, BULLETIW BOARDS, ETC.Information: Computer literates stressed theopportunities afforded ATEG by Internet,bulletin boards, and similar computer devices,stating that various lists are available throughthese sources. hlso, ATEG could set up a database of bibliographies, book reviews, and othermaterials viewers might be interested in.Decisions: -Ed Vavra asked those interested tomeet with him after the meeting amd/or to be intouch with him via mail or e-mail. -Ed willdetermine whether NCTE has an 800 number,if so, he will publish it. He will also investigatethe cost of 800 numbers for groups such asATEG.

ATEG BROCHURE Information: Discus-sion about ATEG's public relations/member-ship needs included the idea of developing asimple one-page tri-fold brochure to stateATEG goals and attract new members. Deci-sion: Martha Kolln will pursue the idea and willdiscuss with NCTE how to include a brochurein their mailings.

RELATIO-JSHIP WITH WCTE Informa-tion: -ATEG is now an assembly of NCTE. -Thus far, ATEG efforts at presenting a work-shop and a resolution have been rejected. -

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NCTE has accepted a panel on systemicgrammar for next year, however, since it istitled, "Classroom Approaches to Genre, " itmay not attract people looking for help withgrammar in the classroom. Suaaestions: -ATEG members are encouraged to proposetheir own research projects on theory, method,etc. and present them to NCTE. Severalpeople might apply for a research grant to-gether. ATEG cannot sponsor such research. -ATEG might invite an NCTE official or boardmember to speak at ATEG's next meeting,explaining how NCTE can help assemblies.

PRIVATE PUBLISHIWG Information: EdVavra announced his formation of a publishingcompany for getting chosen manuscripts outand solicited manuscripts from ATEG mem-bers. This is not a vanity press, but the authormust pay printing costs. He is interested insetting up a Bulletin Board if ATEG can helpWith the cost of initial equipment. Decision: -Edwill explore the possibilities and draw up aproposal for ATEG to consider.

ORGAWIZATIOW-U. COWCERWSInformation: -ATEG has $1600 now, but not allbills for the 1994 conference have been paid. -ATEG now has a book review editor, Lt-whreu.. -ATEG needs a membership chairperson.suaaestions: -Would your school be billing tospend $20 to send the newsletter to someschools in its area? -The next newslettershould put out a call for membership.

WEXT nEETIWGS Discussion: ShouldATEG move meetings around the country toenable more people to attend? Subsidizeofficers for meetings out of their own area3Hold regional meetings, either simulta-neously or alternatively with national ones?Meet only every two or three years? Piggybackmeetings onto NCTE or other professionalmeetings! Meet in summer or during theacademic year'? suaaestions: Investigate thepossibility of offering CEU credits for ATEGmeetings. Decisions: -1995 meeting will beWilliamsport, Pennsylvania. Ed Vavra will setit up. -1996 meeting will be in Michigan orIllinois. Janet Gilbert and Irene Brosnahan willtry to set it up. -1997 meeting may be in Ken-tucky. Terry Irons will look into the possibility. -Preferred meeting times are the first or secondweek of August or the last week of June. -

Present officers and executive committee willcontinue to serve.

Wanda VAn Goor, Acting Secretary

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1995 Conference Program

Pre-Conference Work ShopThursday, July 27, 1995

9:30 -1; 2-6The Kiss Approach to

Grammar in the Curriculum, K - College(Ed Vavra)

Friday, July 28, 1995

10:00 Martha Kolln (State College, PA)President's Remarks

10:30 Sabah A. Salih (Bloomsburg, PA):"The Politics of Grammar"

11:00 William McCleary (Uvonia, NY):"(Still) trying to find an answer to the problem of'ener in writing"

11:30 Agbaw, S. Ekema (Bloomsburg,PA): "The Fate of "he" or "she" and "her" or "his" ina Non-Sexist World"

12:00 LUNCH Le Jeune Chef

1:30 Jim Kenkel (Eastern Kentucky) &Robert Yates

(Central Missouri): "Grammar and Literacy:Embedding Outside Sources in Text"

2:00 Julia Keret (Miyazaki, Japan):"Teaching Grammar to Japanese College Students"

2:30 Frank Peters (Bloomsburg, PA):"Creativity in Short Phrasing"

3:00 Break3:15 Cornelia Paraskevas (Monmouth,

Oregon): "The Reading-Grammar Connection"

3:45 Stephane Dunn (Granger, IN):"Using Humour and Creative Techniques to TeachStudents the Common Sense of Formal English"

4:15 Glenn Swetman (Biloxi, MS): "TheNine-Question Method of Teaching Grammar."

4:45 Dinner Break7:00 Business Meeting

8:00 Publishing Session

Saturday, July 29

9:00 R.A. Buck (Charleston, IL): "Simpli-fying Tree Structures in the Grammar Classroom"

9:30 Jim Brosnan (Providence, RI):"Teaching Grammar Through Technical Documents"

10:00 Break

10:15 Cornelia Paraskevas (Monmouth,Oregon): "Grammar Textbooks"

10:45 Audrey Caldwell (Shillington, PA):"Syntax Book Reviews: What Should be Covered?"

11:15 Delma McLeod-Porter's Proposalfor an Official ATEG Bibliographer (Ed Vavra)

11:45 LUNCH

1:00 Anthony Hunter (Delhi, N.Y.): "AHands-On Non-Traditional Grammar That's Fun"

1:30 Brock Haussamen (Bridgewater,N.J.): "Between Restrictive and NonrestrictiveAmplifying Clauses."

2:00 James Boswell, Jr. (Harrisburg,PA): "Using Error Notebooks to Improve Grammar

2:30 Break2:45 Margaret Enright Wye (Kansas

City, MO): "To Pause, To Separate, To Terminate:A Prolegomena to Understanding Punctuation"

3:15 Heping Zhao (Fullerton, CA):"Particle, Complement, and Phrasal Verb: Rethink-ing 'ON'"

3:45 Kevin Griffith (Columbus, OH):"Surrealism and Grammar CreativelyReinvigorating the Classroom"

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3:45 End of Conference

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1995 ATEG Conference Participants

Adcock, Sarah S., Northeast High School, 1320-43 Ave.No.St. Petersburg, FL 33703

Agbaw, S. Ekema, Bloomsburg Univ., 365 Hillside Drive,Bloomsburg, PA 17815, 717-389-4828

Boswell, Jr., James, Harrisburg Area CommunityCollege, 676 S. 82nd Street, Harrisburg, PA17111, 717-780-2453

Brosnan, Jim, Johnson & Weise University, 8 AbbotPark Place, Providence, RI 02903, 401-598-1424

Buck, R.A., Eastern Illinois University, English Depart-ment, Charleston, IL 61920, 217-581-6305

Caldwell, Audrey, Alvernia College, Reading, PA, 610-796-8284

Dauberman, Russell, Jersey Shore Area, 347 E.Howards Street, Bellefonte, PA 16823, 717-398-7170

Dunn, Stephane, Davenport College, Dept. Head,General Education, 7121 Grape Road, Granger,IN 46530, 219-277-8447 ext. 270

Family, Eugene, Jersey Shore Area, 124 SusquehannaAve., Lock Haven, PA 17745, 717-398-7170

Fink lea, Evelyn M., St. Petersburg Junior College, 5200Dover St. N.E., St. Petersburg, FL 33703, 813-341-4751

Flinchbaugh, Timothy I., Eastern York School District,2453 Blacksmith Way, East Petersburg, PA17520, 717-252-1551

Griffith, Kevin, Capital University, Columbus, OH 43209Hall, Sylvia, Jersey Shore Area School, 2219 Springs

Grove Drive, Williamsport, PA 17701, 717-398-7170

Hartnett, Carolyn G., College of the Mainland, 2027 BayStreet, Texas City, TX 77590, 409-948-1446,EMail: 74563.641@CompuServe.com

Haussamen, Brock, Raritan Valley Community College,English Department, P.O. Box 3300, Somerville,N.J. , 908-526-1200, EMail:bhaussarn@rvcc.raritanval.edu

Hunter, Anthony, Hunter & Joyce Publishing Co. FederalHill, Rdl, R.R.2, Box 54, Delhi, NY 13753, 607-746-3196

ltzoe, Linda V., Penn State, York Campus, 435 N. HollySt., Elizabethtown, PA 17022-1625, 717-771-4153

Keret, Julia, Miyazaki International College, 1405 KanoKiyoteke-cho, Miyazaki 889-16, Japan, 0985-85-5931, EMail: JKaret©pmail.miyazaki-mic.ac.jp

Kenkel, Jim, Eastern Kentucky University , 217 WallaceBuilding, Richmond, KY 40475, 606-622-3177,EMail: engkenkl@eku

Kibbe, Mary Beth, Jersey Shore, RR 2 Box 530, JerseyShore, PA 17740, 717-398-7170

Kann, Martha, 3628 Buffalo Run Road, Bellefonte, PA16823

Lakey, Sandy,Pennsylvania College of Technology

Loehr, Joseph,Pennsylvania College of Technology

London, David,Pennsylvania College of Technology

McCalley, Beverley,Pennsylvania College of Technology

McCleary, William, SUNY at Cortland, 3217 BronsonHill Road, Livonia, NY 14487, 607-753-2083,EMail: Mcclearyw©snycorvacortland.edu

Mullin lx, William D., Prince George's Corn. College,11304 Lake Arbor Way, Mitchellville, MD 20721,301-322-0592

Paraskevas, Cornelia, Western Oregon State College,345 N. Monmouth Ave., Monmouth, OR 97361,503-838-8408

Peters, Frank, Bloomsburg University, English Depart-ment, 400 E. Second St., Bloomsburg, PA17518, 717-389-4738

Plummer, Samuel,124 Young Ave., Croton-on-Hudson,NY 10520

Rakauskas, William, University of Scranton, 31 GarberSt, Old Forge, PA 18518-2103, 717-562-2834

Rhoads, Jr., Don, Stevens State School of Technology,413 Fairview Ave., Lancaster, PA 17603, 717-299-7703

Sa lih, Sabah, Bloomsburg University, Department ofEnglish, Bloomsburg, PA 17815, 717-389-4427

Schell, Joan,Pennsylvania College of Technology

Swetman, Glenn R, Wm. Carey College on the Coast,P.O. Box 146, Biloxi, MS 39533-0146, 601-865-1500

Van Goor, Wanda, Prince George's Community College,3510 Husted Drive, Chevy Chase, MD 20815-5629, 301-322-0603

Vavra, Ed, Pennsylvania College of Technology, DIF112, One College Drive, Williamsport, PA17701, 717-326-3761, EMail:EVAVRA@PCT.EDU

Waldman, Jean, University of Maryland, 9819 EastLight Drive, Silver Spring, MD 20903, 301-405-3852

Wye, Margaret Enright, Rockhurst College, EnglishDepartment, 1100 Rockhurst Road, KansasCity, MO 64110-2561, 816-926-4000

Yates, Robert, Central Missouri State University,Department of English, Warrensburg, MO64093, 816-543-8741, EMall: ryates@cmsuymb

Yonkin, Thomas P., Athens Area High School, 511 N.Wilbur Ave., Sayre, PA 18840, 717-888-7766

Zhao, Heping, California State University, Fullerton, Ca92634-9480, 714-773-3163, EMail:HZHAO6FULLERTON.EDU

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