Grammar Instruction in the US

For much of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, grammar instruction was the linch pin of American public schools, so much so that the early grades were called “grammar school.” This line of teaching arose from the university system of medieval Europe, which held that civilization peaked with the Greeks and Romans. As a result, their educations concentrated on Latin and Latin literature. Veit states that following the American Revolution, both England and the United States developed pride in their own language, which led to a move away from Latin and into English grammar. Unfortunately, the way this was done was to overlay English with Latin grammar, which resulted in a great deal of confusion.

Structural Linguistics

Halfway through the 20^th century, scholars began scientific studies of grammar. The first major school to arise from these studies was structural linguistics. According to Veit, this approach to grammar held that “the syntax of a sentence should be studied without regard to the sentence’s meaning.

Transformational Grammar

Then in the late 1950s, Noam Chomsky developed the concept of transformational grammar. He taught that grammarians should study the meaning of a sentence (its transformations) AND how it was produced (the deep structure). The key to this field was the notion that “sentences have a history”; thus knowing the author’s intent became a part of the study. In his analysis of transformational grammar, Veit stated what most English teachers had come to believe: transformational grammar is extremely complex and is not suitable for instruction to children (251). As a result, traditional grammar continued to be taught in public schools.

Traditional Grammar

What is traditional grammar? It is the parsing of sentences into the eight parts of speech. Rarely, does it dig into the meaning of the sentence so the author’s intention can be determined. Many of us grew up on the Warriner’s Grammar and Composition series, which drilled the eight parts of speech. Some ambitious teachers actually covered material on phrases and clauses. It was believed that this system of study would produce better readers and writers. Such was not the case.

The last word from Veit

“Any attempts to teach writing skills apart from actual writing will fail. Improvements in grammatical sophistication come from exposure and practice in using new grammatical forms, not from isolated learning about grammar.”

Linguistic Grammar

This is where linguistic grammar enters the picture. Rather than studying the forms of English (that is, the eight parts of speech), linguistic grammar examines the function of words in sentences. For example, the word running can be a verb (he is running a business), an adjective (the running machinery made a lot of noise), or a noun (running is not her favorite sport). Same word, different functions. Grammar Made Easy combines linguistic grammar with sentence combining and writing practice to improve students’ language fluency.

What is sentence combining? It is the process of taking several short, choppy sentences and rewriting them into one dense statement that avoids the use of coordinating conjunctions (e.g., and, but, etc.).

While teaching the lowest quartile seventh grade remedial reading students several years ago, I used sentence patterns with sentence combining exercises as one of my strategies. I hypothesized that better writers would indeed become better readers and embarked upon linguistic grammar instruction with my classes. All 14 of the remedial students improved at least two grade levels in reading. I had accidentally affirmed a large body of research that demonstrates that the teaching of sentence combining skills improves not only syntactic maturity in writing but also students’ reading comprehension.

And the coup de grace . . . Evans states, “The implication of these findings is that sentence-combining instruction most influences the reading and writing development of students registering lower scores on tests of such skills” (56).

Grammar Made Easy takes all of this information and places it in one package. Each chapter begins with instruction on a grammatical form (such as, prepositional phrases, noun clauses, etc.). Then there are two or three exercises in which sentences are parsed to see how the pieces fit together. The third section is diagramming, which is a second strategy to help students see how the pieces of a sentence fit together. Another feature in each chapter is the homework in which students practice writing the form being taught in that chapter. Finally in most chapters, there are five sentence combining exercises to give another way to practice the form. Practice, practice, practice – that is the way to advance reading and writing fluency.

By the end of this school year, your students should be writing dense sentences that are considerably above their grade level.

Works Cited

Evans, R., et al. “The Effects of Sentence-Combining Instructions on Writing and Standardized Test Scores,” Journal of Educational Research. 82 (1988): 53-8.

O’Hare, F. Sentence-combining: Improving Student Writing Without Formal Grammar Instruction. Urbana: NCTE. 1973.

Veit, R. Discovering English Grammar. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986.