Many people have told me that grammar is no longer taught in primary or secondary schools and that it should be. Is this true? Or is some kind of grammar, different from what was taught in decades past, being taught? I don't know, but I am tired of arguing about it. What I would like to know is what these people think grammar is and how it can be taught to seven to 18 year-olds.
I think of grammar as a set of rules for using a particular language. For me grammar consists of various sub-fields of study: phonology (the sounds used by a language), morphology (the basic units of meaning, which can be lexical items, i.e., words, or smaller bits, e.g., affixes), and syntax (how the various units of meaning are put together to form grammatical phrases or sentences). I do not think of orthography as a part of grammar. That is spelling and punctuation, which should be taught, are just not a part of grammar for me or most linguists I have talked with or read.
The vague notion of grammar I get from non-linguists is a good deal of parsing (i.e., parts of speech assignment to words in a sentence) and diagramming (that is a method of drawing a sentence on a chalk board or piece of paper that gives some limited information on a constituent's part of speech (e.g., noun, verb) and syntactic function (e.g., subject, predicate). Thrown in here are also some spelling and punctuation "rules" and a good deal of what I would call usage "rules".
In particular, I'd like to know if anybody can name a good pedagogical grammar of English for use by native speakers. Also, I'd like a run-down of what particular set of parts of speech should be used and where that set came from. By fiat, by analysis? I find that when I try to explain my notion of grammar to the pro-grammar group of non-linguists, we very soon become aware that each group is using a totally different terminology to speak.
[Fixed stupid typo; that's grammars for teaching native speakers.]
Last edited by zmjezhd; 06/22/12 07:09 PM.
OP
