Grammar to Get Things Done

A Practical Guide for Teachers Anchored in Real-World Usage

Darren Crovitz, Michelle D. Devereaux

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134836949
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Alphabétisation

CO-PUBLISHED BY ROUTLEDGE AND THE NATIONAL COUNCIL OF TEACHERS OF ENGLISH

Grammar to Get Things Done offers a fresh lens on grammar and grammar instruction, designed for middle and secondary pre-service and in-service English teachers. It shows how form, function, and use can help teachers move away from decontextualized grammar instruction (such as worksheets and exercises emphasizing rule-following and memorizing conventional definitions) and begin considering grammar in applied contexts of everyday use.

Modules (organized by units) succinctly explain common grammatical concepts. These modules help English teachers gain confidence in their own understanding while positioning grammar instruction as an opportunity to discuss, analyze, and produce language for real purposes in the world. An important feature of the text is attention to both the history of and current attitudes about grammar through a sociocultural lens, with ideas for teachers to bring discussions of language-as-power into their own classrooms.

Chapter 1
Introduction

When Michelle taught her first high school class, she fit the stereotype of the uptight English teacher obsessed with correct grammar use. Though her teacher pens were full of purple and green ink instead of red, the result was the same: her students’ papers marked with every error she could find. That, she thought, was good grammar instruction. After all, that was how her own teachers had taught grammar so many years earlier: identify the mistakes in student writing relentlessly and follow that with worksheets, lots of worksheets, to hammer home correct usage.

Experience is a persuasive guide. For years, Michelle continued to mark up her students’ papers. She passed out stacks of grammar worksheets in the hope that her students would finally put that comma after the introductory adverbial clause. Strangely, while her students dutifully completed these stand-alone exercises, their own writing never seemed to show much improvement. They continued to make the same grammatical mistakes they’d always made. On some level, Michelle was aware of a disconnect here. Why couldn’t her students transfer the lessons of a worksheet to their own spontaneous writing? She heard other teachers complain about students as lazy or careless. Was that it, or was she missing something important? Assigning those photocopied grammar worksheets felt like teaching and fit comfortably with the conventional expectations of an English classroom. But it was hard for her to ignore the obvious. Her students didn’t seem to be actually learning anything.

Eventually, Michelle heard about teachers exploring different ways to teach grammar and help their students write better sentences, passages, and papers. While trying out new approaches seemed sensible, she was reluctant. After all, what if her students asked a question that she couldn’t answer? There was so much about grammar that she didn’t know. And so, fear and tradition kept the bleeding papers and the worksheets front and center for many years, until Michelle really started learning what grammar is and how it really works.

Defining Grammar

As a rookie teacher sharing resources with her colleagues, Michelle found that many veteran teachers’ writing rubrics had the acronym “GUM” at the bottom, for Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics. She was confused by this acronym. Wasn’t grammar just the rules and expectations for comma placement, sentence structure, verb choice, those lovely parts of speech, and the like? There were entire books—she had to buy them in college—that told her the rules of grammar. Why did these teachers differentiate between grammar, usage, and mechanics, and for that matter, what did these words even mean?

Grammar

“Grammar” has a far simpler definition than Michelle’s college grammar books led her to believe. At its most basic, grammar is “a description of language structure” (Kolln & Gray, 2013, p. 1), a map of the innate understandings of language forms that all native speakers possess. You will never hear a first-language English speaker say “Red the on had shirt a student” because such an utterance is not grammatical, meaning that it doesn’t fit the underlying map in our minds for how English is used. What speakers will say (“The student had on a red shirt,” “The student had a red shirt on”) may vary for different reasons, but it will always be understandable. All developmentally normal first-language speakers have grammatical structures hard-wired into their brains; researchers have found that even before children are born, they are differentiating the particular rhythms of their mother’s language (Kolln & Gray, 2013). By eighteen months of age, children have already identified predictable patterns (that is, they’re picking up the grammar) of their first language and have begun to use them regularly. In English, these patterns include subject-verb (“Kitty run”), verb-object (“Find Mommy”), and noun-modifier (“Hotdog allgone”) (Curzan & Adams, 2012, p. 322).

We discuss various American English dialects later in Chapter 2, but it’s worth mentioning a point here on which all linguists agree: all dialects are grammatical (Adger, Wolfram, & Christian, 2007; Charity Hudley & Mallison, 2011; Green, 2007; Labov, 1972; Redd & Webb, 2005; Simpkins & Simpkins, 1981; Wheeler & Swords, 2006). That is, all dialects follow rules that every first-language speaker can understand.¹ “Him and me went to the store” will be received in different ways according to the expectations of the listener, but the meaning of the sentence will rarely be in doubt. It’s as understandable as “He and I went to the store,” and that makes it grammatical.

Crazy as it may sound, grammar is really about understanding, not about “correctness.”

Usage

In our experience, usage is what most people mean when they use the overarching term grammar. “Usage” can be understood as the arbitrary rules of language that have been deemed correct by mainstream groups. We think Sledd (1996) provides a helpful explanation:

The study of usage is the study of approved choices among socially graded synonyms. I ain’t got none means “I don’t have any” or “I have none.” All three sentences are equally clear; all are governed by stable rules of grammar; but ain’t and multiple negatives are in some quarters socially disapproved. When we teach correct usage, we teach linguistic manners of the privileged. Correct usage is usage that observes those constantly changing manners.

(p. 59, italics in original)

What is considered “correct” changes across time and place. Many English teachers will pounce quickly when students use double negatives (“I don’t got no cooties”), but there was a time when such usage was acceptable, as the examples below illustrate:

Ther nas no man nowher so virtuous … (Chaucer, “The Friar’s Tale”)

I never was nor never will be. (Shakespeare, Richard III)

Not until the printing of Robert Lowth’s infamous (and we use “infamous” purposefully here) 1762 book A Short Introduction to English Grammar did the double negative attain its current frowned-upon status. Sayeth Lowth, “Two Negatives in English destroy one another, or are equivalent to an Affirmative” (as cited in Schuster, 2003, p. 60), managing in one sentence to condemn a popular usage while also spawning a now-common grammar meme (When you say “I don’t got no cooties” it actually means you do have cooties!!). Languages evolve, and when they do, what counts as correct changes as well.

Lowth’s argument against the double negative—that two negatives make a positive—is a long-standing fallacy, one we often hear when talking with teachers about grammar and American English dialects. Turns out that many modern languages (such as Spanish, Portuguese, and French) employ double negatives, and we’re pretty sure that when French speakers say, “Je ne sais pas” [literally, “I don’t know nothing”] they don’t actually mean “I know.” Triple negatives reinforce the silliness of these bogus language prescriptions. When a Southern English speaker says, “Jimmy don’t know nothing noways,” does that speaker really mean that Jimmy does know something … but not at all? Of course not. The intended meaning of the statement is clear to any native listener, and superimposing the rules of one discipline (math) onto another (language) produces absurdity rather than clarity. With matters of communication, the rules of logic often don’t apply.

Our point here is that usage rules are arbitrary, dictated and elaborated in the college textbooks Michelle bought and in innumerable style guides on bookstore shelves. People are quick to ascribe a moral dimension to language use: your use of “incorrect” or “bad” grammar must indicate something deficient in your upbringing, your culture, your soul. But these judgments and the rules they arise from rest upon shaky ground. Today’s acceptable usage is tomorrow’s faux pas.

That said, we are not arguing against the use of a standardized language. Far from it. We think a standardized language is vital, as it provides everyone a means for common communication. Bottom line, grammar and usage are two different aspects of language study. It’s helpful to remind ourselves that usage invokes a set of rules that changes according to mainstream beliefs and practices, and that these beliefs and practices are often then (mis)labeled as “correct grammar” and put into books to be studied and applied. These “rules” about correctness are not set in stone but change according to the whims of dominant social forces.

Mechanics

“Mechanics” simply refers to the technicalities of writing: conventions such as spelling, capitalization, and basic punctuation. Many people group mechanics with usage, which is perhaps understandable. As with usage, the rules of spelling, capitalization, and punctuation change according to time and place. For example, Lowth capitalizes both “negative” and “affirmative” in the sentence we cited earlier, a move that would be considered incorrect by today’s standards. Travel to England or Australia, and you’ll find that English spellings differ according to place and culture (such as colour and color, aeroplane and airplane, draught and draft, and theatre and theater). The concept of mechanics is bounded by a small list of writing technicalities, similar to the restraints found in usage. One major difference, however, is that mechanics is a concept that only applies to written language. Take heart in knowing that not even the worst grammar snob can judge what you say for non-standard spelling, capitalization, or punctuation.

A Very Short History of Grammar and Usage in the English Language

We live in a time of digital technologies and tools that have transformed how we communicate. New modes of writing (email, instant messaging, texting, tweeting) and communi cating (emojis, vines) have, however, come with an accompanying set of reactionary worries. The general fear, really a kind of “moral panic” (Thompson, 1998), is that these new developments are a corrupting influence on conventional literacy: each time a student uses “LOL” or “gr8t” or “i m ritn 2 u” in an essay, it’s sad evidence of a slow decline toward language chaos. At the risk of overgeneralizing, many folks with these concerns seem to see themselves as lonely defenders of linguistic purity, protecting classic standards of correctness against a looming, ungrammatical horde (we talk a bit more about this perspective in Chapter 2). Sometimes this struggle will include an homage to the supposed educational rigor of yesteryear and a plea for back-to-basics, no-nonsense grammar instruction. Through such a lens, it’s easy to imagine an unadulterated, stable, and consistent history of English grammar and usage stretching back across the centuries, with rules and conventions long-established if not inscribed in stone, all of it now under threat from modern sloppiness.

This version of English grammar history is, however, an illusion. The truth is a lot more complex. Turns out that language standards have always been in flux, changing across time and place, and buffeted by powerful forces of self-interest and control, and people have bemoaned the gradual but constant fall of the English language since such a thing existed.

To understand where the peculiar love of deconstructing sentences and parsing the language into questionably definitive parts of speech came from, we have to go all the way back to 100 B.C.E. Greece, which is where Dionysius of Thrace wrote the first grammar book based on written rather than spoken language (Lindemann, 2001). Before this text, thinkers such as Aristotle and the Stoics saw grammar primarily as a way to better understand speech, while also accepting that language was a product of human nature and, therefore, susceptible to imperfection and anomalies (Weaver, 1996). However, as the centuries marched on, Dionysius’ first grammar book became the basis for Latin grammar texts, which in turn heavily influenced the creation of English grammar books. Oddly enough, many traditional guides used in teaching twentieth-century American schoolchildren employed the same strategies of Dionysius’ book: memorization of definitions, the use of literary models, and the parsing of language into parts of speech (Lindemann, 2001).

By the Middle Ages, grammar had taken on a moral dimension in Europe. The predominant social institution of the time, the Roman Catholic Church, deemed any change in language “emblematic of the human condition since the fall of grace in the Garden of Eden” (Lind...