Faulty Assumptions
Successful grammar instruction involves matching instruction to expected out-
comes and then assessing whether the instruction was effective. As I’ve already
suggested, there is ample anecdotal evidence that these crucial considerations
are absent in typical language arts classes. More evidence follows, but at this
point we need to consider why years of instruction might not produce students
who have much knowledge or understanding of grammar.
One factor is that the long history of grammar instruction has instilled in us
certain pedagogical assumptions that are difficult for most teachers to chal-
lenge and that make developing viable learning outcomes extremely difficult
without a radical change in perspective. The most influential assumptions are
the following:
- Grammar instruction leads to correct speaking.
- Grammar instruction develops logical thinking.
- Grammar instruction improves writing and reduces or even eliminates errors.
Grammar and Speech. Let’s take the first assumption and use it to for-
mulate “correct speaking” as a learning outcome. The most common approach
to teaching grammar is drill and exercise. Students drill on grammar terminol-
ogy—noun, verb, preposition,and so on—and then complete exercises in
which they are required to identify the various parts of individual sentences.
Given enough encouragement and practice, students can become very good at
these activities. But it should be obvious that there is no match between such
activities and speaking and that the fundamental requirement of learning out-
comes is not met. These activities can be completed successfully without
speaking at all, which no doubt accounts for the fact that we just don’t find any
language arts classes in which there is an attempt to link grammar lessons ex-
plicitly with speaking.
Still, the hope exists that something from these drills and exercises will have
an influence on students’ speech. Somehow, the ability to identify nouns in
workbook sentences is supposed to transfer to speech. This hope is ill-founded.
Consider the following: Nearly all young people today use the wordlikerepeat-
edly when speaking, and the expressiongoes likehas in most instances re-
placed the wordsaid. As a result, sentence 1 below typically appears in current
speech as sentence 2:
- And then Macarena said, “I’m not going to dinner with you.”
- And then Macarena goes like, “I’m not going to dinner with you.”
For anyone who uses sentence 2, no amount of drilling and exercising will
result in a change in speech patterns to sentence 1, which outcomes assessment
20 CHAPTER 2