NationStates Jolt Archive

I was doing some research and found an interesting article that seems to present a more balanced perspective than my professor was giving me in class.

http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/writing.htm

It discusses the research done on the effectiveness of traditional grammar as a teaching tool. So I figured I'd ask y'all if traditional grammar forms such as Reed-Kellog sentence diagrams and conjugation charts helped you to improve in the use of your native language.

Poll to come shortly. [Edit: Nevermind about the poll. I messed up. :( ]

With my native language being English, formal gramar was pretty much ignored, even at a grammar school!

Learning a more structured language I believe is helped by formal conjugation charts etc. My wife, whose native language is Portguese asserts that this is the case and her grammar is certainly better than most of the generaton that were not taught that way. This is, however, not a large enough sample from which to draw any general conclusion.

I learned grammar in primary school (without any whatever charts) but we learned parts of speech and so on. I then went on to learn latin, greek, french and spanish.

The grammar I learned in each language helped with all the others, and I think I write much better as a result of my understanding of grammar. My kids hardly learn any grammar in primary school, and it seems their teachers hardly know any.

I was surprised to recently learn that diagramming is not commonly taught in school anymore. (I haven’t diagrammed a sentence since the late 70’s or early 80’s myself.) I suspect this is the holy war of English education much like the phonics/whole language holy war for reading instruction.

I think my Latin classes provided me with the best English grammar lessons I had. For example, you can’t write a sentence without knowing precisely how you are using a noun, since you have to use the proper declension. English is more forgiving that way. You can often compose a grammatically correct sentence without explicitly knowing what you’re doing.

However all that was long ago and far away, and these days, I’m lucky if I can string a bunch of words together and make any sense.

i use teh internet grammar :P which means lots of sort cuts and typos :D

Not teaching grammar at school seems to be the norm these days worldwide, and if the posts by some here are anything to go by, I think not teaching grammar has certainly negatively affected people's ability to write and convey meaning.

I'm sure I was taught grammar. I even remember a little yellow textbook that we had to use that must have been from the 60's (I went to school in the 90's). But if you ask me where I learned what an adverb was, I'd have to tell you, it was here in college.

I remember doing horribly in grammar, and that's about it. I don't remember what style we used, or how it was taught. I remember that some of the things that we said when we spoke were incorrect when used in a paper, and that the correct answer to "Who's there?" is "It is I" not "It's me."

The funniest thing about it is that I'm currently taking a reading class in college. We're supposed to be learning how to teach grammar and spelling, but we haven't. The theory is that is we teach students how to read, then the grammar will come to them easier than if we we're to teach the grammar first, and then reading. Top-down versus Bottom-up.

I know this really made no sense, but I just woke up and I haven't had my caffiene yet.