Why Grammar Is Essential | Lecture 7

DANIEL B. COUPLAND: Well, we learn-- in fact, we can even use our minds and we think about things-- through language. So if we don't understand language, we're not going to be able to understand concepts and ideas and principles in other areas of study, not just language but mathematics and history and art and all of those other areas of study. If we don't understand language and we do not have the ability to communicate using that language, we're going to be limited in our ability to understand

the world around us. [MUSIC PLAYING] Hi. Thank you for joining me today. The question that I'm going to try to answer today is why is grammar essential. In order to do that, I have a couple of items here to direct where we're going to explore this question. So I'm going to take a little bit of a look at the history of grammar instruction in the United States, actually going back to antiquity. And then I'm going to try to answer the question, when should English grammar be taught. Our third ques

tion here is, why should we teach English grammar. And last but not least, I'm going to spend a little bit of time talking specifically about how we should teach English grammar. In order to deal with these issues, I would like to refer to a book called The War Against Grammar by David Mulroy. He's a professor in Wisconsin, and he a couple of years ago wanted to know why his students were coming into college and not knowing grammar, specifically grammar of their native language, of English gramm

ar. So he decided to research this question and do a little bit of a research study on the role that grammar has played in education all the way up until the present, in order to try to address the question, what happened to grammar instruction in the United States. So I'm going to read from a quote from the book, and we're going to use this to talk about a variety of these things here. So if you will, the quote is this. "From antiquity to the late 1800s, grammar was introduced to children at th

e beginning of their schooling, as soon as they learned how to read, and it remained the central concern for several years. It was a foundation that was built upon carefully and gradually in the still-receptive minds of the relatively young pupils." So there's a lot in there. There are two statements in there. But in that short amount of space, he is able to answer these very important questions regarding English grammar. So let me start with the opening line here and address our question about

history. "From antiquity to the late 1800s." If you go back and you look at representations of learning and teaching and learning and schooling going all the way back to antiquity, you will see that there were certain subjects that were important in the academy. And one of the liberal arts, going back all the way to antiquity, was grammar. So I have a few illustrations here that I would like us to take a look at. The first one is titled Garden of Delights, and it was a text compiled by a lady na

med Herrad of Landsberg. And she was a nun, and she worked at a convent in the 1100s. And her job was to compile information of the day in order to teach the young ladies who were coming into the convent. And so the picture I have here today for us to take a look at is an illustration from this wonderful text. And you'll see around the outside of this wheel, this wheel of learning, are the seven liberal arts. And I'm just going to start in the 12 o'clock position here with grammar. All of the ar

ts around the wheel here are represented as human characters, and they are holding and using the tools of their art. So let's begin with grammar in the 12 o'clock position there on the wheel. Then we go to rhetoric, then logic, music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. And these were the classic seven liberal arts that a student had to acquire if he or she wanted to move on in their education. Let's move on to another painting here titled The Liberal Arts, compiled or painted in the 1400s. And

unlike the previous piece of art, where it was a wheel, now we have what looks like a hallway, and once again, you can see the seven liberal arts in this hallway. Once again, they're seated and they're holding their tools of the trade. And you can see-- and I'll name them off here-- going from left to right, arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy, logic, and then grammar. And notice, in their hands they're all holding these tools, and they're practicing their art. Also, notice in front of them,

there are student who are being taught by the arts to practice the art as well. As you go along from left to right, once again, you can see that the students front of the liberal arts practicing their arts-- many of them are older, mature men. They have beards. But go all the way, if you will, to the right to the student directly under grammar, and you'll notice he is without a beard. And in fact, he looks like a younger student. Now, we're going to zero in on Grammar here for one moment. If yo

u'll notice the posture of the rest of the liberal arts, they're staring off or staring at their tools. But notice Grammar and the direction of her head. She is leaning to the right and looking to the right, and she's looking at two small characters there, standing in a doorway. That doorway there is the entrance to the Hall of Learning. And you can see they're stepping in-- in particular, the one who's in front there is stepping in and looking up at grammar. And notice Grammar's posture. Once a

gain, she's turned towards the students, unlike the rest of the arts. Her head is kind of leaning over, and her eyes are staring down at the student while the student is staring up at grammar. The idea here is that if this represents a hall of learning where students would encounter all these arts the students coming in through the doorway into this Hall of Learning, the first person they would encounter would be Grammar, suggesting the idea that it is first in education, the first thing that a

student would need to master before, as you can see here, being able to move on to rhetoric, logic, and the rest of the liberal arts. The last piece I'd like you to take a look at is the seal of the University of Pennsylvania from 1894. You can see the name of the university around the outside of the seal. And then you can also see what looks like a stack of texts or textbooks, and on those textbooks you can see the names of studies or particular subject areas that a student would study. So you

can see, once again, things like astronomy, mathematics, logic, and rhetoric. But as we work our way all the way down to the bottom, you see that the bottom text, the widest text, is grammatica or grammar, once again suggesting the idea of it being the foundation of a quality education. Now, the quote refers to the late 1800s here. So what happened at the end of the 1800s? Well, education changed over the millennia, no doubt. But all the way up until that point, there was this idea of students n

eeding a classical, a traditional education, where students would study things because they were worth being studied-- all the way up until, and like I said, the late 1800s when the Progressive movement was coming in. John Dewey was writing his text, and he had a great influence on people at Teachers College, who were, once again, training the future educators. And part of the Progressive movement was this idea of making education as practical and as useful as it could possibly be. And so as a r

esult, modifications were made to the curriculum, and particular subjects were actually pushed out of the curriculum. Higher mathematics, Latin was pushed out, even some arithmetic because it just wasn't seen as useful. One of those things was grammar. And so the study of grammar began to lose its place in terms of quality education because it was viewed as not being practical enough. Now, these were the leaders of the education movement. They weren't necessarily the teachers in the schools, and

many of them held on to grammar instruction for a long time, for decades, even. But eventually, pressure from the top worked its way down, and grammar lost its prominent role within an American education. Now, Mulroy in his book points to the fact that we need to recover this in American education and that students, if they don't have that kind of grammar instruction, are going to be at a real disadvantage. Why is that? Well, because understanding of our language is critical in order for us to

understand any kind of a subject, whether it be math, whether it be history, art, and all of that. So we'll get to that a little bit later. So our second question here is, when should students learn English grammar. So let's go back to the quote, if you will, and you can see a few lines in here. It says, "at the beginning of schooling." Once again, that is consistent with what we saw in the paintings, where grammar was an introductory art that students had to encounter and, to some degree, had t

o master in order to move on to the other arts. But also notice this small statement in here-- "as soon as they learned how to read." So I think that's right. I think what Mulroy is trying to point out here is that students need to acquire an understanding of grammar, an understanding of English grammar. However, they need to do that after reading instruction has actually taken place. So my recommendation, and I think Mulroy would recommend this as well as we can see in the quote, is that prior

to kindergarten students should be spending lots of time experiencing language, hearing the sounds of language, encountering letters and being able to name those letters. But once students get into kindergarten, they need to focus on being able to decode text and to read text. And so that is the priority in K through 2, maybe even K through 3. But around the third grade or so, students typically are fluent enough in their reading. And, of course, they need to continue to develop their ability to

read and their ability to comprehend text. But now there is space in the curriculum to be able to study English grammar in a very explicit way. Now, I would recommend grades 3 through 6 is the perfect time to be able to introduce English grammar. I think that kids, once they've learned how to read, are primed and ready to take on more language arts instruction. In addition, we have the higher end, in that we are running out of time a little bit as well. And it's pretty obvious how kids are able

to acquire language, and they are able to acquire the structure of language in amazing ways that we as adults often struggle to be able to do. And there's something that happens at puberty where we lose our ability to develop the kind of understanding of language that we can acquire as young children. So I think that once a child learns how to read, grades 3 through 6 is a perfect time to be able to introduce grammatical concepts. Beyond that, once again, students can continue learn grammar, an

d they should be held accountable for the grammar that they have acquired. I think Mulroy hints towards this critical age here in the upper elementary grades when he says, "in the relatively young pupils." And he says that their minds are still receptive to language. So, then, why should students learn about the structure of language? Why should they have this kind of an understanding? Well, once again, Mulroy talks about it being foundational to everything else, that we think and we learn throu

gh language. And when students have an understanding of how words work with each other within the language, well, then, that will help them to be able to learn in any area. But he is a little bit more specific at another point in the text, where he openly addresses the two reasons why we should teach students English grammar. Number one, he says, "The purpose for studying and learning and understanding grammar is preserving and reviving an appreciation of literary classics." What he means by tha

t is if we have an understanding of our language, it allows us to connect back to our heritage, to be able to connect to the great tradition of learning. And that ability in language gives us access to those ideas in the past. The second reason for teaching kids English grammar is, he says, quote, "creating future eloquence." What he means by that is the tradition has not ended. It continues still today. And so in a way, by him pointing to these two things of preserving and reviving, but then al

so creating future eloquence, he's pointing backwards with his perspective, that we should learn grammar because of the past. But he's also pointing ahead, that we can continue that great tradition. My last question here is how. How should we teach students to understand how grammar works? We're going to spend a little bit more time on this, and I'm going to use a few examples to show you this on the board. But let's go back one more time to the quote. Mulroy says this. "We should teach students

grammar carefully." I take that to mean that we should be intentional, and we should teach it intentionally to students. Typically we find in schools today that grammar is often taught implicitly. In other words, it's important to teach students how to write. But if we are going to give them grammar instruction, well, we'll just add it on top of a composition or something like that, almost like an add-on, or to give students enough grammar so that they can improve their writing. And we won't ad

dress it any more. I think his idea of carefully means intentionally. In other words, we need to slow down, and we need to give grammar the attention that it needs. And we need to spend time actually teaching students grammar. Sure, it'll apply to a student's ability to read and to write, but this thing is worth knowing and it's worth slowing down in understanding it. The other point that he makes, it's not just carefully, but it's also gradually. The other problem in a lot of grammar instructio

n is that it's taught very, very quickly, almost like a shot in the arm and that'll do the students an incredible good. I don't think that is the case at all. And I think Mulroy realizes this, that it needs to be taught intentionally but it also needs to be taught gradually. And as he says, it should be a central concern not just for a semester or for a year, but for several years. And that's how you allow the understanding of grammar to actually seep into the student's mind and be able to have

a legitimate understanding of actually how the language works. About our last question, how grammar should be taught-- I had a little change here to my board so I could show you a few examples of some of the methods that I would recommend using if you're trying to teach students English grammar. So there are a lot of curricula out there that you could choose from. There are a lot of techniques that you can use in the class or with an individual student, but I'm just going to highlight four that

I think are essential to a quality English grammar curriculum. So the first thing is terms. Students have to be acquainted with terms. Now, we use vocabulary almost as a shortcut so we don't have to explain the concept, so we can name things and label things. And if we're going to be talking about grammar, we might as well use the language of grammar, and so students need to acquire terms. Now, the terms that you teach, the definitions should be accurate. In other words, they should represent th

e thing accurately, but they should also be easy to memorize. And so at times these are competing, but oftentimes you can come up with a definition that is both accurate and easy to memorize. So here's an example. Remember that we're dealing with elementary kids here, so if you can create rhymes or songs that students can use-- no, I'm not going to sing-- if you can use these kinds of chants or rhymes, students will be able to absorb them into their memory. So, for example, I have one here for t

he eight parts of speech. So students should be able to say these. These are definitions. The eight parts of speech are classes of words with the same kind of meaning and use. And they are nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. Another example, the term adverbs. So here's an easy way to acquire an accurate and easy definition. So adverbs. An adverb is a part of speech. It modifies a verb, an adjective, and an adverb. It answers the questions h

ow, when, or where. An adverb is a part of speech. There's almost kind of a sing-song nature to that definition, once again making it easy for them to memorize. Now, the adverb definition I have here uses three questions-- how, when, or where. But there are other questions that relate to the adverb as well, but those are a little bit more technical. And most likely, students will be able to add those questions on later on. But for now, this is both accurate and easy to memorize. So the first one

was students need terms in order to talk about language when they're talking about grammar. The second thing is analysis. Students need to have the opportunity to look at language as a whole and to try to understand what particular words are doing within a complete statement and the relationship of those words in that statement. So I'm going to show you two forms of analysis, and I'm going to use a quote from a Robert Louis Stevenson poem called "Foreign Lands." And the poem goes something like

this at the beginning. "Up into the cherry tree, who should climb but little me. I held the trunk with both my hands and looked abroad on foreign lands." So I've pulled out one of the statements here, "I held the trunk with both my hands." And we're going to take a look at it, and we're going to use an approach called marking in order to do that. And so remember, our goal here is to ask ourselves what's the relationship of these words within this statement here. So typically when you mark, ther

e are symbols that you use when you do the marking, and I'm going to use an approach where I try to identify clauses first and then phrases and then the principal elements. So I'm going to start. There are no subordinate clauses in here, so I'm going to skip that altogether. And I'm going to identify right up here that I have a phrase. So even before I get into this subject/verb, I'm going to portion of this phrase, and I'm just going to go ahead and identify the elements here within this phrase

. So I have a preposition. Now, symbols will vary depending on the approach that you're going to use. I use a P here for the preposition. And then every prepositional phrase has an object of the preposition, so I'm going to go ahead and label that as well. Now, these words are not main elements or principal elements of the sentence, so I'm going to label them below the quote itself. Within the prepositional phrase here, I have two more words, and those words act as modifiers here. In fact, they

are adjectives modifying hands, so I'm just going to go ahead and label those like this. So this prepositional phrase is connected to something earlier in the sentence, but I'm just going to leave it alone for now. And I'm going to try to deal with the principal elements, the most important things. So the first thing I'm going to look for is my subject, and I'm going to underline it and put an S up above to identify. "I" is what the sentence is about. And then I'm also going to identify the verb

here by underlining it twice and identifying that as the verb. Now, this is a transitive verb, which means that there's something, some noun form on the other end of the verb, that is receiving the action. And that's what the trunk is. So I'm going to circle that as my direct object, and I'm going to label it that way as well. So now I'm going to deal with the last element within this part of the sentence here, which is "the." And "the" is an article, but it acts as an adjective, and so I'm goi

ng to label it as an adjective. Now, everything in the sentence is labeled, but I still have to deal with one more relationship here. And that is, "with both my hands" is a prepositional phrase. Now, that answers one of the adverb questions that I posed earlier. I held. How did I hold? Well, I held with both my hands. So actually, this prepositional phrase is what I'm going to identify here as an adverbial, or an adverb, prepositional phrase. In other words, it's telling us how we're going to ho

ld. And I'm going to identify it-- I'm going to use prep to identify that. This entire prepositional phrase is modifying held. Now, this is a wonderful approach to use and that students can very easily see in a simple line of text. They can see the relationship of these words within the sentence there pretty clearly. Now, if the senses get too long, then you're not able to do this kind of marking, especially if the sentences begin to go multiple lines. Then lines are going across words, and that

's not a good idea. Well, in the late 1800ss, two linguists came together-- Reed and Kellogg were their last names-- and came up with a way of visually representing language without doing this kind of marking. And it allowed linguists to actually look at the relationship between words within a larger statement. So I'm going to take this same quote, and I'm going to actually do a diagram here really quickly. First thing you identify is the horizontal line, and then you do a vertical line that goe

s across the horizontal line to represent the complete subject, the complete predicate. So I'm going to go ahead and identify the subject as I, and then I'm going to identify my verb, "held." Now, because this is a transitive verb, I know that I have a direct object here, so I'm going to put a vertical line that does not go across the horizontal line. And what is it that I held? I held the trunk. Now, I'll deal with this word right now, the article, which modifies trunk. So here's a visual way o

f looking. At least the principal elements here, I've seen it pretty clearly. But now I can take this element here, and I can show how it is connected. Now, remember, this is adverbial, so we're going to go ahead and show it like this with. And just by using these lines, we're able to show the relationship of these words to the main elements, the principal elements in this sentence. Now, it helped us a little bit, in that we're able to avoid all of these labels here, but it really helps with lon

ger statements. So I had two statements here that I'd like you to take a look at. The first one could be pretty well-known to many of you. It is the opening line to Pride and Prejudice. And it reads this. "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of good fortune, must be in want of a wife." Now, if we were going to label it using the markings, that would get pretty messy in a hurry. But you can see in the diagram here that I've created, we can absolutely see the rel

ationship of these words and phrases and clauses all together. And you can actually see what Austen is trying to do here in this sentence. Now, she opens up this well-known opening line with an "it is" construction, which typically we think as a pretty weak construction. But here we have Austen actually doing it on purpose. Rather than saying that, "A single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife is a truth universally acknowledged," what she does is she begins with the "I

t." In other words, she's using this grammatical construction in order to delay the information, in order to build anticipation of what this truth actually is. So she identifies that there is a truth coming and then gives it after in order to build up the anticipation. The next example is a well-known amendment to the US Constitution. "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." I'm sure we've

seen this many, many times. But when you're able to analyze it grammatically, you can see the relationship of the statement, or this one statement and the elements within it. In this construction here, the opening element, "A well regulated militia," is actually a thing called the nominative absolute, which is a thing that we use in the English language in order to lay down the foundation before we have the independent clause, "right shall be infringed." But you can also see that the relationshi

p between these two structures, there is not a line connecting them. In fact, you could take this statement and turn it into an adverb clause-- "Because a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people." But wouldn't it be interesting to have a conversation about what is actually going on in this amendment from a grammatical point of view? There are two other approaches that I'd like to talk to you about in terms of teaching English grammar. The thir

d one is editing-- in other words, taking language and moving the parts of the language around or taking existing language and trying to find errors in it. So in the sentence that we already had from Robert Louis Stevenson, "I held the trunk with both my hands," I might give the students a statement with an error in it. "I held the trunk tight with both my hands." Now, the word "tight" is an error, and I would expect my students to identify that as an error. "Tight" is an adjective. What we need

there is an adverb. So they should be able to modify it and say, "I held the trunk tightly with both my hands." In terms of transformation, we could actually take Stevenson's statement here and move this adverbial prepositional phrase to the beginning of the sentence. Grammatically, it is still correct, but it changes the language just a little bit. So we could say something like this. "With both my hands," comma, "I held the trunk." This is a way of allowing students to transform the language,

still keeping it grammatically correct. But they're able to move it around, to play with the language. And actually, this helps students when they do write on their own, so that their language is not always of the same structure. So allowing students to transform language using grammar is a wonderful activity. The last method that I would like to talk to you about is exposure to rich language. Now, what I mean by that is I think that it's well worthwhile giving students examples of quality lang

uage. So the first three activities here were much more explicit, allowing students to manipulate language or to identify or to label or to show relationships, to look at specific pieces of language in a very explicit way. But what I'm talking about here is much more of an implicit approach to language instruction. In other words, allowing students to experience that language through things like this, reading aloud to students great literature. This is not having them analyze it-- what we did up

here-- but just allowing them to experience that, large quantities of quality language in great literature. I also think that students' understanding of language can be improved by asking them to memorize language-- great speeches, great poetry-- having that language in their minds, asking them to memorize it, and to recite it, and to review it. Those are the patterns of language that you can teach in an explicit way, but implicitly they're able to acquire these great pieces of language. So ove

r the course of my lecture, I've tried to explain what happened to grammar instruction in education. And I would argue it needs to come back, and we need to have a recovery of explicit grammar instruction. I've also tried to identify when grammar should be taught and that the upper elementary grades are a wonderful time. Kids are primed and ready to acquire an understanding of English grammar. I've also tried to argue that if students have this understanding of grammar, they will have a greater

appreciation for the past, and they will be able to enter into that tradition and be able to continue that great tradition. And then I also have tried to offer a variety of activities showing how grammar should be taught. And it should be taught both explicitly and implicitly through the approaches that I identified. So I hope you've enjoyed this discussion of English grammar. And hopefully you'll have a greater appreciation for why grammar is essential, and I hope you learned something along th

e way. [MUSIC PLAYING]