I don't remember diagramming sentences until I was in 6th or 7th grade. We did "how to write a paper" in 5th, and then it came up when we needed to write one (which was rare). I was a debater in high school, so practiced organizing my thoughts in that, but it wasn't needed in English classes.
I never needed the grammar practice, because my mother was a prescriptive grammarian who corrected me every single time I said something the wrong way. So proper grammar was always what sounded right to me, whereas it sounded wrong to many of my classmates.
A foreign language with more inflections / cases than English uses is a good way to understand English grammar, too. I don't remember how it came up, but I found myself teaching DD a bit of German over the weekend to explain some aspect of English grammar. Although I think I was good at German grammar in large part because I was good at English grammar.
DD is learning about as much grammar in 3rd as I remember having been formally taught at that age. They're working on quotation marks at the moment, from what she's bringing home. And have covered nouns (common and proper), subject and object of a sentence, and pronouns.
I don't remember covering much grammar in English classes, but German and Dutch have helped me quite a bit in this area. German seems to have rigid structuring and different variations of pronouns and verb endings depending on tenses. I remember learning quite a bit more grammar in Germany than in the US, but that might reflect being in primary school versus secondary school...
I was really hoping to hear more from people on this subject!! Especially, since I'm attempting to teach it now and it's not my strong suit. I remember dictation and writing my first report at 5th grade. I also remember diagramming at 10 grade. Diagramming made so much sense, but I only had a small amount in the one grade. When I look back, I see a lack of cohesiveness and follow up from teachers.
Now I see more cohesiveness and follow up with teachers. However, DS needs more structure than what is currently in the public school. I don't think that creative writing will ever be his strength. We are spending time on how to write a paragraph and then an essay. The end product will be that he can write college essays without difficulty. This may change as we get closer to college and as he evolves.
I wonder if the lack of grammar in our country stems from the lack of learning multiple languages as well? There is a lot of grammar now that we've added another language.
It's interesting what I see now with DS, and this is across the board in all subjects. He say's 'you make me think'. I started him diagramming sentences and I think this is harder than labeling, for him. Perhaps before he was finding the pattern? It's the same thing with word problems from Singapore Math. He really has to think and not just follow the example. It makes me wonder how much some curriculum has lost ground. This not an opinion at this point, just a passing thought to explore.
Thank you for the topic. I hope we hear more from others-
I'm reviewing grammar and punctuation with my two classes of first-year university students this month, and it's been interesting to see what they know, and hear how they learned it. Approximately half claim to have had NO formal grammar training, while the rest can recall spending some time in elementary and middle school learning about parts of speech and basic punctuation. The interesting thing is that nearly all of them (these groups are largely first-language-English-speakers) have assimilated most of the major grammatical conventions and syntactical constructions that they need to know. There are lingering areas of difficulty--comma usage, and catching and correcting sentence fragments give them some trouble. But they can write grammatically-correct prose, even if they can't tell me the difference between an adjective and an adverb (another common difficulty), or distinguish between the subject and the object in the sentence.
The problem at the university level is that what they don't know can start to trip them up: they need to be able to edit their own academic writing, and as the ideas they're trying to express become more complex we often see a kind of regression where students make more frequent errors, but don't know how to identify and catch them. And if we just write "SF" or "pron ref unclear" it's unlikely they'll be able to self-correct.
Ideally, I think, grammar should be reviewed at each level (elementary, middle, high school) as students develop their writing and produce more complex prose texts. But--the crashing but--teaching grammar is really boring; the students' eyes literally glaze over as I explain dangling modifiers. So I think a lot of teachers avoid explicit grammar instruction.
I'm having good luck with online instruction for this. We're using both a proprietary and an open-access site for first-years. Each has piles of grammar exercises, and offers good advice and explanations as students proceed through diagnostic and development exercises. I suspect that online instruction will be more and more useful in this area.
Let me start by saying the unthinkable: I LOVE GRAMMAR! I like how concrete it is, allowing you to see the right ways and wrong ways to speak/write.
The best teacher of my entire school career was my seventh and eighth grade English teacher. He threw away our text books and (literally) handwrote his own, a few pages at a time, copied them on the school's ditto machine **oh, the smell of ditto copies!** and we put them in binders to make our own books. The following year, he paid out of his own pocket to have them professionally typed and copied.
We learned definititions of 70-something parts of speech, and had one-on-one oral exams with the teacher several times per year during which we were expected to know the definitions verbatim. He even tested us our first week back to school after summer vacation in 8th grade. We learned to diagram sentences. Eventually, we analzyed grammatical structure of various pieces of literature.
I don't know whether my interest in grammar would have come anyway, or whether I responded to this teacher's passion and very high expectations. He obviously placed importance on us and the content. He worked very hard and expected us to do the same. No slackers allowed. AND WE HAD A GREAT TIME IN HIS CLASS, so it can be done!
I think it's vital for children to learn the rules of grammar, and I think not knowing them is a great disadvantage, like not knowing your math facts when you're trying to do calculus.
I find it unfortunate to see how many people I encounter in work and social life who have no grasp of basic grammar. It can really make a person seem less intelligent and knowledgeable than he/she really is. I think it's like having a clean house. Nobody really notices when it's clean, but if it's messy, people have a hard time seeing past it.
I enjoyed my trip down memory lane on this one. DC's school focuses on grammar in 7th/8th grade. In fact, the English teacher for that grade has been at the school for 40 years, and I run into people all the time who say he was their best teacher, and how much they learned from him. Unfortunately, he'll be retiring before my kids get there. Hopefully, they'll find someone equally as great.
Sorry I got off on a tangent. I think I'll go rummage through my stuff and find that old binder again.
Yes, I was thinking along these lines recently with DS8's reading and writing work at school. We diagrammed sentences in 4th grade--I remember because I know which teacher started us on it! I don't think they do that anymore, and it's a shame and a disgrace. As good as our schools here are, their writing and language program is the weakest link; it's still ahead of the state, but not stellar. I may have to do some diagramming homeschooling here.
My homeschooled 12 year old son is in a one hour a week 7th-9th grade writing composition class this year. His only grammar training before this class came from occasionally doing some free online grammar exercises and games. I think he picked up a lot of grammar rules just by reading a lot, the same way he picked up spelling without really working on that except for practicing for the state spelling bee one year.
In her one hour with her students, the teacher assigns a warm-up writing exercise that has to be at least a paragraph, and then before my son can finish writing that, she goes over two or three pages of grammar rules and examples that she writes on the board and are to be copied by the students. She gives them at least seven sheets of grammar exercises and a creative writing assignment (must be at least one page) that are due the next week. The writing assignment includes circling all simple subjects and predicates or whatever the main grammar lesson for the day was. She is supposed to be preparing the kids for college level writing. My son is not the only smart kid in the class and I think this is so good for him, but...his grammar is one of the things that already made him seem different, in addition to his use of a higher level vocabulary than most of the adults where we live. I think ending a sentence with a preposition is okay sometimes, for example "What room are you in?" or "What are you looking for?" Is it really better to be grammatically correct in every day conversation?
My son watched Schoolhouse Rock videos and played Schoolhouse Rock computer games before he started kindergarten, so that might be where he learned most of his grammar.
This is a great thread. DS5 has pretty sharp language skills, but mostly because of imitation of, and corrections by, us. I want him to have technical knowledge of languages he speaks and writes, just as much as facility. I suspect that a lot of U.S. schoolchildren these days may get more rigorous instruction on syntax and grammar in foreign-language classes than in English, although I guess with immersion-style teaching that may not be true.
I am volunteering at DD public school, so we can work in the library or do reading for children from non English speaking homes. The training was fantastic. It was interesting the things this lady brought up about the lack of grammatical knowledge of children. She says you have to teach your kids (and we were talking K-5 grades) what a noun is, etc. She told us to ask the child we were reading with, what is the noun in the sentence, what is the adjective. She said kids don't know.
It was also interesting that kids today lack a lot of common vocabulary. She told us to ask them the title of the book, and they don't know title, only the "name of the book",
In the striving for creative, problem solving, we lost the basics.
Learning english is not a typical... if u have good books and excellent way of learning.. you can improve your english through the conversation with each other...
All of my grammar instruction came from foreign language classes. I was born and educated in the US and cannot remember a single grammar lesson. We did learn to edit essays and correct our mistakes in 8th grade. I thought it was fascinating that there was a whole shorthand language for "make a new paragraph here." But before that? Nothing.
I believe I could have made it all through college and through my teacher credentialing program without learning the difference between a direct and indirect object if I hadn't studied Russian.