Hartwell, Patrick. “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar”

Hartwell, Patrick. “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar” 205—234
“what does experimental research tell us about the value of teaching formal grammar? But seventy-five years of experimental research has for all practical purposes told us nothing” (206).
“Thus we might suspect that the grammar issue is itself embedded in larger models of the transmission of literacy, part of quite different assumptions about the teaching of composition” (208).
What is meant by grammar W. Nelson Francis, quoted by author:
‘the set of formal patterns in which the words of a language are arranged in order to convey larger meanings’ (209).
“In fact, all speakers of a language above the age of five or six know how to use its complex forms of organization with considerable skill; in this sense of the word—call it ‘Grammar 1’—they are thoroughly familiar with its grammar” (209).
‘Grammar 2”—is ‘the branch of linguistic science which is concerned with the description, analysis, and formulization of formal language patterns’ (210).
‘linguistic etiquette. This we may call ‘Grammar 3.’ The word in this sense is often coupled with a derogatory adjective: we say that the expression ‘he ain’t here’ is ‘bad grammar.’
“Criticism of this sort is based on the wholly unproven assumption that teaching Grammar 2 will improve the student’s proficiency in Grammar 1 or improve his manners in Grammar 3” (210).
Grammar 4 the grammar used in schools (211).
“Grammar 5, ‘stylistic grammar,’ defined as ‘grammatical terms used in the interest of teaching prose style’ (211).
“So Grammar 1 is eminently usable knowledge—the way we make our life through language—but it is not accessible knowledge in a profound sense, we do not know that we have it” (212).
Quoting Mark Lester, ‘there simply appears to be no correlation between a writer’s study of language and his ability to write’ (216).
Does this (the fact that we don’t learn to write through learning the mechanics) have something to do with the constant idea that using literature is the way to teach writing? We assume that canonical literature is good in style and grammatically correct—it would make sense. Could we accomplish the same thing by having students read well-written student papers, essays published and unpublished, or any number of other materials?
“Arthur S. Reber, in a classic 1967 experiment, demonstrated that mere exposure to grammatical sentences produced tacit learning: subjects who copied several grammatical sentences performed far above chance in judging the grammaticality of other letter strings” (218).
“R. Scott Baldwin and James M. Coady, studying how readers respond to punctuation signals (“psycholinguistic Approaches to a Theory of Punctuation,” Journal of Reading Behavior, 10 [1978], 363-83), conclude that conventional rules of punctuation are ‘a complete sham’ (p. 375).
“It may simply be that as hyperliterate adults we are conscious of “using rules” when we are in fact doing something else, something far more complex, accessing tacit heuristics honed by print literacy itself. We can clarify this notion by reaching for an acronym coined by technical writers to explain the readability of complex prose—COIK: “clear only if known.” The rules of Grammar 4—no, we can at this point be more honest—the incantations of Grammar 4 are COIK” (221).
We need to. . .”shuck off our hyperliterate perception of the value of formal rules, and to regain the confidence in the tacit power of unconscious knowledge that our theory of language gives us” (223).
“More general research findings suggest a clear relationship between measures of metalinguistic awareness and measures of literacy level (224).
“The analysis here suggests that the causal relationship works the other way, that it is the mastery of written language that increases one’s awareness of language as language” (224).
“Print is a complex cultural code—or better yet, a system of codes—and my bet is that regardless of instruction, one masters those codes from the top down, from pragmatic questions of voice, tone, audience, register, and rhetorical strategy, not from the bottom up, from grammar to usage to fixed forms of organization” (224).
“We might put the matter in the following terms. Writers need to develop skills at two levels. One, broadly rhetorical, involves communication in meaningful contexts (the strategies, registers, and procedures of discourse across a range of modes, audiences, contexts, and purposes). The other, broadly metalinguistic rather than linguistic, involves active manipulation of language with conscious attention to surface form” (225).