Functional Grammar--Blog Post #1

Very few English teachers enjoy teaching about grammar. The reasons for this are manifold, but certainly include the following:

1.       We don’t LIKE talking about grammar. Of course, this is in direct contradiction to the view that most non-English teachers have of us as stern grammarians—grammar seems to be the ONLY thing they think we like talking about. But really, we dislike discussing it. We were drawn to the field because we love great writing and big ideas that are well spun out, and while we love robust and well constructed sentences, we like them more in terms of holistic style than we do as a collection of parts.

2.       Grammar smacks of authoritarianism, and we like to think of ourselves as empowering students instead of forcing them to conform. And really, when we speak in terms of correctness, that is exactly what we ask students to do: conform to our definitions of right and wrong and abandon their own. This stance not only contradicts the political and ethical beliefs most of us hold, it flies in the face of much current scholarship that argues for multiple voices/dialects/conversations in the classroom.

3.     We don’t understand it that well. Most of us English teachers acquired our command of standard written English (SWE) rather than learning it explicitly. We read all the time, and many of us came from families whose home dialect was close to SWE, so our explicit learning of grammar consisted mostly of correcting small misunderstandings. As a result, we feel only slightly less baffled than the general public when asked to define a gerund or adverbial clause (or an adverb clause—is there a difference?), and diagramming a sentence looks like something suspiciously close to balancing chemistry equations, which we never really got anyway.

Unfortunately, this means that we apply our considerable fluency with language and theory to craft rationales for why we shouldn’t teach grammar to our students at all (it’s more important to find their voice, it’s de-privileging their home dialect and othering some students, they’ll learn it naturally through reading so I’ll assign lots of reading, etc.). However, at some point, many of us realize that, especially in developmental writing classes, fluency with the grammar of SWE really is one of the key things that marks students and prevents them from doing well on their writing assignments—not just in our classes, but in their others, as well. And since we are committed English teachers, we decide we’d better teach them grammar.

However, this puts us in a bind. All the reasons I’ve listed above are real—they don’t cease to exist just because we’ve decided to teach grammar—and to add to them, we know that ample research has proven as conclusively as research in the humanities can prove anything that traditional grammar instruction just doesn’t work, and in fact can make students WORSE writers due to, for example, less time spent on actual writing and an increase in student confusion (in trying to use commas right, they think too much about it and forget the things they already knew about using commas).

Still, because I have two sections of developmental writing in the fall, I have decided to charge into the breach and try to figure out some research-supported ways to teach my students grammar. And that brings me to my first official blog post:

Fearn, Leif and Nancy Farnan. “When Is a Verb? Using Functional Grammar to Teach Writing.” Journal of Basic Writing 26.1 (2007): 63-87. ProQuest. 19 May 2011. Web.

Fearn and Farnan begin with the premise that we do not naturally understand grammar descriptively, which they connect with traditional list- and skill-based grammar instruction, but functionally, in terms of what different words and groups of words actually do in a sentence. They argue that “the ability to define and identify grammatical elements is not related to writing skills […and] time committed to descriptive and definitional grammar impedes the development of writing skills precisely because time committed to grammar is not available for writing” (64), claims that I have seen many times in other articles. However, Fearn and Farnan write that increased grammatical proficiency will help students perform better in two contexts: they will write better, and they will score higher on high-stakes tests present in most public schools (64). The bulk of the article reports on a study the authors performed on three classes of low-performing (as measured by state proficiency tests) tenth graders.

I had a difficult time pulling from the article a definition of functional grammar that was more specific than that it focused on what words did in sentences rather than on identification and definitions. Much of the authors’ methodology seemed reminiscent of traditional grammar instruction, with a focus on sentence parts. I searched the web and several periodical databases for a better definition of functional grammar, but the term seems to be connected to linguistics, and I found that what I turned up just confused me further, as it seemed to be more theoretically than pedagogically oriented.

The reason I don’t intend to give up, though, is because of the results the authors report. Two classes received functional-grammar lessons for five weeks, and the third received traditional grammar instruction for five weeks. In the functional-grammar sections, students wrote sentences using verbs from a class-generated list. Students also wrote descriptive one-minute freewrites about a teacher-given subject while thinking about verbs. The authors used a similar process to teach about several other grammatical elements. At the end of the five weeks, they holistically scored both the treatment and control classes on writing performance and grammatical ability and compared the results to pre-test scores. The treatment classes significantly outperformed the control class in writing ability and matched or exceeded scores on the grammar tests. The authors write that their instructional method provides “a way to teach grammatical structures that will satisfy high-stakes tests and teachers’ needs, and at the same time […] positively affect writing performance” (77).

These outcomes attract me, especially the promise of improving writing performance. For this reason, my next blog entry will explore pedagogical applications of functional grammar in greater detail. While the article gives enough information for me to replicate the authors’ instructional methods, it does not provide me with enough of a theoretical explanation to feel good about such replication. I would recommend this article to other teachers interested in ways to improve students’ grammatical knowledge and writing ability; however, I would also suggest they pair it with another article that delves into functional grammar in greater depth.