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Cobweb Corner
-- The Research Basement
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This area is devoted to
research on natural syntactic development.
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Welcome and Introduction
Welcome to the Research
Basement, otherwise known as Cobweb Corner. I call it that because, although
a lot of English teachers refer to the research that supposedly proves
that teaching grammar is not effective, not very many of those teachers
have looked at the research. Approximately fifteen years ago, when I first
attempted to publish some articles about the teaching of grammar, my articles
were rejected with comments such as "This person is totally unaware of
the research of the last twenty yars." So I decided to study the research.
Almost all of the
research involves time-consuming, statistical analysis of passages of students'
writing. Some of it is very interesting and very good; some of it stinks.
The good stuff is primarily by Kellogg Hunt, Roy O'Donnell, and Walter
Loban. They analyzed passages of students' writing to see if they could
find ways of measuring -- statistically -- the differences between the
writing of young kids and adults. Much of my work is based on theirs. Unfortunately,
some people misused this research and, with comparative pre- and post-test
studies, attempted to prove that teaching grammar is not effective. Their
stuff has had a major harmful effect on the teaching of English for the
last two decades. (For bibliographiesy, click
here. For a long review of the harmful
stuff, click here.)
Unfortunately, the
research by Hunt, O'Donnell, and Loban used transformational concepts which
many teachers do not understand. That, combined with the fact that the
students' writing that they analyzed is not available for review, led me
to want to follow up on their research. In particular, I wanted to see
if and how their approach could be modified such that students, even students
in fifth grade, could participate in such research themselves. But such
research -- on a scale that would convince educators -- is extremely time
consuming. Because I teach five sections of writing each semester, I don't
have a lot of time to devote to it. So I poked along, particularly because
I devoted a lot of time and energy founding Syntax in the Schools,
the newsletter that has now become the official publication of the NCTE
Assembly
for the Teaching of English Grammar. Recently, however, there has been
a lot of discussion, particularly on the NCTE and ATEG list servers, about
the "research that proves that teaching grammar is not effective."
The advent of the
web allows me to respond in some detail to those people (including English
teachers) who claim that research proves that teaching grammar does not
improve students' writing. In the review of the harmful
stuff, I show why their research is invalid. Here, in the Cobweb Corner
of the Research Basement, I will be exploring the many questions involved
in statistical research of natural syntactic development. Although the
Spring 95 project is far from complete, the completed parts show several
things:
the questions and problems involved in such
research;
the questionable validity of the anti-grammar
research; and
the advantages of using the KISS approach.
The completed sections of the project also include
transcripts of students' writing. These transcripts not only enable people
to challenge my work, but they also provide a database for others who wish
to study other aspects of students' writing (such as the use of transitions,
paragraph structure, etc.)
Your comments and
questions are welcome. I will try to answer them as best I can. If you
send me e-mail, there will be less chance of my accidentally deleting it
if you put "Grammar" in the Subject line. I hope you find this corner interesting
and useful.
The Mechanics
of Statistical Syntactic Analysis
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