ABSTRACT
In many ways, the situation for grammar instruction in United States schools is unresolved and, perhaps, not solvable without change in the widely differing world-views of the opposing participants. There have long been reasonable criticisms of traditional school grammar, including a criticism that it does not easily transfer to writing. Attempts to reform it have met with resistance from the public and grassroots professionals. The closest we have come to public acceptance of a reform grammar in the schools was with the structural grammar of the 1950s and early 1960s. It’s worth a close look to see the “perfect storm” that derailed its possibilities. A number of major forces allied against acceptance of that grammar: the Dartmouth initiative and a movement toward “process” approaches in composition away from the product approach that was often seen as formal correction; the replacement of structural grammar by generative/transformational grammar, an approach that proved even less suited to pedagogy than traditional grammar, as the principal linguistic grammar of the time; and political movements of the 1960s and 1970s, which often characterized Standard English as regressive and reactionary and asserted students’ right to their own language. Even progressive educators, though, have not tried to wish grammar entirely away, acknowledging a need for at least minimalist intervention in the service of fluency and correctness. The movement away from formal grammar and toward a “grammar in context” approach has had the unfortunate consequence of diminishing knowledge about language, not just for the public, but for successive generations of teachers as well. In the wider public and in the teaching professions, there seems little acknowledgment that grammar is an inherent aspect of language, deeply tied to meaning and to rhetorical effect. Most of the debate still seems to assume that grammar is inherently formal and primarily concerned with correctness, though the pendulum in linguistics is swinging toward the functional, cognitive side. New understandings of language have the potential for healing the grammar/ writing split, though this healing might require significantly more knowledge about language in the teaching profession and significantly more attention paid to language within the English curriculum.
