The authors combine a self-reflection on how grammatical instruction can be used to reinforce institutional hierarchies at several levels with a close analysis of the words preservice students use to respond to perceived student errors to demonstrate how grammatical instruction remains a locus of power and control in English instruction at any level. Briggs and Pailliotet study undergraduate preservice students' responses to student errors on a test. Despite at least two semesters of writing courses taught from a process or postprocess approach to language conventions, these preservice students overwhelmingly linked usage errors with student incompetence and carelessness and did not focus on the cognitive aspects of these errors. While these responses were frustrating in light of the exam's wording and these preservice students' class work, Briggs and Pailliotet were not surprised because of the institutional and cultural responses to language conventions. Further, the authors recognize that they participate in linking grammar and power by participating, however reluctantly, in administering and correcting the test. English educators at all levels are encouraged to continue to broaden their approaches to working with students, especially preservice students, on how to address surface-level error and grammatical instruction.
In their analysis of 300 samples of writing from first- and second-year college composition courses across the United States, Connors and Lunsford wanted to identify the most common patterns of student writing errors and the patterns that were marked most consistently by American teachers (397). Topping the list of 54 identified types of errors were spelling (450 errors), no comma after introductory element (138 errors), comma splices (124 errors), and wrong words (102 errors). They found that "what constitutes a serious, markable error var[ies] widely" from teacher to teacher and that "teachers do not seem to mark as many errors as we often think they do" (402). In addition, what constitutes an "error" is largely an individual judgment, the kinds of errors students make may be a result of cultural trends, and students are probably not making any more errors in their writing than they did decades ago.
The analytical study of grammar is of limited value for basic writers, but D'Eloia suggests that other approaches to grammar are useful. Basic writing instructors benefit from grammatical expertise since it gives them tools to identify, explain, and design appropriate exercises for student error. Students benefit when they are taught grammar economically and as part of the writing process. Instructors should use minimal, simple terminology to teach students as much grammar as they need to make standard English predictable. Students should complete grammar exercises that help them transfer abstract principles into the production of correct writing, such as dictation, focused proofreading, paraphrasing, and imitation. A discovery approach, in which students move inductively to grammar rules, can be more helpful, though time consuming. D'Eloia provides sample exercises and a syllabus for teaching the verb phrase.
Gray and Heuser update the survey that Maxine Hairston created for her ground-breaking article, "Not All Errors Are Created Equal: Nonacademic Readers in the Professions Respond to Lapses in Usage." Hairston correctly assumed that readers would consider some errors more egregious than others. To determine what errors would be the most bothersome, Hairston surveyed professionals who were not English teachers. The survey consisted of sixty-six sentences, each with a single mistake. Nonacademics were to choose from the following options: "Does not bother me," "Bothers me a little," or "Bothers me a lot." Gray and Heuser added a "No Error" answer and some grammatically correct sentences to the survey and represented each error by at least two sentences. The survey revealed that respondents were often inconsistent or incorrect in applying grammar rules. Overall, the revised study results suggest that while nonacademics are less bothered by usage errors, the errors that they find most bothersome are still common dialectical features. Gray and Heuser argue for a comprehensive grammar curriculum so that students may learn metalinguistic skills to understand the ways that language usage norms vary among communities.
Harris and Rowan suggest that editing is a complex problem that is perceived as having many steps, especially for basic writers. While such students do not "need to be able to spout grammatical terminology," they do need to "understand fundamental grammatical concepts" to successfully edit their writing (22). Harris and Rowan suggest drawing on "concept learning research"-an approach that focuses on explaining a student's "most frequent misunderstandings" (23). The authors explain and outline in detail four key steps to understand and explain concepts: recalling background knowledge, controlling all the critical features of a concept, recognizing new instances of a concept, and discriminating apparent from real instances of a concept. The authors also make suggestions on how to implement their ideas. They conclude that no one method works for all students and all problems; however, they suggest using a combination of approaches.
To demonstrate how misunderstandings in the debate over grammar instruction have rendered it largely useless for producing effective strategies for teaching writing, Hartwell identifies five definitions of grammar: the arrangement of words, the study of rules about the arrangement and use of words, judgments based on the use and arrangement of words, school grammar, and stylistic grammar. He argues that instructors often confuse the more useful definition of grammar (how language works) with power-imbued definitions of grammar (school rules for writing correctly). Too often, teachers conclude that students are poor writers because they don't know the school rules for writing when, in fact, students often have great command over how language works. Hartwell concludes that our theories and research studies should teach us that student involvement with language is always preferable to any direct instruction on the "rules" of that language.
Citing the long-standing awareness of the limitations of teaching formal grammar to developmental students, Kenkel and Yates propose viewing student errors from a developmental perspective-not as evidence of ignorance or carelessness but as "principled attempts to manage information" (45). Expanding on the earlier work of Charles Fries, Mina Shaughnessy, Patrick Hartwell, Robert De Beaugrande, Rei Noguchi, Charles Coleman, and Eleanor Kutz, Kenkel and Yates suggest that some nonstandard constructions can be explained as students' "difficulty fitting complex ideas into the correspondingly more complex syntactic structures" (39). The authors assert that assignments should be constructed to encourage mature shifting of focus (something that a personal narrative, for example, does not do) and "making explicit comparisons between student texts and mature texts" (46). These types of nonstandard constructions are not performance errors, they contend, cannot be easily self-corrected, and will not disappear after extensive reading and writing.
Lees argues that a social view of proofreading and error explains why basic writers have difficulty correcting their own writing. Joseph Williams's work on the complexities of perceiving error shows that errors are located not in texts or writers but in the reader's experience. Proofreading is not a mechanical process of correcting the physical features of a text but a critical interpretation carried out within a cultural group. Skilled proofreaders use texts to construct meanings that support conventional judgments of literacy. Unsuccessful proofreaders do not possess the interpretive frameworks to organize the features necessary for revealing errors. Errors are flaws in social display that embarrass writers by revealing their imperfect mastery of behaviors considered appropriate in communities they wish to join. Some basic writers have trouble leaving behind their original interpretive community for that of Standard Edited American English and might always need help when editing their work.
Following advice from Rei Noguchi's Grammar and the Teaching of Writing [172], McAlexander implemented a short course in grammar followed by a grammar-checker project and experienced success in her academic assistance composition classes. The project provided a review of the grammar lessons, applied many grammar rules specifically to the students' writing, and taught students the effective use of the grammar checker.
Neuleib and Brosnahan argue that for teachers to use approaches like sentence combining and error analysis in the classroom, the teachers themselves must know grammar better than they currently do. The authors tested twenty-four teacher-certification students in a required upper-level grammar course and found that most of these prospective teachers had had grammar instruction at three or more levels (elementary, junior high, high school, and college) but that few knew grammar as well as they thought they did. Neuleib and Brosnahan attribute this gap in perception to fuzzy definitions of grammar that are not informed by the history of language. To help students edit for grammar, teachers "need to be able to work out exercises of the types illustrated by Shaughnessy and D'Eloia, exercises patterned to individual students' language problems" (118). Better grammar instruction at the teacher-training level will enable teachers to apply grammar instruction effectively in their own classrooms.
See: Sarah D'Eloia, "The Uses-and Limits-of Grammar" [163].
Basic writers are sometimes overly preoccupied with grammatical concerns because they are "trying to send the message that they belong to the academic world they have come to join" (35). Surface-level errors are best approached with students through acknowledging this perspective and working with them on how their texts might fit in best with the expectations of register or genre. Newman posits that teaching language conventions from a perspective that views many usage edicts as based on logic or another language's grammatical rules does students little good; nor does denying the appropriateness of the above-mentioned usage edicts, as so many sociolinguists do. These edicts carry weight because they are based on myth, not science, and the myths of prescriptivism are an attempt to make clear what is not. Instead, instructors may do best by focusing on register variations, approaching tasks with students by working with them to best fit their texts into those already in the genre. In this way, instructors would not just be teaching grammar but would be focused on helping students "acquir[e] a new way of meaning" (38).
Citing a long line of research from anti- and programmarians, Noguchi suggests that writing teachers navigate the middle ground by using grammar in a way that works to improve student writing. This sort of grammar instruction addresses a manageable collection of a select few rules and rubrics based loosely on generative grammar and common-sense editing models that can help writing students help themselves. Noguchi's grammar addresses grammar more as an editing tool than as a generative tool. To further circumvent a reductive traditional approach, Noguchi suggests an editing and revising model based on students' innate and cultural grammatical and syntactic knowledge.
Weaver explains that grammatical concepts taught in isolation have not been effective in improving students' writing. Noting that "students can learn and apply many grammatical concepts without learning to analyze the parts of speech and various other grammatical constructions" (25), Weaver urges the teaching of grammar through example rather than through the memorization of rules. She addresses reasons for teaching grammar and reviews research studies from 1936 forward, providing a tour of research on the efficacy of grammar instruction. Weaver illustrates how English speakers learn complex English grammar without direct instruction, and she posits that errors in writing are "evidence of thinking" and that teachers need strategies that will teach students to "edit effectively" (59). Her recommendations include envisioning the writing process as truly recursive, using editing checklists, and modeling editing. Weaver also argues that editing should be linked to college-level writing, calling for teachers to narrow their focus and concentrate on teaching only those grammatical concepts and terms that are truly necessary for effective editing and revising, and she further advocates setting such an approach in the context of learning theory.
Weaver offers four minilessons for preservice and inservice teachers in a course on grammar or the teaching of grammar. The lessons help teachers view themselves as writers and to model techniques of teaching grammar in context. The first lesson encourages students to include narrative and descriptive details in their writing. The second lesson encourages students to write "I am" poems that metaphorically equate themselves with things that reflect their interests. The third lesson encourages students to identify present-participle phrases, past-participle phrases, and absolute phrases and to use all three of these free modifiers in their writing. The fourth lesson encourages students to find effective examples of absolute constructions in literature and to appreciate absolute constructions as a means of conveying descriptive detail.
In this classic study of response to errors in grammar and usage, Williams explores how educated readers read and react to perceived errors based on the complex interplay of text, reader, and intention. Williams shows how differently texts are read when they are read not for error but for their message. He does this by highlighting passages taken from style guides that break the very rules they posit. He argues that error cannot be defined only as either a violation of a grammatical rule or a breach of social expectations because the significance of an error depends on our response to it. Williams challenges his readers to realize that "if we read any text the way we read freshman essays, we will find many of the same kind of errors we routinely expect to find and therefore do find" (159). Williams discusses the range of responses we have to "errors" that are often lumped together in style guides and common wisdom as "nonstandard," showing how errors that mark class (nonstandard verb forms, for example) provoke much higher negative responses than errors of usage (the use of irregardless, for example).