Instructional Materials on Grammar

A free 86 page self-teaching textbook based on the above method is available. It features clear explanations of grammar concepts, and takes you through a staged approach to sentence structure recognition. There are extensive sentence collections (taken from classic English writers) to use for practice. The textbook also applies these principles to punctuation. Supplemental readings from classic traditional grammar books are included. Please click here for details. Listen to audio files of Supporting Lectures on this Workbook: Lecture 1: Parallelism - Download Lecture 2: Phrases and Clauses - Download Lecture 3: Sentence Structure - Download

In the current state of education, Language Arts teachers who wish to teach grammar are in a quandary.  Because grammar is no longer a systematic part of the curriculum in most school districts, the grammar teacher is faced with students who have no prior knowledge of the subject.  The quandary, then, is to find a lesson that is self-contained, brief, and educationally useful.  I have faced this quandary with my first-year university students for quite a few years now, and suggest the following as just one of many possible ways of dealing with this quandary.

Students today have little recognition of sentence segmentation.  They tend to think of a sentence as an ongoing stream, rather than as an assembly of discretely structured pieces.

Therefore, it is a good beginning in grammar simply to have the students learn to recognize word clusters as specific discrete segments which compose the sentence. Teach them to see that a sentence consists of definite clusters, which are called clauses and phrases.

Each clause and each phrase has its own definite integrity.  It is to some degree a closed unit.

This internal unity can be demonstrated in a few ways, first, by the fact that clauses and phrases function as a closed piece.  If you take an adjectival phrase, for example, it is the phrase as a whole that performs the adjective function.  The phrase is one unit. 

In addition, phrases move around the sentence as one complete piece.  In revising, one inserts, moves or deletes phrases; one doesn’t tear a phrase apart and remove half and leave half in the sentence.

If you can teach students to see the solid clusters within the sentence, that alone is one way out of the quandary of grammar teaching.

In my experience, the three following grammatical structures make for a compact, complete, and self-contained grammar unit:

1)	The prepositional phrase:  it starts on each preposition and continues until the next following noun.  Instruct students to bracket each prepositional phrase.
2)	Clause conjunctions.  These come in two varieties, the kind that produce dependent clauses (by far the majority) and the simpler, more neutral ones that do not create dependency.  Students should underline all clause conjunctions.
3)	Dependent clauses:  these occur whenever a clause is headed by a dependent clause conjunction.  Ask students to put square brackets around dependent clauses.

The following are illustrations of this diagramming system:

Please note the choice of classic authors (Austen, Wells, Blair) for grammar study. Classic authors use a rationalist style that makes for very prominent segmentation. This approach to sentence analysis will take your students from being structurally unaware to being structurally aware. The approach is an excellent precursor to the study of punctuation errors.