Summary
Remember high school English? Feel like you went through English grammar classes in a daze? If you felt lost, confused or even cheated, Grammar Today: The New American Language and Grammar Primer will provide some practical language explanations you may have missed.
English teachers, too, may wonder why the grammar they taught failed. "Was it me? Or was it the students?" they asked.
They may have heeded the warning given them by George Hillocks, Jr.: "The study of traditional grammar (i.e., the definition of parts of speech, the parsing of sentences, etc.) has no effect on raising the quality of student writing." Faced with seemingly contradictory tasks - teach no grammar, yet help students learn to speak and write effectively- English teachers (and the books they used) sometimes went too far. And English language learners (ELL) lost out. English students need to know about their language, where it came from, what constitutes its system, that it is constantly changing.
Grammar Today helps clear the muddied waters, explaining grammar, and its relationship to language, where usage fits, and making a clear connection between linguistic information and style, one of the most important reasons for knowing grammar in the first place.
Style can be the catalyst for changing knowing into doing for both teachers and learners. Knowing a variety of styles from which to choose the most effective one for every language situation will enable learners and motivate teachers.
Written by former English teacher Richard Betting, Grammar Today: The New American Language & Grammar Primer. (A Skeptical Press, 2008) Written primarily for language arts teachers and students, the book deconstructs the myth that knowing grammar will almost automatically make students better writers and speakers. It offers an alternative method: putting grammar to work in the form of making stylistic choices.
Along the road to communication competence, both language learners and English teachers will encounter useful information about where English began, what its components are and how they differ in their forms and functions. Grammar Today: The New American Language & Grammar Primer believes that seeing the big communication picture makes understanding the smaller pieces of the language puzzle possible. Linguistic information meets function at the crossroads called style.
About the Author
After forty years of teaching English the author now writes along the Sheyenne River in North Dakota. He began his teaching career in small public schools, where he also directed band and was a principal. As a university professor he taught communication courses, freshman composition and literature. After retiring from full-time teaching, Dr. Betting traveled and taught English as a second language in Ningbo, China, to both middle school and university students. His educational background includes degrees from St. John's University in Collegeville, MN, Marquette University and the University of Northern Colorado. His other books are Hayfield, a novel, and China Diary 2000. The author is currently involved with a local group trying to save a river, a project about which he has also written extensively.
