In the world of grammar, there are two aspects of structure: form and function. (Okay, there are more than that, but these are the ones that I want to discuss here.) I know I've written about form and function before. Well, here I am again. I have so many students struggling with grammatical form the way it's being presented in schools. I've had elementary school students who are given a sentence and have to label each part of speech in the sentence. And honestly, I'm not sure why they're doing it. It's not helping them write better sentences, and the memorization games are not producing in them an understanding of grammatical structure. To me, this type of activity is akin to having students decode words letter by letter and then wondering why they're not accessing meaning from the words they're "reading."
Form refers to the grammatical label we give a word, phrase, or clause. You probably know the ones we give words as parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc., but form also includes names like appositive phrase and relative clause and prepositional phrase. Grammatical function, on the other hand, refers to how we use words, phrases, and clauses in sentences. In other words, form refers to naming and function refers to using. Which are you more concerned with your student being able to accomplish? Do you want them to name grammatical elements in a sentence, or do you want them to use grammatical elements in a sentence? Maybe you want them to be able to do both. For years, educators have conjoined these two aspects of structure and have prioritized the labeling and naming over the using and doing. That's a bold, kind of blunt statement, but I'm prepared to defend it. First, let me give you an analogy of form and function.
I am not, nor have I ever been, a person who likes mathematics. I just don't really enjoy it. I love numbers. I enjoy learning about finance, statistics, and economics outside of a classroom. But the thought of taking a math class gives me the shudders. Maybe the truth is that as a kid, I just didn't like math classes in school. I had some difficulty with the names of operations and mathematical principles. If you told me at the time to calculate a number ratio or percent change of a certain number, I would've had to look back at my chapter facts to help me out. However, if you would've told me that the new single from Duran Duran was twenty percent off that day, I would've known exactly what I would be paying later that afternoon as I ran to Turtles music store. I knew how to find percent discounts. I didn't always know what the math practices were called. (I will pause here to say that if I'd had a teacher who studied math terms with me using structured inquiry instead of asking me to memorize them, the functions themselves would've made a lot more sense to me.)
Thus it is with grammar lessons today. Students are given lists of grammatical terms and some examples of those terms and are asked to label them in sentences. Now, I'm all for knowing (and more importantly, understanding) the form names. It's good to know why a preposition is called a preposition. Especially when learning a subsequent language, it's important to have something to call the words that you're learning so that you can talk about them. But what is the actual goal of grammar lessons? Is it just to be able to notice forms, or is the ultimate goal that students be able to use words, phrases, and clauses in well-written sentences, paragraphs, essays, and emails? Are some tasks so far removed from the overall goal that they amount to busy work?
I have two high-schoolers I'm teaching right now who both just had lessons on participles and appositives. The lessons were very similar, though the students are separated by about ten U.S. states. For whatever reason, both curricula presented participles and appositive phrases together in the same lessons. Both students had worksheets that contained examples of both forms, and the forms were bolded in the sentences. (e.g. The dog, a Rotweiller, was ferocious-looking.) There was a brief explanation about what each form was, and then the students had to underline either a participle or an appositive phrase in each sentence in an exercise. Both students could label the forms with maybe 75% accuracy.
"So what do you need my help with?" I asked the one out west.
"Well… what are they?" he asked.
"What are appositives?" I asked.
"Yeah, and those other things. The ones that look like verbs."
We studied both words, participle and appositive, and already things were starting to make more sense to the student. Then, I broke up the lesson. Both students had had difficulty in their classes because the forms were taught together. So I chose appositives to start with, while we did participles another day.
"But I'll do you one better," I said. "I'll teach you how to use them. I want you to pick a person, and we'll describe that person."
Both students in their different lessons chose athletes to describe. They gave me some sentences with adjectives (e.g. Ronaldo is fast.) and some with noun complements (e.g. Djokovic is a tennis player). Already, we were able to move more into function. Is this phrase modifying or is it complementing? Then, we took two sentences and turned them into one sentence with first a relative clause and then an appositive.
Here's an example:
John Smoltz played for the Atlanta Braves.
He is a pitcher.
Relative clause:
John Smoltz, who is a pitcher, played for the Atlanta Braves.
Appositive phrase:
John Smoltz, a pitcher, played for the Atlanta Braves.
By the end of each lesson, both students were able to write sentences with appositive phrases. Could they label the phrases? Maybe. I didn't check that. What I know they could do is tell me which noun they wanted to give more information about and put that extra information right next to the noun they were modifying. And instead of only being able to identify and label appositive phrases, they got an understanding of relative clauses as well, in a two-for-one deal.
What if we had our students write more? What if we gave them model sentences with complex structures and taught them to follow the models to better describe what they want to describe? Might that be the overall goal? I know for two of my students, it is. They're old enough to tell me not only what they have difficulty with but also what they want to be able to do. Neither of them said they want to be able to label parts of speech in a sentence with 100% accuracy. Both of them told me they want to be able to take what is in their beautiful minds and put it clearly and creatively on paper so that whoever reads their words understands what they're thinking. In other words, they want to use words to impart meaning. To do that, they have to know how words function. Now, that's a good goal.
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