I have been working for CCP for almost two years, and my work has been a great experience, not only because I love what I do but because I learn as much, if not more, from my students as they do from me. I am thrilled when I hear, “I finally got it. I see what I’ve got to do.” I am even more delighted when I hear, “I spent four hours writing this essay, and it still does not look right.” And I am depressed when I hear, “I don’t get it. I don’t know what you want from me.” I want to know why some students get it and some do not. Is it they or I? Perhaps it is both of us or perhaps something in between. But in recent days the thought that it is my fault haunts me more and more, possibly because every semester I find myself spending much too much time on presenting grammar. It is not that I plan to teach grammar; I never do. I make plans for teaching reading and writing. Yet, as the semester progresses, I realize I just have to go back to basics. But what if I had an option—to dedicate all the time I spend on presenting grammar to reading and writing? Would I get more students who “got it”? Maybe. That is what I want to investigate.
When I was in the former Soviet Union, I remember my teachers used to tell me that I was good with language. I always knew when to use a comma, semicolon, or dash. I knew the declensions for all parts of speech and could do it in an instant without a single error. I could never confuse an adjective with adverb or noun with pronoun. But I never asked myself, why do I struggle with a pen for several hours trying to write a simple letter to my parents? It was not until I read Hartwell’s article “Grammar, Grammars, and Teaching of Grammar” that I realized that I was never good with my native language. I was only good with linguistic etiquette. I thought that grammar was a language itself. I thought that studying it would help me to become an efficient communicator and improve my language performance. I was mistaken, because investigating grammar and memorizing rules for more than fifteen years did nothing for my writing abilities. Therefore, I want to tell others not to make my mistakes.
To make my case, I turned to Vygotsky, Hartwell, and Chomsky, who helped me see even further why grammar may be irrelevant to writing. However, I am not ready to throw away grammar completely because I want to do more research and investigation. Below is just a preliminary version of my findings; my investigation is far from being complete. And I have no idea what my final thoughts will be after my further studies.
Many people believe that grammar encodes meaning; some claim it to be “a language of art” (Hunter 10). However, in his article “Grammar, Grammars, and Teaching of Grammar” Hartwell claims that for him grammar issues were “settled at least twenty years ago” (183), and instead of teaching it he suggests to “move on to more interesting areas of inquiry” (206). I would rather endorse the latter because it is true that grammar—the kind of grammar that occupied our classrooms for decades and perhaps for centuries—does not improve the students’ abilities to write well. I am afraid that teaching grammar may do the students more harm than good because commitment to rules reduces the language to nothing more than codes and “don’ts” and discourages them from writing. Most importantly, commitment to rules may also eliminate room for creativity.
Creativity means to be free to express oneself in one’s own language and style and, as a result, produce work of imagination and quality. If quality is what counts at the end, then we should place creativity where it belongs—into the hands of a writer. Yet, if we really care about our students (and everybody from politicians to educators say they do), we must consider the social dimensions of creativity. We must also understand that creativity is developmental and a learned skill, which comes from social engagement and dialogue and not from following a given structure. Since grammar is an established structure, it may deprive the students of freedom and imagination and instead teach them to be passive recipients of information. Studying grammar, moreover, may highlight the dissonance between the student’s home environment and school, causing confusion or resistance. If our students spend enormous amounts of time studying the formal patterns in which the words of a language are arranged rather than being invited to read, discuss what they read, and write about it, then, obviously, they digest little about composing and may not even become eloquent writers who produce quality products.
From my own experience of living in the former Soviet Union, I can say that I never became an eloquent writer in my native language, as a result of not having the option to develop creativity. I was exposed to memorizing rules of grammar starting from the first grade and continuing all the way through graduate school. It is mandatory in my native country to introduce children to grammar as early as preschool. One would assume that so many years of studying rules would make me an excellent writer. Unfortunately, I am not. I can still remember some grammatical rules (many, of course, are erased from my memory. What was the point of studying of those rules, if I can no longer explain them?), but I cannot write well because I was never encouraged to write. My experiences tell me already that studying grammar rules was a waste of time because those rules did not provide me with the ability to manipulate language.
In addition, knowing the rules did not reward me with some special authority on how language works. When my son, who is learning my native language now, asks me why masculine nouns in Ukrainian have totally different endings from feminine ones, my answer is “I don’t know; that’s just the way it is.” My ignorance, despite the fact that I studied grammar rules for more that fifteen years, makes me draw an important conclusion—studying grammar might be unproductive. The evidence for this is that many times we find ourselves preaching to our students about dangling modifiers and subject-verb agreement, and yet they leave our classes and go into the next ones still making the same mistakes. On the other hand, if we could expose our students to full participation in the reading and writing processes and dialogues, they would more likely become mature readers and writers. That exposure may give our students an absolute advantage over those who come from other backgrounds, where learning revolves around grammatical rules.
The earliest language experiences may have nothing to do with a formal study of grammar because we have an innate ability for language. So, since we have basic innate language structures, teaching grammar may be irrelevant. Perhaps, we should, indeed, move on to more important areas of inquiry, in Hartwell’s words. And Hartwell is correct when he says that we naturally acquire a “‘rule’ for forming plurals, for we do not memorize the plural of each noun separately” (190). Certainly, not only do we have a “rule” for plurals but for grammatical competence in general, which develops naturally. For example, let us examine for a moment how our children learn to speak. We know that no six-year-old native speaker in the U. S. would use a sentence like, “Don’t have to school go I like when it snows because.” The child would obviously say, “I like when it snows because I don’t have to go to school.” Even though a six-year old child has not been instructed in any grammar rules yet, he or she knows how to use the correct sentence structure. The child makes use of his or her innate knowledge.
Similarly to Hartwell, Vygotsky believes that children participate in the creation of their own knowledge. I found Vygotsky’s theory remarkable because he addresses the grammar issues quite a bit. He believes that grammar develops before reasoning, and that the child “operates with subordinate clauses, with words like because, if, when, and but, long before he really grasps causal, conditional, or temporal relations. He masters syntax of speech before syntax of thought” (87). From his words I can conclude that we master language spontaneously, and we discover it through conversation with others. According to Vygotsky, the child receives “all the elements of his complexes in a ready-made form, from the speech of others” (122). He also thinks that human beings are products of their cultures, and that “the social factor [is] the decisive one in child development” (44). What he is saying is that children learn from interacting with others [emphasis added]. Therefore, he argues: “If left to himself the child would develop only delirious thinking. Reality would never teach him any logic” (53). Vygotsky practically tells us that children master language best when they are engaged in dialogue; subsequently, children “internalize” this dialogue, which becomes inner speech by which they then conduct their own thinking. The implication for me here is that acquiring knowledge may have nothing to do with rules but with participation and verbal communication. If I can make all of my students fully participate, that can become a powerful factor in their writing development—they can build up creativity.
Indeed, creativity comes from conversation within community, what Bruffee calls “normal discourse” (401). Like Vygotsky, Bruffee thinks that students learn the skill of writing within a “community of knowledgeable peers” (401). If that is the case, then we should create the kinds of contexts that stimulate thinking, which could successfully be achieved through collaborative learning. We can create the situations where students work through their ideas on paper. Those ideas may be often disorganized, but it does not mean that messy papers do not involve good reasoning. Under certain circumstances—through multiple drafts, revision, and peer-editing—disorganized essays can be turned into admirable writing pieces. In such classrooms, the students can learn how to correct their grammatical errors. Let us say, for example, that a student continually makes the error of ending sentences with prepositional phrases. If the student practices enough and gets a lot of feedback from his/her peers, then with time such errors will decrease. In other words, the student will have learned the rule and will be able to apply it. Research has shown that a decrease in errors often indicates that the student is in the process of acquiring knowledge. With more experience comes understanding of rules. Thus, do we need to commit ourselves to rules? Do we need to waste hours every semester on grammar instruction if we know from experience that those who are taught strict rules and nothing else develop little or no creativity? Certainly many people question whether we have the knowledge in us and innate ability for language. Some answers to this objection may be found in Chomsky’s concept of generative grammar. Let us see how he develops his grammatical theory:
The theory of grammar is concerned with this question: What is the nature of a person’s knowledge of his language, the knowledge that enables him to make use of language in the normal, creative fashion? A person who knows a language has mastered a system of rules and assigns sound and meaning in a definite way for an infinite class of possible sentences. Each language thus consists (in part) of a certain pairing of sound and meaning over an infinite domain. Of course, the person who knows the language has no consciousness of having mastered these rules or of putting them to use, nor is there any reason to suppose that this knowledge of the rules of language can be brought to consciousness (103-04).
Chomsky makes an important claim—the system of rules is innate, and each of us masters this internal system of grammar without any awareness. Our innate abilities—what Chomsky calls universal grammar—help us to know and understand the sentences we speak and to construct new ones.
According to Chomsky, universal grammar is a system of rules that uses a limited number of words to create an infinite number of sentences. In his words, the grammar of a language generates “an infinite set of ‘structural descriptions,’ each structural description being an abstract object for some sort that determines a particular sound, a particular meaning, and whatever formal properties and configurations serve to mediate the relation between sound and meaning” (104). The author demonstrates his logic in two simple sentences: “John is certain that Bill will leave” and “John is certain to leave” (104). These two sentences are similar in form. Yet, they are different, and we know that because we internalize the rules and later make use of them. We know how to generate such sentences because we have unconsciously “mastered” (104) a system of grammar in “producing these sentences or understanding them when they are produced by others” (104). We cannot really disagree with Chomsky’s generative grammar because linguistic research shows that when children learn language, they do not make any mistakes that would contradict universal grammar’s principles. Instead, the opposite is true, and universal grammar works for every language. Chomsky’s ideas are similar to Vygotsky’s in that Vygotsky is convinced that children initially copy the adults who act as models and gradually calibrate their own conduct in various later contexts. Thus, if Chomsky is correct, humans are, indeed, basically pre-wired to acquire grammar. If they did not possess innate abilities for grammar, they would not be able to communicate. An analogy can be seen in the way children learn how to walk. There are no rules for learning to walk; children just start walking when their bodies become stronger. Perhaps food is the main tool for walking. If food is the main tool for walking, practice, then, is the main tool for writing. To become a writer, a student needs to be fed with exposure—reading—and constant practice. Practice is the key for writing; with practice comes creativity. Practice, not grammar, is the main formula to increase students’ creativity and awareness of language.
So, it seems we know a lot of grammar rules; however, we cannot explain some of them because we have only tacit knowledge. Hartwell talks about tacit knowledge, and he believes that native speakers “show tacit mastery of the conventions of standard English, and that mastery seems to transfer into abstract orthographic knowledge through interaction with print” (202). For example, when I ask my native-born and highly educated husband to tell me how he knows when to use the article “the” or “a,” he can never explain to me how. His answer is always, “I don’t know how; I just know.” Yet, he never makes mistakes with “the” and “a,” in writing or in speaking, which means that he knows the rule. He just cannot articulate it because his knowledge of this rule is tacit. This tacit knowledge operates in subtle ways that we may be unable to control or even feel. The theorist Polanyi argues that we posses practical knowledge in our bodies, and that we “know more than we can tell” (4). Polanyi even demonstrates tacit knowledge with an experiment of people being exposed to shock therapy. All of the people in the experiment learned to forestall the shock by avoiding certain utterances; however, the subjects could not explain how they were doing this. In Polanyi’s words, “Here the subject got to know a practical operation but could not tell how he worked it” (8). This experiment shows that we have unspoken knowledge, which reinforces Hartwell’s theory on “tacit mastery” (202) of the English conventions.
So is tacit knowledge relevant to how one develops creativity in writing? I can draw at least one possible conclusion—because we have tacit knowledge, studying grammar might be a waste of time. If we can rely on knowledge that cannot be put into words, it may make sense to drop some grammar units from our curricula and instead concentrate on the ones that will make our students inventive. This is not to say that students should not be made aware at all of how language operates. Awareness can come from many sources, but grammar instruction may be the least important of those sources.
Grammar is neither language, nor does it create knowledge. Experience creates knowledge, and with it comes understanding of rules. With experience and communication in meaningful contexts, the students can gain new knowledge and find their unique writing voices. The students should write about topics they know. If we want our students to learn something about writing, we must create meaningful assignments for them, assignments with which they feel at home, so they explore their knowledge and learn on their own to apply grammatical rules to their writings.
Exploring ideas in meaningful contexts raises students’ awareness of language. This awareness may lead the students to work on their sentences, paragraphs, and styles and eventually improve their writings and develop distinctive styles. Do I know that for certain? I do not. But I know that language can be viewed as a conversation where a great many people talk at once. And I know that for many practitioners— Dean for example—that is the case:
“As with any learning, the first tries aren’t always wonderful. Some of the sentences sound a little contrived [...] but they improve. If I asked them [students] to tell me the names of the parts of speech or their functions in the sentences they construct, they could not do it. But I think I’m finally to the place in my teaching career where I understand that this doesn’t matter. My students are writing, and they are trying to write more effectively, and they understand how to look at what they read as a model for what they want to say. They know grammar— they just don’t know that they do” (89).
Indeed, Dean does not teach grammar in class; yet, her students are writing. I can see that the author is right every time I watch my students’ work develop and improve.It seems reasonable to me to go beyond grammar and instead spend more time on the kind of writing that provides the opportunity for meaningful experience. I must also add that I am fortunate to have discovered Hartwell because not that long ago I believed in traditional methods of teaching, the kind of teaching that required discipline and control. I, like so many, thought that the mind can only think creatively by understanding the whole and its parts. Reading Hartwell made me dig deeply into many other theorists and realize that writing is not about rules but about finding one’s unique voice of expression. Conventions may often take away one’s uniqueness. We must challenge the kinds of conventions that do not work and learn to foster creativity through dialogue, practice and discovery.
Works Cited
Chomsky, Noam. Language And Mind. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1972.
Polanyi, Michael. Tacit Knowing. Gloucester, MA: Smith, 1983.
Vygotsky, Lev. Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1985.
Works Consulted
Heath, Shirley. Ways with Words. New York: Cambridge Press, 1983.
Hunter, Susan. The Place of Grammar in Writing Instruction. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton, 1995.
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Maintained by Jay Howard,Apr 2005