RATHER THAN TEACHING PRESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR OR LINGUISTICS, NEITHER OF WHICH IS LIKELY TO INCREASE THE ABILITY TO WRITE, SPEAK, OR LEARN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE, THE ENGLISH TEACHER SHOULD GUIDE THE STUDENTS INTO AN INQUIRY ABOUT THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE. SUCH AN INQUIRY WOULD ACKNOWLEDGE THAT LANGUAGE USAGE IS DETERMINED BY THE SOCIAL SITUATION AND THAT…

The meanings of the words grammar and linguistics have undergone a multitude of changes in the last years, but teachers should continue to teach linguistics and formal grammar in the schools. (JH)

This unit is intended to give ninth-grade students a brief survey of the changes in the study of language from the time of the Greeks to the present. Organized to proceed from the teacher's introduction of a subject to class examination and discussion of an excerpt from a grammarian's work, the unit focuses on the belief that a grammarian's…

The approaches of traditional grammar, descriptive linguistics, and generative grammar are largely complementary rather than exclusive. Traditional grammar defines eight parts of speech according to meaning or function and concerns itself almost wholely with the written language. Descriptive linguistics postulates that English has a set of unique…