What are you feelings about grammar? Unimportant? Important? The foundation of civilization? And what are your feelings about how grammar should be taught? Drill and kill? Sentence diagraming? Lots of red ink from the teacher? (about 400 words)
I remember my parents' being consistently strict about grammar when I was a kid. Years later, too, even nowadays, I'll hear them harp about someone using "poor grammar" that drives them crazy. For example, my mom's mentioned a couple times this year alone that she hates hearing people use "at" at the end of a sentence, such as, "Where's it at?" Though the "offense" is a dangling preposition, she doesn't see that we commit this "sin" in America all the time, from The New York Times down to the local union hall, with phrases like, "What channel's it on?" Yet no one's rankled by this.
My friends have similar pet peeves about grammar. I suppose we all do. Personally, I find I'm almost entirely resilient to such "abuses" after years of teaching entry level ESL. I learned through teaching grammar that the English language is damned quirky, plus it's in constant flux; so what was verboten forty years ago is de riguer today. Does anyone beside English teachers use "fewer than" instead of "less than" for countable nouns? Seems to me most folks are content saying, "The Express Lane is for ten items or less." OK, I take it back. Some phrases do rub me the wrong way.
As an ESL teacher, my grammar Bible was the three-volume series by Mary Azar. Any time my students had a tough grammar question, any time I was perplexed myself, Mother Mary comforted me. It was Azar who clarified the difference between formal English, with its prescriptive grammar, and the more casual conversational English, with its descriptive grammar. The former grammar stands in the middle of the intersection directing traffic like a cop. The latter is the linguist/ethnographer under the bleachers, listening and grinning at the reality of American speech, jotting down notes for the next edition of The Redneck Dictionary.
While my turning a"blind eye" to entry level ESL errors served a purpose, that approach won't cut it when tutoring college level comp students. Now I'll have to step out on the tightrope and balance myself on tiptoe, mindful of global grammar issues worth a mini-lesson on one hand, and careful to offer advice only when the moment presents itself.
For example, my current two tutees both need more development on the structural side of things. For now, there's no hurry to push grammar. After a week or two of broader strokes, after I've built some solid rapport, I will look over their papers and try to pick the most frequent, most global issues to offer my two cents via mini-lesson, which I'll follow up on with a couple of quick exercises for them to practice what they've learned. Then I'll have them explain the grammar point. Additionally, I think it will be good for them to keep a log of certain grammar points we cover. This is fully in keeping with the concept of context-rich acquisition, since I'll be explaining a point when it comes up, while it's of interest, and not later, out of context.
Sentence diagramming strikes me as far too "mental" an activity. I'd like to keep things as simple and organic as possible. So far as red marking goes, according to the research of Ferris and Bates, error marking with red ink, though it appears we've mortally wounded the tutee's paper, is generally deemed totally acceptable by students; ink color in such studies was found to be a non-issue. Still, for the above reasons, I prefer a bold BLUE tint. What's more important in error marking is to limit the focus to the most global and the most frequent issues, and to explain my markings, since most students tend to be baffled by teachers' scratches.
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