Based on a review of “500 quasi-experimental studies of writing instruction between 1963 and 1983” concentrating on those with strong research design.
I am a Professor of English at the University of Lethbridge, where I teach and conduct research in the Digital Humanities, Digital Cultural Heritage, English Philology, and Book History. You can read more about me by following this link.
My university site (which contains syllabi and the like) can be found by following this link. Most of the non-course related material from that site can be found here.
Textbook companies are teaching classes; colleges charging full tuition. By @GabeKahn http://t.co/FKGsqmxaq0 via @slate Gun nuts’ special privileges: How police treated a dangerous “open carry” zealot http://t.co/YpOl4dDg99 via @Salon @portableant just unsual to see a conversation among DHers discussing it. @portableant @MicroPasts YQL means something different in, well, #yql
It’s a well known issue. One of my research assistants on the Unessay project wrote a blog posting about it: http://dpod.kakelbont.ca/2013/05/23/teaching-grammar/ but it comes up all the time (for more on the Unessay, see: http://dpod.kakelbont.ca/category/research/unessay/
Well, it may have a place. Just not an effective one if your goal is to change anything. The better thing to teach is descriptive syntax rather than prescriptive (I think, anyway: no research I know of on it).
But more importantly, our work with the unessay is showing that basically all “grammar” problems in undergraduate writing are actually genre problems. Students find the whole “undergraduate essay” to be so completely artificial that they write artificially. I’ve been doing blogs for about 5 years and they show basically none of the grammar/style problems you find in “formal essays”; with the unessay, we’ve been experimenting with subverting their generic expectations as well and, with one semester in, it seems to work as well: no style problems, essentially, and no discovery issues.
Last year was the brainstorming year. This year we’re going to try it in production. Here’s the original assignment and then a companion by michael ullyot in Calgary. This year, I’m going to use mine for the first essay, his for the second (or a version of it) and then a formal third essay. http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/Teaching/the-unessay http://ullyot.ucalgaryblogs.ca/2012/10/04/the-unessay/
Descriptive syntax? No one expects a person with a sore back to get better from studying the anatomy of back muscles. You go to physiotherapy and take meds. The physiotherapist knows what he’s doing, but the patients just needs to do her exercises.
I say this as a linguist.
I don’t think your analogy works here, because we are talking about writing instruction. That means that the student/patient is ultimately supposed to know how to self-diagnose problems. So maybe more like somebody being taught first aid or to self-inject with insulin: they are going to have to interact clinically with anatomy and you have two choices for their training. Teach them a process they are simply to repeat without knowing why, or explain the context for the process so they can learn from first principles.
So think about how you might teach CPR: you could just teach the technique (“put your hands here and push up and down; don’t be afraid to push hard”); or you could give some background as to what they are doing and why: “put your hands here and push up and down hard because what you are doing is working the heart muscles and trying to keep the circulation flowing in the absence of the patient’s heart doing it themselves; you need to push hard because otherwise you won’t be helping it pump and a broken rib is far less serious than not getting the heart to pump.”
My gut feeling is that not teaching anything or teaching prescriptive grammar only is like the first method–“do this, don’t do that” (because we say so). Teaching some background (i.e. the descriptive grammar) helps orient the students and, even when the rules have no linguistic basis, it orients them on the anatomy, so to speak.