the worst published material on English grammar by a native
speaker that I have come across
i know my English is very bad.
i dunt know Down Under also need some tuitions,for teachers'
teacher.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23855992-601,00.html
Justine Ferrari, Education writer | June 13,
2008
A TEACHERS' guide to grammar circulated by the
English Teachers Association of Queensland is riddled with basic
errors, leading an internationally respected linguistics professor
to describe it as "the worst published material on English grammar"
he has seen.
A series of articles on grammar published in the ETAQ's journal
intended as a teaching resource is striking for its confusion of
the parts of speech, incorrectly labelling nouns as adjectives,
verbs as adverbs and phrases as verbs.
University of Queensland emeritus
professor Rodney Huddleston, one of the principal authors of The
Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, said it took the
association about one year to correct the errors, and even then it
confined most of the corrections to
its website rather than in the journal and did not republish
the guide.
"These articles contain a huge amount of error, inconsistency
and confusion," he said. "They
constitute, without question, the worst published material on
English grammar by a native speaker that I have come
across.
"(The author) clearly does not know enough about English grammar
in general to take on work of this kind.
"Anyone who analyses 'won't' and 'capable of' as adverbs, 'a
pair' and 'set of' as adjectives, or 'Sam's' as a possessive
pronoun has no business to be preparing a resource on English
grammar for teachers."
The articles, published with the general title Grammar at the
Coalface, were prepared by Lenore Ferguson,
the editor of the ETAQ journal Words'Worth and published over a
series of months last year.
Dr Ferguson printed three examples of the errors in the March
edition, saying they were "the result of the usual mishaps with
work that undergoes several drafts and is proofed and edited by the
original writer".
Last night, she told The Australian the points Professor
Huddleston identified were differences of opinion rather than
mistakes. "They weren't all mistakes as he described but
differences of opinion and that's the way of the world," she said.
Dr Ferguson said Professor Huddleston did not follow traditional
grammar but had invented his own type, called the Cambridge
grammar, which was unique and had reclassified terms, such as
calling prepositions conjunctions.
"It's a totally different perspective and a totally different
way of organising and thinking about language," she said.
Dr Ferguson is an education consultant, a former president of
the association and has worked as a senior education officer for
English in the Queensland Education Department.
A CV included with a paper presented at a conference by Dr
Ferguson says she has taught in primary, secondary and tertiary
institutions and has a long history of involvement in curriculum
development and professional development at state and national
levels.
ETAQ president Garry Collins said the mistakes were "relatively
minor" and the association had published an article on grammar by
Professor Huddleston in the journal and alerted readers through a
newsletter to his longer critiques published on the website.
"Ideally the errors wouldn't have been there but these things
occur in the best-regulated households," he said.
"If coming upon these couple of minor inaccuracies caused
teachers to be having conversations about grammar in staff rooms
then I would see that as not a bad thing."
Mr Collins accused The Australian of reporting educational
issues with a particular slant, representing minority views, and
said highlighting the Words'Worth articles would hamper teachers'
engagement with grammar.
"It would be useful if the paper didn't seize on minority views
but try to report in ways which are relevant to what really does
happen in classrooms," he said.
Professor Huddleston provided The
Australian with a list of 20 defects that summarised the errors in
the ETAQ teachers' guide, which take 10 pages of explanation in his
reply article on the ETAQ website. "A lot of them are very
elementary," he said.
In Dr Ferguson's first article, The Structural Basics, published
in March last year, she says "won't" in the sentence "The small boy
won't eat his lunch" is an adverb when, in fact, it is a verb.
"Sam's" in "Sam's folder" is classified as a possessive pronoun
when it is the possessive form of a proper noun; "what" in "They
saw what lay before them" was called a conjunction but it is a
pronoun; and "a pair" is classified as an adjective instead of a
noun group comprising a determiner "a" and a noun "pair". In the
sentence, "The small boy is capable of eating his lunch", the term
"capable of" is called an adverb when it is not a grammatical unit
of any kind but an adjective followed by a preposition.
Similarly, in "a set of bowls", Dr Ferguson calls "set of" an
adjective when it consists of the noun "set" and preposition
"of".
Syntactic constructions such as "have a peep" are classified as
verbs, while "something" is classified as a pronoun and
"everything" as a noun.
Professor Huddleston said he believed teachers would be
discouraged from reading his corrections because it was described
in the journal as being "complex, requiring readers to have
extensive knowledge of traditional, structural and functional
grammars". It also repeatedly refers to traditional grammar as "his
grammar".
