Colloquium on English - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

1. Are all words alike?
2. Since obviously not, what are the kinds of words? (These students had read 1984 including “the
Principles of Newspeak.” They brought this in as one way of defining kinds of words. They then
freely discussed other differences from the number of letters in the word to rhyming possibilities.
They arrived at differences in function)
3. Out of this came another question: What are the differences in function?
4. Where do words occur in relation to each other by function?
5. In what patterns do words occur?
They took three weeks to answer those questions. They came up with four classes of words: 1. labels
and substitutes for labels 2. predicates that show action and that show being 3. pointers that point to labels,
that point to predicates, that point to other pointers 4. connectors. They learned that there is a discoverable
pattern of words in English. “Control words” (subject, predicate, object, or complement) are the least
variable. Pointers are extremely variable in size and location.
They were then delighted to look at the “control words” in “Ode to the West Wind.”
There are many examples that we often overlook in literature that have an exciting relationship to
grammar: finding the subject and verb in the first sentence in “The Prologue” to the Canterbury Tales, for
example, or noticing the effect of the opening paragraph of Brave New World which has no verb.
As part of a review of grammar in Grade 9, I send two scribes to the board and have the students
describe all the things that there are in the room. They eventually include abstract nouns as well. Then I
give them a paragraph from the literature we are reading and have them underline the nouns. Then, working
in groups, I have them discuss how they know the words that they have underlined are nouns. They
come up with all sorts of answers beyond the usual definition of a noun. The position or function in a
sentence, a pattern of suffixes, often preceded by “the”, “a”, or “an”, or an adjective, the words that start
with capitals. It isn’t a radical shift to move to having them discover the “rules” rather than giving them
definitions.
At a Waldorf Grade 12 Conference in 1998, I heard a young man from Green Meadow describe an
experiment in language that he had undertaken as a project out of 1984. He limited himself to three
phrases only in response to all questions asked him for a full week. He was astonished that no one noticed
that his language had been in any way restricted. It was a powerful lesson for him in the general unconscious
way in which language is received. This is discovering language!
7. Syntax through Stylistics: The most successful teaching of grammar in high school seems to be lessons
that are taught in the context of reading or writing using a constructivist approach rather than an errorbased
approach. The difference between the two is summarized by Constance Weaver. An error-based
approach, which she calls “product” or “behavioral”, is a “teaching perspective: to eliminate all errors by
establishing correct, automatic habits; mastery of the target language is the goal.” (Teaching Grammar in
Context. 63) The constructivist or process approach see “errors as a natural part of learning a language”, and
is “a learning perspective: to assist the learner in approximating the target language; support active learning
strategies and recognize that not all errors will disappear.” Weaver’s book is an excellent resource for ways to
teach grammar through such a process approach. Harry Noden’s Image Grammar: Using Grammatical
Structures to Teach Writing was developed in part through working with his wife in a Waldorf Middle School
(in Akron). He helps students develop a “palette” of stylistic devices through finding them in literature and
then trying them out in their own writing. Only after they are familiar with the effect does he apply
terminology. He has developed a remarkable resource, complete with CD and a web site for downloading
examples and exercises which can be customized.
Integrating grammar into literature lessons would promote a “discovery grammar”, starting with
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