This course will introduce students to the basics of English grammar.  Students will learn how to identify parts of speech, analyze sentences, and recognize the conventions of Standard American English.  This course will prepare students for upper-level coursework in teaching language arts, assessing language development, and linguistic study.

Upon successful completion of the course, each participant should be able to:

• Identify parts of speech
• Parse grammatical slots and their hierarchy of constituents, including heads and attributes
• Describe the status of verb phrases in terms of tense, modality, and aspect
• Employ tree diagrams to parse simple, compound, and complex sentences
• Rearrange statements into yes/no questions, wh-questions, and negative statements
• Understand the structure/effect of active and passive sentences
• Analyze/construct relative clauses and relative clauses that have been reduced to phrases
• Analyze/construct noun clauses, gerunds, and infinitives
• Add nonrestrictive modifiers, absolute phrases, and adverb clauses to sentences

Morenberg, Max. Doing Grammar. 5^th Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. ISBN: 9780199947331

This course meets the following competency as set forth by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. 1.3: how the English language works, including its grammars, semantics, syntax, morphology, phonology, lexicon, history, and dialects.