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".
