ELA-251 English Grammar III
$125.00
The third and last of the English Grammar courses in the CLAA. In 90 lessons, a student in grades 6–8 studies English grammar in its classical form: the accidence of the parts of speech, the formation of words from Latin and Greek, the combinations that make a sentence, and the improvement of style. Based on Arnold’s An English Grammar for Classical Schools.
Description
English Grammar III is the third of three courses in the CLAA English Grammar program. It teaches English grammar in 90 lessons, in the form used in the classical schools.
The course covers the whole subject a third time, and now in the terms a student will meet in Latin and Greek. Nouns are treated with their cases and the relations those cases express. Verbs are treated at length, with their moods and voices. Words themselves are taken apart and their formation from Latin and Greek roots, prefixes, and terminations is shown. A sentence is understood as three kinds of combination, and clauses as accessory sentences serving the parts of speech within them.
Nothing memorized in the earlier courses is set aside. The definitions learned there are taken up in Arnold’s fuller forms.
The twelve parts are:
- Letters and the Parts of Speech
- The Substantive
- The Adjective
- The Pronoun and Its Allies
- The Verb
- The Particles
- The Formation of Words
- The Three Combinations
- Accessory Sentences
- Punctuation
- Parsing and Analysis
- The Improvement of Style
Each lesson is a reading with plain definitions. Each ends with Memory Work: numbered sentences the student memorizes and recites.
Parsing runs through the whole course as a daily discipline, and continues into the analysis of full sentences. The student is also given faulty sentences to correct, so that he learns to see error as well as to state the rule.
The last part is given to style. The student is set to work on passages of English prose, and taught to improve what is loose, obscure, or ill-arranged. This is where grammar passes into composition, and the course ends at that door.
Prosody is not treated here. It is covered in ELA-151 English Grammar II.
The lessons are written for a student of about eleven to fourteen years, and are meant to be read by the student himself.
The arrangement and the doctrine come from Arnold’s An English Grammar for Classical Schools (4th edition, 1848). The lessons are newly written by the Academy.
The course prepares the student for ELA-301 and ELA-302, English Composition, and for the study of Latin.
