Do grammar students still diagram sentences?
When I was studying language and grammar in school, we learned subjects, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, articles, antecedents, etc. by diagraming sentences. The sentence would be drawn as line, then the words that modify the subject or verb would be added at an angle. The articles, prepositions, and other components of the sentence would then be added to illustrate how the words all worked together to communicate an idea.
I have noticed many questions on this forum from members who have gotten confused on objects, subjects, etc.. I find myself still trying to diagram a sentence before I construct it in Spanish. It is helpful for me to keep track of the components in the sentence.
Was this practice used to teach Spanish? Is this practice still in use?
10 Answers
I took college Spanish classes recently and am convinced that most of the students (whose families spoke Spanish at home) had no idea about grammar or sentence structure.The professor did not bother reviewing it with them, which I think was a mistake.
They were clueless as to what a dependent and independent clause was, so had trouble understanding explanations of subjunctive sentences. They tried to skate by on the tests, hoping their knowledge of verbal Spanish would sustain their grades. And the truth is, they probably all got passing grades. It just didn't matter to them.
It bored me to death to learn structure in elementary school, yet it was vital to writing good stories or compositions. Dogwood, yours is a great question because it is so important (especially with all the highly knowledgeable Spanish grammarians and linguists on this site), to have a basic understanding of sentence structure and terms so one can appreciate their corrections of our questions and submissions.
Ugh!
I took English Transformational Grammar in college. In Spanish, I learned a bit of it (basic sentence structure but not to the extent I learned it in college).
Here's a link that may be of interest to you. Mind you, these rather advanced Grammar studies are for academicians, which I am not. 
Diagraming sentences has fallen out of style in the US education system. This bothers me greatly because as a child it was the only way I ever understood grammar. I was dyslexic and had great difficulty with syntax and understanding grammar. (Perhaps you can see it is still a problem for me.)It would have been impossible for me to pass high school English if it were not for this visual teaching method. My daughter also has the same affliction but when she went to school, the schools were not teaching it. Even in her special ed English classes, her teachers told me that diagraming sentences was not approved by the school board. So it was left for me to teach her. It was the blind leading the blind and I was not able to get the concepts across to her. She studied sign language in high school, which was suggested by the school system, to fulfill her foreign language requirement. In case you don't know American Sign Language has almost no grammar. By the time she graduated she was still having problems picking out the verb in a sentence, her writings were atrocious and she struggled terribly. Because she is bright in all other respects, she was accepted at a very good college where one of her teachers realizing the problem spent three weeks teaching her how to diagram. Well I can't say it cured all her problems, I doubt she will ever be a writer. But she can easily identify past participles and verb units (most Americans have never heard of a verb unit)and her ability to write has improved markedly. Perhaps now she will gain enough confidence to learn Spanish. I don’t know why Diagraming sentences is not an acceptable way to teach grammar. There are many people in the US who speak English well but cannot analyze sentence structure and I would think to have more than one method to teach grammar would be helpful for everyone.
We did at my school - and I H A T E D it.
I love writing and literature though.
I've never done it in English past elementary school, but in my Spanish linguistics class we did with all kinds of sentences.
We still do it at my University. I never had it in high school. but the class is required for the English B.A.
I remember diagramming sentences when I went to school a long, long time ago. I recall that I did not like it very much, probably because it was hard to chisel those lines on the stone tablets back then. Now that we have power tools it would probably be a lot easier.
Now that I have that off my chest, I think diagramming a sentence is a real good idea. If only I could remember how.
I did it a lot in Jr. High in the late 1960's and for some reason I loved it and was good at it. I homeschooled my son (now 20), and his purchased curriculum included, it but he hated it! For me it was like working a challenging puzzle.
I took English Transformational Grammar in college. In Spanish, I learned a bit of it (basic sentence structure but not to the extent I learned it in college).
It's probably fair to say that what you may have learned in this class is a bit different than what is (or was formerly) taught in most elementary or high school English classes.
When most people mention sentence diagramming, they are usually referring, not to a Transformational approach, but to the Reed-Kellogg method (an example of which can be seen in Qfreed's post).
English Transformational Grammar, on the other hand, is a relatively new concept and is built mostly on the ideas of Noam Chomsky and his colleagues. Since the early 50s, the idea of Transformational grammar has been extended and has seen several offshoots. Now, the umbrella term often associated with this theory and its many offshoots is "generative grammar."
It is worth noting that generative grammar differs markedly from the grammar that is traditionally taught in school. Because of this, in respect to the traditional Reed-Kellog method, the procedure for modeling sentence structure using the generative approach (sentence tree model) is often radically different. For the most part, generative tree diagrams focus heavily on X-bar theory, a concept that is generally not taught except in institutions of higher learning.
For comparison, here are two different diagrams using the different methods:
Reed-Kellog:
Generative Approach:
[S [NP [D The ] [N dog ] ] [VP [V ate ] [NP [D the ] [N bone ] ] ] ]
