If you understand and can name all the various parts of speech, you are by now shouting, "What about...?"
My answer is a question. Can the best students in your classes name every part of speech they use? Do they understand the reasons behind their commas, their placement of a helping verb, or why their sentences are not fragments or spliced? My guess is that I should be seeing negative head-shakes or quizzical looks. So, another question; "Why ask students who have difficulty writing good sentence structure have to understand and explain more than those who don't?"
I asked myself, "What do these students really need to do?" And I answered myself, "Write complete sentences."
So, if the goal of grammar classes (at the college level at least) is about remediating sentence mistakes, the focus should be on the rock-bottom minimum necessary to teach those students to write sentence variety.
"What must be in each type of sentence?" Subject and verb (simplest sentence) which fixes most sentence fragments.
"What must a student recognize to form compound sentences?" Two simple sentences each with their subjects and verbs which they then have to successfully marry together with a conjunction (and comma).
"What about complex sentences?" Again, two simple sentences married with either a subordinating or dependent word.
Once the students understand how to find their subjects and verbs, they can write at a level with the rest of the students, sentences correctly written at least 95% of the time. Then it once they have the foundation, it is easy to add upper-stories to their structures, such as comma usage, capitalization, and quotes.
