In Apposition of English

In my ENG 621 class the other day, we (the graduate students) were presented with some of the exercises that ENG 100 students are sometimes made to do, just so, I suppose, we can get a feel not only for what kind of exericises work for the basic writing student, but to also put us in their shoes. During one of the exercises where we were to construct a paragraph using popsicle sticks instead of words, we were told to include such things as introductory phrases, complete sentences, exclamatory phrases, prepositions, commas, periods, and a couple of appositives. That last one brought about what could only be described as a cloud of confusion for some of the graduate students. Listening closely, one could hear many murmuring voices asking each other, back and forth, "What's an appositive?" Myself included.

This brought up an issue for me. How can we expect a basic writing student to understand and point out such things as an appositive in a sentence when it would seem some (or maybe most) graduate students could not do the same thing?

Yet, for myself as least, once I was able to get home and look up the definition for the word, I found out that, yes, I did know what an appositive was, I had just never heard of it being called an appositive before. In fact, I had never heard any technical word for it before.

Here's what www.dictionary.com has listed for "apposition" (since appositive only means the use of an apposition) - "a syntactic relation between expressions, usually consecutive, that have the same function and the same relation to other elements in the sentence, the second expression identifying or supplementing the first. In Washington, our first president, the phrase our first president is in apposition with Washington."

Since that class period, I've been wondering about the use of technical jargon that we sometimes feel we have to use to talk about these conecepts of grammar and language. Or, more precisely, should we be using this technical jargon at all? I can only imagine the frustration that a basic writer must feel when being told to find an appositive (or any other fancy technical mumbo-jumbo) in a sentence, when some graduate English students have trouble finding it too. But what can be done? Should we start teaching this technical grammatical jargon in early childhood so first graders can go home spouting about the proper use of a prepostional phrase or active versus passive voice in the book See Spot Run? Or should we be more apt as teachers to spell out what these words mean, to give the student a graphic representation of what these words stand for so that they can make the connection themselves between these fancy words and their real-life applications to the their writing?