Language Lessons

One of the biggest tricks to teaching grammar is the terminology. Because everything else so far in Grammar Alive! has been at least reasonable if not pretty darn good, I figured that Chapter 3: Teaching the Language of Grammar was going to be enlightening. Was it? You be the judge.

Though more concepts were covered, the two main ones (that I'm struggling a little bit with, frankly) are that it's easier to talk about words based on their classes rather than whatever part of speech it might be and to talk about sentences based on phrases and clauses.

The three classes are form, frame, and function. FORM is recognizing a word based on its endings, like nouns becoming plural or possessive by adding s's and apostrophes. FRAME is recognizing a word based on what comes before it or after it, like a noun having an article, like, well, "AN article." The "an" is a frame for the noun "article." FUNCTION is how a word acts in a sentence, like a noun acts like a subject or can even sound descriptive, like "the kitty cat purse."

With me so far?

Okay, then, it's also useful to break sentences down based on their phrases and clauses. A PHRASE is a word or group of words that is a unit in a sentence but is NOT a clause (like "The kitty cat purse" is a noun phrase). This is helpful, I think, when discussing how to figure out when a sentence begins and ends. A CLAUSE has a subject and predicate, and I'm sure you already know that there are independent (The dog barked.) and dependent (Because the dog barked...) clauses.

Phew.

Finally, the authors claim that there are only about seven available sentence patterns in English, but those are broken down in Chapter 8, and I'm not quite there yet.

On first blush, the phrase/clause distinction is most useful. I'm not sure (yet) how discussing words based on form/frame/function is helpful, but I'm open to reading about it. Stay tuned for ideas from Chapter 8.

Why'd you have to go and make things so complicated?

A confession:

Though my teachers taught me grammar rules in school (I specifically remember 9th grade English, in which we were asked to learn as many rules as possible for the different parts of speech and the test was to list all the rules out--the more we could remember, the higher our score), my real learning was more grass-roots. I read and wrote a lot naturally, so the rules just came into being rather than something I had to consciously work to figure out.

I first had to teach grammar rules when I was a tutor in college. I remember continually going back to the big filing cabinet to get copies of the sheets that explained comma usage and pronoun-antecedent and, particularly for ELL students, the articles a, an, and the. I started to pick up on things as I was helping other students out.

As a teacher, knowing the rules is especially important. I've utilized textbooks over the years to get a grasp on the rules, and then worked on how I could interpret my understanding of them for the students. Basically, I want what's in my brain to get into the students' brains.

The problem with this, of course, is that this assumes that my brain is somehow superior to the student brain, or at least that the way my brain understands things is the same way that other brains should be able to understand things. Hence my research here.

A critical teaching lesson has been occurring to me in the midst of reading Grammar Alive!. The authors are talking about "traditional" grammar and "current" grammar in Chapter 3, "Teaching the Language of Grammar," and I have to say, the current concepts are throwing me off. I am learning new terminology for things I already know, which is exactly what my students are facing in my classroom. I'm going to discuss these concepts further in upcoming posts, but I want to stress (perhaps mostly for myself, to make me feel better) that it's okay if I'm a little thrown by the new information that's coming at me. It'll help keep me humble--I, too, struggle to pick up what's being put down. And that's okay, because, as Stuart Smalley said on Saturday Night Live, "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me."

Okay, so conjuring Stuart Smalley might be taking things a bit far. But please...be gentle on me, dear reader, as I'm tripping through the new information.

Backing Things Up

In my zeal to read something that gives practical advice about teaching grammar (a tendency that plagued me in grad school, too--in all the reading we did, I always wanted to know HOW I was going to use this information in the classroom), I skipped over a valuable chapter in Grammar Alive! Chapter One looks at three goals for teaching grammar. Again, these are goals that are for secondary teachers that guide the teaching of high school students, but they're relevant to us college folk, too. They are, in my own words, as follows:

1. All students will be able to use Standard English correctly, in both written and spoken form, and recognize when Standard English needs to be used.
The authors hasten to remind the dear readers that Standard English has some grey areas, but it's generally recognized as the type of language one might see in a periodical.

2. All students will be able to recognize, analyze, and use grammar structure and terminology and understand how that structure helps ideas within texts stick together.
It's important for students to understand the basic terminology because it helps students make conscious choices based on a rhetorical strategy. This goal also asks that students apply their knowledge, not just on the day in English class a grammar concept is being discussed, but in other texts and classes.

3. All students will also understand that there are natural variances in language usage and that these variances contribute to the richness of our language but can also be a source of prejudice.
I like this one because it validates students' experiences with language, making grammar a topic that's less about "right" and "wrong" and more about thinking about context and audience. It helps empower students, not drag them down, which hearkens to the ol' "catching more flies with honey than with vinegar" adage. Plus, it allows for what I discussed in my last posting, which is to work with real texts when discussing grammatical concepts rather than using generic examples from textbooks.

Give Me Something to Work With, People!!

Hungry for my first foray into the practical teaching tips that I just know some of the books I got last spring are holding within their pages, I chose the book with the best, slap-me-in-the-face title:

Hello, Brock Haussamen, Amy Benjamin, Martha Kolln, and Rebecca S. Wheeler!

In all seriousness, this book, published by the NCTE, is for elementary, middle, and high school teachers, but the concepts easily apply to teaching grammar in college. It also contains a fabulous quote, found in the Introduction on page xi:

"Grammar is the skunk at the garden party of the language arts."

Ahem. This feels very, very true to me.

As the authors go on to suggest, though teaching grammar has fallen out of favor and has been replaced with process, creativity, and individuality, "grammar does not go away" (xii). Our best bet, according to Chapter Two: Discovering Grammar, is to approach the teaching of grammar in context, utilizing the language of conversation and texts that students will encounter, including newspapers, advertisements, menus, and brochures. Start with what students are familiar with, and they will learn.

I liked three exercises especially. The first is having students create "style guides." This is where they look for patterns within a specific type of text, such as sentence and paragraph length, punctuation choices, and use of contractions or abbreviations (17).

The second is called "comparison/contrast." Students are asked to look at two different texts about the same topic, such as a car ad versus an owner's manual for that car, and note the differences between the two regarding sentence length, tone, etc. Students can also be asked to look at the subject in one genre, such as a Facebook update, and write about that same subject in a different genre, such as a formal letter. This requires students to understand the conventions of both genres, allowing them to "code switch" based on audience expectations (18).

Finally, and this is one that I've used more casually in my classes but may put more concerted effort into in the future, is "postmortems of student writing." This is, you guessed it, looking at examples from students' papers that illustrate style, interesting use of punctuation, or even simple errors and discussing those concepts as a class or in small groups (19).

The beauty of these strategies speaks to one of the issues I have confronted when teaching grammar: the "Who cares?" stares from the students (or sometimes they even say the "Who cares?" aloud--the horror!!). Simply put, students think grammar is boring, and based on how I teach it, why wouldn't they? The authors suggest turning this idea on its head: in fact, students already KNOW grammar. Instead of teaching grammar, we're "teaching...about grammar...hoping to bring them the added confidence and clarity that go with any knowledge that strengthens skills and deepens understanding" (xiii).

Viewed through that lens, there is no wrong grammar, there are just different grammars, and we are tasked with helping students navigate those grammars based on audience expectations (code shifting). Grammar Alive! isn't a misnomer, and I'm intrigued. More to come.

Following the Hunch

I must've had a premonition about this critical thinking stuff. Last spring, I ordered several books to help out this sabbatical project. When they arrived, I set them aside and only recently looked them over. This book was in the stack:

Holy smokes! Teaching Study Strategies in Developmental Education speaks to those higher-order issues that I talked about in my last post. Though the audience for this book seems to be reading and study strategy instructors, because this is about developmental students, I'm in!

Based on the title, it seemed logical to start off with the article "Reading and Learning Strategies: Recommendations for the Twenty-First Century" by Michele L. Simpson, Norman A. Stahl, and Michelle Anderson Francis.* Teachers, don't fall off your chairs when I tell you that Simpson, Stahl, and Anderson Francis suggest that active learning is critical for developmental students. They also say that students will acheive more when they transfer their study skills across disciplines, learning a variety of strategies and how to determine which strategy should be applied to the tasks they will face in other classes (14).

Something that I suspected that was confirmed in this article was about students' beliefs about the learning process, including studying, when they got to college: "...it is not atypical for college freshmen to believe that learning should be easy, completed quickly (i.e., the night before in a cramming session), and should happen to them because of what others do for them (i.e., the professor did not teach me how to solve that problem)" (18). The writers then posit that the most successful students know that the responsibility for their learning lies with themselves and are able to apply useful strategies (18).

Okay, got it. If I can help students to understand that learning new concepts (or, in the case of grammar, old concepts that they didn't get the first or second (third?!) time) can be difficult and therefore requires time and commitment on their parts, that's useful.

The authors also suggest that instructors learn what is happening in the curriculum of other disciplines and to "...teach students to be cue seekers who understand the language and metalanguage of the college curriculum" (20). Okay, so how? Perhaps, as the authors' suggest, by helping students learn how to interpret syllabi and interact professionally with instructors during office hours and how to analyze test questions in other courses to determine how to best answer those questions (20).

Ultimately, we do our best as instructors when we learn about the particular needs of the students who are in our classrooms and, based on that information, change how we deliver the material (25). Monitoring what our students are learning throughout the semester is important, too. The authors suggest that students could write about their own experiences with education at the start of the semester and continue to reflect on their college coursework in journals throughout the rest of the semester (26).

So, folks, there you have it. Get students actively involved in not just the subject matter of the course (like comma usage), but also help them understand why it's important to learn and the usefulness of the concept beyond that day in class. We'd also do well to encourage our students, as the concepts won't necessarily come easily. This is the most critical thing for me to keep in mind, especially with the grammar concepts that I picked up on easily as a kid and now have a harder time teaching.

Above all? It's not just about fragments or the difference between its and it's. It's also about learning how to think.

_____________________

*A note on citation: For these blog entries, I will always introduce the article name and authors as well as including a picture of the text from which the articles came (as appropriate). I will also refer to page numbers. I know that it's not a formal style. This is my blog, though, so I'm the boss.

A Hunch: Study Skills

I was having a conversation about grammar with one of my coworkers in the Paralegal program a few weeks ago, and as we were rolling around ideas about how to effectively teach sentence-level concepts, it occurred to me that my sabbatical research may have less to do with specific teaching strategies for grammar and more about how to teach students to think. After all, my first blog post spoke to the difficulty of teaching the concepts in just sixteen weeks. If that's true, then perhaps this should be more about the bigger picture: teaching students how to find and fix their errors when they come up, not teaching students how to avoid errors altogether (which feels like an insurmountable task, especially with a class of 22 students).

Novel idea, eh? What's interesting about it is that it absolves me from a certain amount of guilt that stems from feeling like I'm not a "good" teacher of these grammar concepts. If I'm teaching students how to think critically about their own writing, they become responsible for their own learning.

On the other hand, it also makes me think that I might have been barking up the wrong tree. Have I compounded my research? Perhaps. I can't ignore this new idea about critical thinking, nor would I want to. I won't abandon my initial idea of how to teach grammar, though, either, because I still think there's value in that research and also because, frankly, it's more interesting to me. My new goal? Wedding the two ideas.

Baseline: How I Teach It

In my last post, I discussed the grammar issues I focus on in my developmental writing classes: the simple sentence, coordination/subordination, run-ons and fragments, commas, and misspelled/misused words. The question at hand, then, is how I go about teaching these concepts, which, I confess, is a little scary to write about. Why? Well, considering that the whole point of my sabbatical project stems from an unease about the effectiveness of my techniques, I'm not excited to share said sub-par techniques. Since the first step of solving a problem is admitting that there is, in fact, a problem, though, I'll give it to you straight.

We utilize the text Evergreen: A Guide to Writing with Readings by Susan Fawcett (I neither encourage nor discourage the use of this book), and as the students must buy it, I use it. I assign chapters for students to read and sometimes assign some of the exercises in the book. On "Grammar Day," we discuss the concept, practice, and then quiz.

Let's say we're going to discuss sentence combining using coordination and subordination. We'll talk about each type (coordinating conjunctions, subordinating conjunctions, and conjunctive adverbs), involving me giving examples on the board. Sometimes I've given them a couple of simple sentences to work with (or I have them make up their own simple sentences), and then they practice putting those sentences together in various ways.

One time (and I thought I was being quite clever here), I got two groups of students to come in front of the classroom. Each group got a stack of words (one word per person), and they had to stand in the right order to create two simple sentences. Two people were also periods. Then I assigned other students in the class coordinating and subordinating conjunctions, conjunctive adverbs, commas, and semicolons, and we started combining those two sentences. When I write about it now, it sounds like kind of a good time. I think I only did it twice, though, so it must have been flawed. It may have gotten confusing (if you can imagine).

After the discussion of the concept, we practice. For coordination and subordination, I have students do the following:

Connect the following pairs of sentences by utilizing four of the five different options found on pages 390 and 391. Be sure to add punctuation where necessary and choose the connecting word (coordinating conjunction, subordinating conjunction, or conjunctive adverb) with the meaning that makes the most sense.

This cactus has flourished
I talk to it every day.

The students then share their answers. Once this is done, we have about 25 minutes left (of a 50-minute class), so we move on to the quiz, which is worth 20 points. Depending on the concept, I use quiz questions from the teacher's edition of the book or just make up my own. The questions for the coordination/subordination quiz are like this (note: the directions and question are from the textbook's quiz bank):

Read each pair of simple sentences below to determine the relationship between them. Then join each pair, using the conjunctions or conjunctive adverbs in parentheses at the left. Punctuate correctly.

1. Arthur was anxious about the benefit dinner.

Only twenty people had responded to the invitation.

(because)_______________________________________________________________

I also try to reinforce the skills we talk about by having a specific grading criteria for that concept tied to whatever piece of writing we're working on, so I look for, say, correct coordination and subordination in that piece when I'm grading it. This is problematic, though, because some students try combining sentences more than other students, so a student who successfully combines sentences in a variety of ways gets the same number of points as a student who combines sentences in only one way or, as is sometimes true in a short paragraph, not at all.

The most creative exercise I use when teaching these concepts is the Comma Game. In this activity, students get into six small groups and start at a station (there are six stations total). At the station, I have a folder with a bunch of slips of paper in it and one envelope. The slips of paper are copies of the same sentence. Students need to put commas in the right place(s) in the sentence, and then take the answer key out of the envelope. On the answer key are three different options for comma placement with a letter next to each, like this:

Station Six Answer Key:

D: While some people might find it embarrassing, I actually enjoy dancing, to polkas.

W: While some people, might find it embarrassing I actually enjoy dancing to polkas.

I: While some people might find it embarrassing, I actually enjoy dancing to polkas.

The students need to then pick out which answer matches their answer (or, if their attempt doesn't match any of them, which one on the answer key is correct), and write down the letter on their slip of paper. They go from station to station, putting in commas, figuring out the correct answers and collecting slips. Ultimately, they unscramble their letters to come up with the right word. If they get the correct word, they get all the points, and they lose points based on how many letters they got wrong.

The game is fun--it mixes things up a bit, but it's got one obvious liability: there's inevitably someone in the group who understands commas more innately than the others, and that person becomes the crutch. Do the others in the group learn the concept well enough, then?

In a nutshell (or pretty long blog post), that's what I do to teach the concepts: skill and drill. I'm not saying that these are "bad" techniques. In fact, I've received a good deal of positive feedback from students on my course evaluations regarding their ability to grasp grammar concepts after being in my classes. That's great to hear, of course, but when some of those same comments contain grammatical/mechanical errors, it's clear to me that there is a difference between students feeling comfortable with the concepts and students being able to apply the concepts.

I also want to stress that I have also seen actual student progress in their writing, though I am concerned about the retention of this knowledge and application in other classes. How do I make it stick? Is there a better (read: more effective) way?