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.