I’ve been busily interviewing my English colleagues about grammar and how they approach the subject in their classes, which has been both affirming and surprising. One of my colleagues wisely asked me, though, if I thought about asking what the students think about grammar. What a novel idea! I’m now pondering what sort of information I’d want to get from students and how I can ask the questions to illicit the best responses.
In the meantime, I found an article called “How Do Students Feel About Grammar?: The Framework and Its Implications for Teaching and Learning” by Rachel Yarrow from the August 2007 issue of Changing English. In this article, Yarrow starts with something many of our students can relate to. She says that she was “…educated during the 1990s, the period that is now widely spoken of as ‘the time when nobody was taught any grammar’.” I wonder if we’re still in that period—I have many students populating my classes who say that they haven’t written essays before (or haven’t in a LONG time), much less learned formal grammatical constructions.
She goes on, however, to ponder the effectiveness in secondary schools of what’s called “Key Stage 3 Framework for Teaching English.” I initially had no idea what this was, but I was able to figure out that it’s England’s Department of Education’s guidelines and outcomes for teaching English in their elementary and secondary schools. In her words, “It is a very closely-typed document containing mammoth lists of objectives (more than 100 for each of Years 7, 8 and 9) covering a range of skills at Word level, Sentence level, Text level—writing, Text level—reading, and Speaking and Listening.” Sounds fun. (Sarcasm? You be the judge.)
Before returning to the Key Stage 3 Framework in her essay, Yarrow discusses the definition of “grammar,” noting that it has many different definitions. Some are looser, referring to how we understand sentences, and some include the rigidity and “correctness” that is often associated with grammar. Traditionally, the teaching of grammar is actually the teaching of Standard English, resulting in the now cliché “skill and drill.” This fell out of fashion when studies revealed that this teaching style didn’t result in better writing overall and could also teach students arbitrary “rules” (such as those no-no “rules” discussed in my previous posting). Yarrow comes to the triumphant conclusion that grammar should be taught in context and continually to make it meaningful, which isn’t news to a faithful reader of this blog.
Back to the Framework. She wonders how English departments have gone about meeting the objectives spelled out in the Framework. The first approach is what she calls “Objective Cramming,” or having a unit that tries to cover as many objectives as possible over the shortest period of time. A focus group that Yarrow held noted, not surprisingly, that the cramming made it hard for the students to remember the concepts discussed previously.
The second method is “Four Part Lessons.” In this method, each major lesson (class period) would begin with a discussion on a particular grammatical concept. So, students come into class, settle down right away (ahem, okay), and learn about subordination in ten minutes. A myriad of concerns quickly bubble to the surface with this one.
The third method includes “New Equipment and Methodology," things like mini-white boards, online “games,” cards, and other “sets” that can speak to different learning styles. Students like these different tools, but several years later, it became old, literally and figuratively. White boards became shot and new ones weren’t bought. Some of the sets were no longer useful.
The major effect from using Framework is that teachers are pressured to cover a lot in a small period of time, causing them to choose “easier” concepts to discuss, like apostrophes, and avoiding more major concepts, like clauses. The students suffer from this, creating a disjointed feeling. In her focus groups, students had a hard time discussing what it was about grammar that they found confusing, even if they had very recently discussed those concepts in class. Students also felt that grammar should not get in the way of writing and should only become an area of concern later on, when the story was done. Yarrow also noted that a student can do well on grammatical quizzes after discussing concepts, but when that student starts writing, those same concepts fall by the wayside. Finally, she notes something that we could all probably relate to: teachers often comment positively on the creative parts of a student’s writing (what students like about writing) and comment negatively on the grammar (what students dislike). This results in, at best, students having a bad attitude toward grammar and, at worst, students “playing it safe” and not making powerful rhetorical choices with their grammar for fear of getting it “wrong.”
Yarrow found that students actually enjoy doing the “skill and drill” exercises in class, sometimes even becoming competitive with each other about those exercises. I would suppose that this would be true because it’s a more objective view of grammar, a way of proving that they know the rules. The problem, though, is translating that knowledge from the exercises to their own writing.
An exercise that Yarrow used in one of her classrooms was interesting. She had a chocolate egg and asked her students to write a line that would persuade her to give them the egg. Students read their sentences out loud (like “I like chocolate” or “I’m a good student”) and were then asked to improve them. They discussed concepts like “using a rhetorical question, using more emotive adjectives, or changing to the second person,” all grammatical constructs (without calling them such), and she asked her students to rewrite the persuasive sentences using at least one of these constructs. She found that all the students, even those with the lowest ability, were able to improve their statements. She has also found that students improve their grammar when she is able to point out an error in their writing as they are doing the writing to get them to think about it.
Yarrow also makes a great statement that “As teachers...we continue to mark students’ grammar with a zealousness that is disproportionate to the amount of time we devote to teaching it, and so students (especially those of lower ability) become cautious and frustrated.” She also notes, however, that students can indeed enjoy learning about grammar when they see how learning about it makes their writing more powerful, yet another sentiment echoed by other postings on this blog. It’s getting affirmed over and over again, and I need to consider how to go about making students see the power of their grammatical choices.
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