Conference Notes

I attended and presented at this year's MnCUEW (Minnesota Colleges and Universities English and Writing) conference a few weeks ago, and, of course, presented on grammar. I'm the type of person who needs some sort of script to work (and, generally, divert away) from, so I thought I'd share it below.

Script for Conference Presentation

I’m Kelli Hallsten, English Instructor and CTL coordinator at Lake Superior College in Duluth, where I’ve been teaching since 2005. This presentation is a result of research done for my sabbatical project on grammar. My research includes all kinds of sources: Mina Shaughnessy, Patrick Hartwell, Amy Benjamin, all of my colleagues, elementary and high school teachers, etc. All of it’s been discussed on my blog.

It all started out of my dissatisfaction with how I approach grammar in my Fundamentals of Writing II classes (paragraphs to essays). So, here’s what I’ve done.

Slide One: What I did

1. Skill and Drill: “Sentence Errors Day”:Read the chapter, talk about it, do a practice or two, quiz.
2. Address it in the essays: The concept is a grading criterion, like “The paragraph is free of run-ons, comma splices, and fragments,” worth about 10 percent of the points. Errors are highlighted, points are deleted. The grammar concepts build on each other, so though the grammar is still around 10 percent of the total grade, they are expected to do much more as the semester goes on (avoid sentence errors, correctly use commas, and no misspelled/misused words, for example).

3. Concepts covered:
a. Simple sentence
b. Coordination and subordination
c. Sentence errors
d. Commas and semicolons
e. Misspelled and misused words

Slide Two: Debunking my own practice

From pages 80 and 81 of Engaging Grammar by Amy Benjamin:
“Usage is about context (audience and purpose). Effective language is language that is well
suited to the context. The traditional way to ‘teach’ usage (and it’s usually ineffective) is this…”

Benjamin goes on to describe exactly what I do…skill, drill, and then move on to the next concept.

She then goes on to say…“What is accomplished? Not much.”

From page 150 in Representing the “Other” by Bruce Horner and Min-Zhan Lu:
Bruce Horner suggests that when students look at their “errors" as right and wrong, it
puts them in a position of not having any power over their own writing, “…a position which…also relieves them of responsibility.”

I don’t have to tell you the problems that arise when students don’t take responsibility for their own writing.

Slide Three: Looking forward

Key principles (discovered through my research):
a. Recognize that native speakers have innate knowledge about grammar.
b. Positivity is important. Talk less about errors as problems and more about possibilities.
c. Errors usually have patterns as well as a certain logic behind them.
d. Reading is important.
e. “Play” with language. Set up that playfulness early on in the classroom and give plenty of opportunities for this kind of play, like, “Here’s a sentence: what’s happening in it? This is inspired by readings and put to words well by my colleague Damon Kapke.
f. Students must be empowered. They are the authorities over their own writing, so they need to know what the effects of their choices are on the audience, like using a double-negative reflecting a certain sort of vernacular that may not be acceptable in certain contexts, or a student I had who said that she liked to use fragments for effect, but the fact that she made liberal use of this “effect” only showed a lack of control in her writing.

Slide Four: What’s the plan?

1. Start playfulness early. Spend time looking at sentences at least once a week, if not more, asking them what they see in the sentence.
2. Havestudents get used to writing through journals and other formal assignments, but also have them get used to reading by showing great examples of student and professional writing.
3. Do an activity that shows them that they have the innate knowledge about grammar (see the sheet I handed out for more information on this)
4. When talking about rules (yes, I still think we should talk about rules), talk about them as possibilities, not absolutes.
5. Talk with students about what rules they know and how they might want to see grammar approached in the classroom or graded in their papers, like circling misspellings or correcting them, for example.
6. Bring in technology: direct students to YouTube and other interactive internet sites.
7. Try a guided peer review in which grammar possibilities are discussed as a part of the meaning-making process. This is an opportunity to give writers honest responses that will allow them to make responsible choices, and the teacher can help guide the process.
8. Have individual conferences in which students read their work aloud and change things as they want to, and the teacher acts as a facilitator for that process, asking questions based on the effect of their grammar on the audience the writer has in mind.

What's a conference presentation without a handout? Here was mine...

Hands-on Grammar Approaches for the Classroom

1. From Amy Benjamin, author of Engaging Grammar (page 61): Utilize the first stanza of “Jabberwocky” as a conversation starter that will get at students’ innate knowledge about grammar. Ask them what the lines mean, what the parts of speech are, and how they know these things:
“T’was brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
All mimsy was the borogrove,
And the mome raths outgrabe.”

2. From Karen Busch, English Faculty at Lake Superior College: The website http://www.academicvocabularyexercises.com focuses on academic vocabulary, the agreed-on “academic language” words that ESL students should know. Students frequently know the words on the lists and their meanings (such as “significant”), but they don’t use them on a regular basis. Have students pick five words from each sublist (three sublists at a time), define them, and then use them in a sentence. Then, students should pick out five words and use them to create a
dialogue between people in specific roles (like bartender and drunk or doctor and patient). The results are often funny, and students become more comfortable with the words when using them in an everyday situation.

3. From Bruce Horner in his and Min-Zhan Lu’s book Representing the “Other”: Basic Writers and the Teaching of Basic Writing (pages 158-9): Have class discussions about error—what students think about different types of errors, the conflicting opinions on what constitutes an error, and ideas about how arious types of errors are viewed. Having this conversation gets students to hink about errors and their ability to be negotiated. We may have our own "systems” for correcting error, but maybe we should give some of those decisions up to the students. Horner suggests asking students about how they want us to respond to their writing. This changes our role from teacher to mediator.

4. From Sheila Packa, English Faculty at Lake Superior College: Sheila finds sentences that she loves written by famous authors, like James Baldwin and Virginia Woolfe (who uses almost all coordination of her ideas), and has students look at how they are constructed. She notes that even the greatest writers bend grammar rules and discusses what affect that has on the reader.

5. From Mina Shaughnessy in her book Errors and Expectations (page 131-2): When students are creating sentences, have them build up simple sentences (without adding a completely new sentence). This gives them the chance to understand concepts like adverbs and prepositional phrases before talking terminology. Get students to expand on sentences in certain ways to get them used to possibilities. The opposite is helpful, too—get students to reduce long sentences into basic parts.

6. From YouTube: The Comma Splice Rap (it’ll come up if you search for it) is a short video done by an English teacher. Show it to students to get a laugh and lighten the mood.

7. From Patrick Hartwell’s “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammar” (page 121): Students tend to correct their errors when they read their work aloud…so have them read their work aloud (in a safe space, of course, like an individual conference).

8. From me, the one thing I’ve done that works well: For each major paragraph/essay, I try to have a workshop day in which students are expected to work on their writing. I go around and individually address concerns, often focusing on grammar. The students seem to “get it” much more when I give them individualized instruction.

There's nothing like a conference presentation to help solidify my thoughts on my research!

News from the High School Front

Along the same vein as my earlier post about what happens in a second-grade classroom regarding grammar instruction (http://sentence-level.blogspot.com/2012/03/writing-and-grammar-in-second-grade.html), I bring you another post that focuses on high school.

By now, I wasn't surprised to hear from Kirstin Peterson, 9th grade Advanced English teacher at East High School and Delrae Smith, current 5th grade teacher (who taught 10th grade for seventeen years) at the Esko schools, that a lot of what's done in their classrooms is similar to what we do in our writing classes in college: discuss the concepts, use the concepts in exercises/activities of some sort, and have the students apply those concepts to their own writing.

This is a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it's good to know that we're doing similar things to help provide continuity for the students and building support for the concepts, but on the other hand, it's a little demoralizing to know that what we do with grammar began at the very beginning of our students' schooling, and years later, in college, it frequently hasn't stuck.

I was curious about Ms. Peterson's thoughts about the student transition from high school into college. As college instructors, we have certain expectations for the students who come into our classes, and with the prevalence of developmental writing classes, we have to wonder why they aren't "getting it" (the grammar stuff) in high school. What are the limiting factors to their understanding the grammar instruction? The fatal flaw in that question is that it assumes that grammar is being talked about at all. Ms. Peterson noted that the students who take regular or special ed classes are still working on the comprehension level of reading and writing, which means that grammar instruction is a "bonus" that frequently doesn't get addressed. That's why, in college, we see students who don't see grammar as important, and those students may not have received specific grammar instruction since junior high.

I have two responses to this. First, I'm both surprised and not surprised that a majority of students aren't being taught formal grammar in high school. I'm not surprised because I've seen the evidence in my classes, but I'm surprised because it seems so integral to the process of meaning-making, of understanding language. Second, and to that same end, my research has shown that the most effective way of instructing grammar is to make it a part of the conversation, teaching students at all levels that it is a tool that effects the message they are sending to their readers.

I recognize that reading comprehension is important, but it seems that there could also be some discussion about the types of words the students see, the length of sentences and the effect of that length, and the language that is used and how the reader views that language. After all, those sorts of questions are the start of a grass-roots learning of grammar and audience consideration--and that's something I can build on in my college classes. As Mrs. Smith, the Esko teacher, noted, the greatest value of grammar is that it allows us to talk about language and that there's value in knowing how things work.

Not to throw another wrench in the works, but I was having an anectodal conversation with two other elementary school teachers, and the sixth grade teacher said that she had been attending some trainings on the new Minnesota standards. She told me that the new standards no longer focus on the formal essay; rather, they focus on paragraph-writing. The idea is that a formal essay is not a practical piece of writing--who writes an esssay in real life, anyway?--so it's not important to teach.

TIME OUT for a note: The math I do in my "real life" is no more complicated than long division, but I bet the Minnesota standards go a bit further than that.

TIME IN: If the Minnesota standards change so that they only require a high school graduate to be able to write a decent paragraph, I'm very afraid for the literacy of our population. Of course, I may have misunderstood the teacher I was talking to (perhaps she meant paragraph writing only in elementary school, not junior- or senior high school), but isn't the spirit the same, regardless? Shouldn't we be requiring more of our students, not less?

I would like to see the conversation start earlier with grammar: that it's the stuff of meaning-making and that it's not about technical correctness, but, rather, choices we (hopefully) consciously make to have a certain effect, whether we're writing an email or a creative story or a formal research paper.

Getting off the soap box now (I didn't even realize when I got on it!). The bottom line: just because a student has graduated from high school doesn't mean that they received specific instruction on grammar while in high school, but it's never too late to start.