Ever thought of teaching grammar to your kids?

Some of my thoughts on how I would teacher grammar as a teacher.

Philosophy of Teaching Grammar

I am proud to say that in a classroom that I happened to be in during my practicum, was the classroom I am going to remember forever. The friendly, relaxed environment encouraged students to share their ideas on writing and inspired them to work with each other to make their writing better. The person who made all the difference was, of course, the teacher. Mrs. Allison had it all figured out. She didn’t tell the children to include their adjectives and adverbs, not once! Instead, she encouraged them to write about their summer in the most descriptive and startling language possible. During the writing, she helped write certain words on the word wall and answered students’ questions on punctuation, spelling, etc. I, along with many other teachers are discovering that teaching grammar in context is more effective than teaching it in an isolated environment, because students learn better writing mechanics and will be able to use grammar more effectively in their writing.

Before describing what grammar in context really is, I want to take a look back at history and find out how grammar was taught before now. Grammar was taught as a separate subject from the rest of the world. It is an isolated topic where students learn about punctuation, sentence structure, and spelling. Students practiced their learned skills on random sentences that are designed to help students practice their grammar skills. However, as Constance Weaver mentions in her book Lessons to Share, “...the practice exercises in grammar books are carefully crafted to be relatively easy; they do not give students the opportunity to grasp the critical features of a concept...” [24] After many years of teaching grammar in an isolated environment, teachers have found that the students who had many years of grammar classes still didn’t understand the critical parts of writing and putting sentences together. Because of the way the students were taught, their writing skills lacked significantly.

While being taught in an isolated environment, students are very concerned about punctuation and grammatical issues to the point where they are no longer interested in creative writing. As soon as the teacher reminds them to USE adjectives and adverbs, students are too concentrated on using the correct grammatical words and are not paying much attention to what they are actually writing. In her book, Weaver indicates a teacher Sarah Woltjer, (p.29) who told children to write a descriptive and creative fall poem. After grading the poems she was discouraged because the children didn’t use very descriptive words and their sentences were not smooth in the context of the poems. Sarah was irritated because of the writing that the children produced after so many hours of studying adjectives and adverbs. The students were accustomed to learning grammar in isolation; they couldn’t even construct a poem to flow smoothly.

After much thought, Sarah knew there had to be a change in her teaching style. She decided to have a “feel” for what the season autumn brings. She organized a fun day with the children by playing around with leaves and enjoying the beauty of fall. She told her students to write another fall sense poem and didn’t remind them to include adjectives and adverbs. Instead, she encouraged creative and extraordinary writing. Sarah was impressed by the results. The poems written by the same students were so different! The sentences were creative and written smoothly enough to read with pleasure. The students wrote very descriptive words of how the beauty of fall is so attractive. From this, we now understand that students learn to write their best after experiencing something great and being encouraged to “just” write rather than having been told a hundred times to include the grammar words of the day.

Now that we have looked at creative writing, a big part of the writing should include revising. In fact, most of the writing consists of revising the written work. Revising occurs when a teacher asks the students to rewrite their assignments after correcting the writing. Many times, teachers mark the mistakes on students’ papers and hand it back to them with no follow-up assignments. Now, however, teachers found that the revising process of writing is essential to growing writers. With the teaching-grammar-in-context approach, revising is not taught as a separate subject, it is taught jointly with creative writing. Weaver quotes Renee Callies, “Revising teaches them [students] that mistakes occur naturally in the process, and opportunities to correct those mistakes exist.” She continues, “Revising teaches them how to compose and how to edit...to value good writing, and the process of writing well.” [110] This makes us aware that revising is even a bigger deal than just reordering words and sentences; it gets students prepared to edit their writing thoroughly. It teaches them to edit real sentences instead of the relatively easy sentences we reviewed earlier. That is why it should be required of students to do follow-up revising after turning their assignment in; writing is an ongoing process.

Callies writes about the methods she uses in her classroom that work tremendously for her students. She has a three-step guide to what she does. The first step is to complement the child’s writing and to point out something that sounds good. The second step is to question the things that seem awkward for the teacher. Finally, the third step is to make a general observation of the entire piece. With this process Callies mentions, “I choose to ask questions about content and meaning first, issues more readily apparent to their young eyes, before going on to aspects of grammar.” [111] Students understand revising when the teacher prompts them according to the students’ writing level. For example, if a student has his pronouns wrong, he will learn more from revising if the teacher asks him if the certain sentence sounds OK and lets him figure it out himself. As soon as the child notices the mistake all by himself, he will edit it and will remember to not make that mistake again. The student will also feel successful for specifying his own mistakes.

Along with revising, there are many other methods to get students to learn grammar in the context of writing. The other method is called sentence composing. Don Killgallon writes about sentences in her article Sentence Composing, “All four sentence composing techniques - unscrambling, imitating, combining, and expanding- use literature as a school for writing with a faculty of professional writers.” [181] This method uses professionals’ writing to unscramble by separating single sentences into parts. They use the professionals’ writing for imitating and combining with other words. Also, my favorite part of this method is the expanding method. It gets students to think beyond what the professional author wrote; it requires the student writer to think of his own words to add into the writing of a professional. This method, like other methods are great when it comes to teaching grammar in context. In Notes Toward a New Rhetoric (1967) Francis Christensen said, “It [sentence composing] helps him [student] thread the syntactical mazes of much mature writing, and it gives him insight into the elusive thing we call style.” [181] With this method, It is true that students learn much better writing mechanics, and most importantly, they feel successful.

I was once a student sitting at a desk learning grammar in an isolated environment. I knew how to punctuate and spell; however, I didn’t know how to write. I continued grammar throughout my elementary and middle school experience. When I transferred into a different high school, I had absolutely no idea how to write. I was accustomed to editing random sentences and figuring out where the nouns and verbs are, but didn’t know how to organize my paragraphs, not alone essays. High school was hard on me for the same reason, I didn’t know how to write. My essays in high school had the “fancy” font with the simplest three-body organizational pattern. I remember sitting at my computer thinking about what to write for hours. Luckily, after years in college, I had great instructors who focused on requiring me to re-write my essays. For my instructor, it was very important that I fully understand the construction of each sentence, paragraph, cluster, and essay. She forced me to work hard on my writing and brought me to where I am today. I learned about different ways to cite and punctuate while in the process of writing my final essay. It was definitely a hard experience. As I look back now, I realize that being taught grammar in an isolated environment, for me, was a horrible idea.

That is why my philosophy of teaching grammar is focused on teaching students grammar in context of writing. I believe that my students will learn amazing writing mechanics and will be able to write creatively and willingly. I am looking forward to years of working with students who have a desire to be great writers, a desire to get their ideas out to the rest of the world. I am excited to use the methods of revising and sentence composing with my students. I know that the methods, in the context of writing, will create beautiful writing that is soon to be a part of history.

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