Teaching English, How To.... Essential Ideas 05

Why don’t students master English grammar? Grammar has been traditionally taught without a clear knowledge of purpose on the part of the teacher or the student. How are students going to use the grammar that they have learned? Traditionally, every year, students learn the parts of speech and the parts of the sentence, including diagramming, without learning how to apply this information to their writing. p. 169.

How can students learn to master grammar—with a sense of purpose? Make the study of grammar problem-centered. Begin with identifying a part of speech or sentence and then turn immediately to chapters dealing with problems involving that part of speech or sentence. In the case of the noun, the problems would be capitalization, formation of plurals and formation of the possessives.
Teachers should also teach mini-lessons on usage problems they encounter in the students’ writing or speaking, like the misuse of “lie” (recline) and “lay” (put or place) or to correct verb usage such as “I should have went to practice” and “I should have ran faster.”
In ten-minute essays, teachers can correct students’ grammatical problems, using the students’ own writing, not textbook exercises. Chapter 9, “Grammar and Composition.”

Showing students how to apply knowledge of grammar to their writing: First, teach grammar and writing concurrently. Second, in ten-minute essays, demonstrate to students how to correct grammar, usage and punctuation problems. Third, teach students to use their textbooks as a reference source to help them correct grammar, usage and punctuation. Make sure students know where to find information in the textbook on problems that you have labeled on their major papers.
Don’t try to teach all grammatical, usage and punctuation problems. In the attempt to teach everything, you will cause students to remember nothing. Emphasize in grammar, for example, significant problems in sentence structure, like dangling modifiers, misplaced modifiers, parallel structure and active/passive voice. Chapter 9, “Grammar and Composition.”

Before teaching any item of grammar, teachers should ask themselves, “Why?” How will students use it? What’s the purpose, for example, of teaching the direct object and the predicate nominative? Emphasize the reason. Students will then remember and apply the grammar you have taught them.

What is the problem with writing as you speak? Writing instructors will often suggest that inexperienced writers try to write as they speak in order to help them relax, increase writing fluency and overcome writer’s block. However, the advice, “write as you speak,” will cause a problem later as students’ writing needs to become more precise. The problem is primarily stylistic. When we speak, we repeat words much too frequently. We can do so without criticism when we speak, but not when we write.
For example, when we speak, we often repeat “there,” “it,” “thing,” and “get.” This habit of repeating words makes our writing wordy and imprecise. The first step in achieving conciseness in writing is to eliminate unnecessarily repeated words.
When you encounter an unnecessarily repeated word, try one of three techniques: 1. Simply drop out one of the words. 2. Try a synonym for one of the repeated words. 3. Rearrange your writing to eliminate one of the words. The best solution, the one that works most often, is usually the third.
Unnecessary repetition of words is one of the most difficult habits for inexperienced writers to overcome. Chapter 9, “Grammar and Composition.”

Are sentence-combining exercises useful? In several ways. Sentence combining exercises help to explain grammatical problems: “Tom is our leading scorer. He is the captain of the team” becomes, when combined, “Tom, our captain, is the leading scorer on the team.” These combined sentences help students understand the punctuation of the appositive, “our captain,” preceded and followed by commas.
In addition, students who practice combining sentences learn how to achieve brevity, variety in sentence structure, sentence flow and understanding of, and solutions to, common sentence problems like the run-on sentence and the sentence fragment. With the sentence fragment, for example, students learn to combine the fragment with either the sentence that precedes or follows it. Finally, students apply sentence combining to their own writing by making the procedure a consistent part of the revise/edit step in the writing process. p. 186.