More Grammar to Get Things Done

Daily Lessons for Teaching Grammar in Context

Darren Crovitz, Michelle D. Devereaux

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429514753
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

CO-PUBLISHED BY ROUTLEDGE AND THE NATIONAL COUNCIL OF TEACHERS OF ENGLISH

Complementing Crovitz and Devereaux's successful Grammar to Get Things Done, this book demystifies grammar in context and offers day-by-day guides for teaching ten grammar concepts, giving teachers a model and vocabulary for discussing grammar in real ways with their students. Through applied practice in real-world contexts, the authors explain how to develop students' mastery of grammar and answer difficult questions about usage, demonstrating how grammar acts as a tool for specific purposes in students' lives. Accessibly written and organized, the book provides ten adaptable activity guides for each concept, illustrating instruction from a use-based perspective. Middle and high school preservice and inservice English teachers will gain confidence in their own grammar knowledge and learn how to teach grammar in ways that are uniquely accessible and purposeful for students.

Chapter 1

What Is This Book About?

Since you’re holding a book about how to teach grammar, well, we’re guessing that some of the following statements probably ring true for you.

• There’s something wrong with the way that grammar instruction has been traditionally taught.
• “Teaching grammar in context” makes sense, but it’s harder than it sounds.
• Close study of language concepts should probably be centered on actual examples of language use.
• Monday looms—you need to tackle grammar, and you don’t know how to come at this subject confidently for your students’ benefit.

Let’s talk about each one of these, and how what follows in this book can help you approach grammar and language instruction from a position of principle, intentionality, and confidence.

1. There’s something wrong with the way that grammar instruction has been traditionally taught.

We all know what traditional grammar instruction looks like. See if you recognize this general process:

1. A teacher notices a common issue in student writing: comma splices, noun/pronoun agreement, sentence fragments, or something similar.
2. To address this issue, the teacher plans a targeted grammar lesson, drawing upon grammar and usage resources and reviewing the related rule with students.
3. Students get a set of practice exercises that reinforce the rule, often in the form of a worksheet.
4. Going forward, students correctly apply the rule in formal writing situations.

Steps one through three should sound pretty familiar. Step 4 should not. Let’s change that final one so it matches reality:

• 4. Going forward, students continue to demonstrate the same issue in their writing as they did previously.

If you’ve been a student in American public schools, chances are you’ve experienced this process a number of times. If you’re a teacher, you’ve probably tried it out as well, maybe thinking that with a little extra attention, with a little bit of your own instructional effort and flair, things might turn out differently. Alas, the result is almost always the same. Students don’t seem to take up this kind of stand-alone grammar instruction in any sustained, applied way.¹

1 It’s not all bad news. Students sometimes show improvement in one specific way: they get better at doing isolated grammar exercises (Hillocks, 1986). We’ll leave you to ponder the educational merit of this outcome without any concurrent improvement in writing.

Let’s think about that for a few moments. Research shows that the isolated, teacher-orchestrated mini-lesson described above doesn’t help students become better users of language. We think this is kind of a big deal, and it really calls into question why this approach is still so prevalent in classrooms. Weaver (1996) wrote about this type of grammar instruction 20-plus years ago and provided a dozen reasons why teachers keep going back to it. Here are three reasons we find particularly convincing:

• Traditional grammar lessons look like conventional schoolwork. It’s highly unlikely that a teacher will be admonished—by parents, administrators, or anyone else—for conducting a typical grammar lesson like the one described above. This process actually fits many people’s preconceptions about what an English classroom should look like: students somehow learning how language works through direct instruction of terminology and rules accompanied by drills. It looks like school as we traditionally imagine it.
• Teachers don’t have the confidence or experience to approach grammar another way. This one makes total sense to us because we’ve felt the same way ourselves. Our initial efforts with grammar instruction were superficial rather than thoughtful. Most of the time, we were able to completely avoid grammar instruction if we wanted to. Without preparation and a willingness to try something different, it’s simply safer—and less face it, easier—to stick with what we prefer to teach. Maybe you feel the same right now. We get it. Teachers’ professional lives are forever at the mercy of new demands on their time and initiative. If you didn’t get a firm foundation in your teacher preparation program, grammar instruction can sit on the backburner indefinitely.
• Teachers—most of them, at least—don’t enjoy grammar. Most of us (there are exceptions, of course) didn’t get into teaching for a love of grammar. A deep affinity for books and reading did it for us, followed later by personal epiphanies about the power of writing. If we thought about grammar at all, it was mostly in implicit ways. We recognized good writing when we read it, and sometimes we were even able to produce such prose ourselves. But the nuts and bolts of the language—what grammar concepts are called, the technical rules for their use, the identification and analysis of sentence parts—yeah, not so much. For reasons we explore a little later, grammar hasn’t been a particularly pleasant subject for most people, and that goes for teachers as much as students. Since many English teacher preparation programs don’t spend a great deal of time on how to teach grammatical concepts in a comprehensive and effective way, it’s rare for teachers to have the opportunity to reposition their own perspective and attitudes toward language study.

Let’s move on to the next item on our list of things-you-might-suspect-about-grammar.

2. “Teaching grammar in context” makes sense, but it’s harder than it sounds.

For several decades, teachers have been advised to “teach grammar in context” as an alternative to stand-alone grammar lessons and units. In a nutshell, grammar in context means that we approach grammar as both an integrated component of language arts skills (i.e., reading, writing, speaking, etc.) as well as an important aspect of students’ day-to-day language experiences.

For example, imagine that we’ve created a unit around the theme of civil disobedience. There are obviously a variety of texts—canonical, young adult, informational, current events–related, etc.—that we might use to explore this theme. Likewise, there are many ways for students to show what they’ve learned (i.e., through a traditional literary analysis essay, applied multimodal projects, etc.). The notion of grammar in context means that we’ve also thought of what grammar moves we might purposefully integrate within this unit. That is, what grammar concepts might go well with the theme of civil disobedience? What concepts might we encounter in the texts we’re studying? Perhaps more compellingly, how do concepts of authority, obedience, protest, and conflict resonate in students’ everyday lives, and how might their own language use be leveraged in such explorations?

Maybe the idea of a unit that fully integrates the different subdomains of English language arts is common sense. Shouldn’t we always be weaving reading with writing, analyzing with creating, speaking with listening, viewing with visually representing? And shouldn’t students’ lives be a fertile source for language discussion and analysis?

Well, of course. Yet, the reality of the English classroom is that such harmony often remains an unachieved ideal. There are a lot of potential obstacles to this unified vision (such as scripted curriculum, mandated texts, standardized pacing guides, testing regimes, departmental/school culture, and so on), and making it happen takes added time and effort, especially if it’s not already the norm. When the existing course curricula feels predetermined or already well-established, change is difficult.

“Grammar in context,” then, is really related to integrating the many domains of English language arts. If that larger work has yet to happen—if we haven’t figured out a unifying thread or theme for a unit, or thought about how students might best experience the complexities of that theme; if instead we’re just trying to get through the week, and what’s happening next Monday morning is pretty much a mystery, let alone what’s happening next month—well, “grammar in context” can feel like a tough ask.

Some teachers interpret “grammar in context” narrowly. For example, it may mean discussing a particular grammar concept by pulling a sentence for analysis from a book or a student essay. And while this is certainly a piece of grammar in context, it isn’t the whole story. Alternately, “grammar in context” can mean something like a mini-lesson on whatever grammatical issue I see regularly in student writing, which takes us back to the not-so-effective approach that opens this chapter. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do much good if we just stop there. The call to “teach grammar in context” is only the first step in a much larger project (and our hope is that this book helps you understand and conceptualize that broader work).

3. Close study of language concepts should probably be centered on actual examples of language use.

Focusing on real-world language use may seem sensible. Of course we should use our students’ language and lives in our classrooms! However, when we begin digging into this statement, we realize that this idea is actually contested linguistic terrain, with different camps staking out turf. Questions of language purpose (whose purpose) and language emphasis (which emphasis) take center stage. For example, should we only emphasize traditional language expectations for academic purposes (that is, Standardized English)? Or, instead, should we focus on language in real-life communication situations? Is it possible to do both?

These questions and the arguments around them are difficult to parse and here’s why: we can’t separate language from the people who use it and the places in which it is used. We also can’t ignore the power dynamics bound to language use or the beliefs behind language use. For an easy example, think of language use and social media. People regularly call out others online for unorthodox spelling, syntax, or usage. However, this “calling out” isn’t done as an act of compassion; instead, it’s often about discrediting the grammar offender’s personal views. The act of correcting others online is inevitably wrapped up in power and privilege.²

2 We think this discussion of people, place, power dynamics, and language is so important that we’ve dedicated an entire section to it in Chapter 2.

Beyond questions of which English (or, more appropriately, whose English), real-world examples of language use have a potential pitfall: there’s no answer key at the end of the book. If we use student-created sentences or sentences we find on a billboard or sentences from social media, we have to be our own answer key. And this can be super scary if we’re unsure of our own grammar knowledge. However, take heart—gradations exist. On one extreme, students might create sentences on the spot and immediately examine them for specific grammar moves. But this can be very intimidating for a teacher, as spontaneous language events inevitably mean dealing with a lot of gray areas. If you’re not confident about certain grammar concepts and what they do, this may not be the best place to begin.

Don’t worry. There are other approaches. Rather than handling grammar questions more-or-less randomly as they appear in student writing, we might consider first deciding what grammar concept to focus upon (including why this concept is important to discuss). Then we can locate real examples beforehand, understand the nuances of that grammar move ourselves, and then bring it to the class. Obviously, this version has its own limitations. First, this option takes more time than using an example in a book or something a student just wrote. Second, students may still ask questions you can’t answer. But we think the benefits are worth the trouble. When students understand that language is living, that it is malleable, that it can be used for specific purposes in specific ways, they are learning the skills and tools they’ll need to be powerful players in their worlds, and we think the time and investment toward this is energy well spent.

4. Monday looms—you need to tackle grammar, and you don’t know how to come at this subject confidently for your students’ benefit.

We’ve all had this feeling. And while this book isn’t a perfect solution to the what-to-do-with-grammar-on-Monday-morning blues, we hope that it provides you with some solid models for how to approach specific grammar topics with both confidence and direction. With that in mind, let’s take a look at what this book tries to do.

What This Book Does and How It’s Organized

Chapter 1: We’re here right now. As you can see, we’re looking at some of the reasons you might pick up a grammar instruction book. Within those reasons, we’ve touched on why teaching grammar can be a real challenge—more on that in Chapter 2. Rest assured, we’ll emerge from this discussion with a focus on the positive, as the rest of this book works to make grammar instruction easier and more purposeful.

Chapter 2: We offer some grounding for what we call a “grammar reset.” If we’re going to tackle grammar concepts without repeating the same cycle of frustration and failure, we’ll probably want to rethink some assumptions and clarify a few goals. Doing so helps us establish a base for why we’re doing what we’re doing—a foundation of principle and practicality, if you will—that informs our weekly, daily, and in-the-moment moves with grammar.

Chapter 3: We consider the realities of “grammar in context” in the English language arts classroom. Since the connections between word, sentence level, and paragraph/passage grammatical decisions are vital to the development of meaning, we organize this chapter into three sections: text-based grammar in context, writer-based grammar in context, and specific ideas for what we call reality-based grammar in context.

Chapter 4: This is the heart of the book. In this chapter, we look at ten grammar concepts and provide ten days of activities for each. These plans are anchored on the guiding principles discussed below.

Incremental Growth

One of the more frustrating implications of traditional grammar instruction is the idea that a language deficiency³ can be neatly addressed with direct exposure to formal rules and some practice with those rules. In reality, there’s no “...