More Grammar to Get Things Done
Daily Lessons for Teaching Grammar in Context
Darren Crovitz, Michelle D. Devereaux
- 200 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
More Grammar to Get Things Done
Daily Lessons for Teaching Grammar in Context
Darren Crovitz, Michelle D. Devereaux
About This Book
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.
Frequently asked questions
Information
Chapter 1
What Is This Book About?
- 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.
- A teacher notices a common issue in student writing: comma splices, noun/pronoun agreement, sentence fragments, or something similar.
- To address this issue, the teacher plans a targeted grammar lesson, drawing upon grammar and usage resources and reviewing the related rule with students.
- Students get a set of practice exercises that reinforce the rule, often in the form of a worksheet.
- Going forward, students correctly apply the rule in formal writing situations.
- 4. Going forward, students continue to demonstrate the same issue in their writing as they did previously.
- 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.