Teaching Grammar

What Really Works

Amy Benjamin, Joan Berger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317926801
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

Instill grammar fundamentals using lessons that stick! In this book, authors Amy Benjamin and Joan Berger share procedures for teaching grammar effectively and dynamically, in ways that appeal to students and teachers alike. Ideal for teachers just beginning their work in grammar instruction, this book includes day-by-day units and reproducibles to help them embed grammar lessons into writing instruction.

Using visuals, wordplay, problem solving, and pattern-finding activities, teachers can forgo methods that fail to engage students in grammar. Through a series of activities designed to delve deeper into grammar learning, the authors share strategies that have proven successful during their extensive years of teaching and literacy consulting. Topics include:

• Using time wisely: Assess for cumulative understanding and development of writing style
• The "Verb Map": A visual metaphor of the verb system
• Teaching parts of speech for effective expression, not just memorization
• And more!

Part I

The Fundamental Things Apply

Part One explains how you can teach the building blocks of language, starting with recognition of complete sentences in Chapter 1 and moving on to sentence components and the basic patterns of English sentences in Chapter 2.

Chapter 3 explains how to teach verbs and their modifiers, adverbs. We want students to start organizing their written language around verbs. We use the metaphor of the map of geographical territory to explain the English verb system. This territory has a railroad track dividing its two sections: the action verbs and the linking verbs, along with the helping verbs. By leading students, region by region, through this map, we can give them a gradual but durable understanding about verbs, the nerve center of all sentences.

English grammar is a two-fisted powerhouse. If one fist is the verb, the other is the noun. In Chapter 4, we explain how nouns can be recognized beyond the “person, place, or thing” definition. Furthermore, we show how nouns act as magnets for their modifiers, forming noun phrases and noun clauses. And single nouns as well as nominal groups (nouns plus their modifiers) get replaced (as we say, “gobbled up”) by pronouns. Pronouns, in turn, take their forms (cases) on the basis of their function in the sentence. Chapter 4 also touches on how knowledge about nouns, nominal groups, and pronouns affects reading comprehension.

In Chapter 5, we talk about conjunctions and prepositional phrases, treating both as linking devices.

1

Teaching Recognition of Complete Sentences

“A sentence is a group of words that expresses a complete thought.”

“A sentence has a subject and a predicate.”

“A sentence has a subject and a verb.”

“A run-on sentence is a sentence that goes on and on.”

“You are not allowed to begin a sentence with and, but, so, or because.”

These sound bites about sentences have not been sufficient to help students create, manipulate, control, punctuate, or advance a basic sentence. Let’s first look at why these notions fall short.

While it is true that a sentence is a group of words that expresses a complete thought, the concept of “complete thought” is abstract. Because the back-and-forth of conversation does not require that complete sentences be uttered, students, especially those who are not habitual readers, do not feel the cadence of written sentences. (Of course, much of what children read is dialogue and thus not written with complete sentences anyway.)

When students who are habitual readers do become accustomed to the drop in the voice that ends a declarative sentence, they don’t really need a teacher’s definitions of what a sentence is. For them, the “group of words that expresses a complete thought” definition might seem to work, when in fact they have developed, through reading, an auditory intuition that tells them when a sentence ends. So, of course, the best way to have students get the feel of what a complete (declarative) sentence is would be to promote a lifestyle that includes substantial amounts of reading. Until then, and while teachers are working to make that happen in their communities, they do need explicit strategies that help students recognize unintentional fragments and run-on sentences in their own writing.

Arguably, having students compose complete (declarative) sentences is Job 1 when it comes to grammar instruction. Certainly, they’ve been taught in the early elementary grades what a complete (declarative) sentence is, and they’ve been told to write with complete sentences. Let’s have a look at four rhetorical situations that can be problematical:

Of the four kinds of sentences (declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory), the only one that concerns us, as far as writing complete sentences goes, is the declarative sentence. In our discussion and in the classroom activities, we are talking primarily about declarative sentences.

1.Not all groups of words are expected to be complete sentences. Titles, signs, bits of dialogue, answers to questions, items in a list, entries on a blog, text messages—these are genres of language that do not have to be in complete sentence form. As a teacher, you may take for granted that when you ask students to write something, they know you want complete sentences. But in the student’s world, as in the real world, complete sentences are not always required. If your students are having difficulty adapting to the norms of written expression for academic genres, you may need to take a closer look at those situations that require complete sentences and those that do not. You may need to heighten your own awareness of those times when complete sentences are not expected in writing. Only by acknowledging that there are times when complete sentences are not expected can you clarify for your students the times when they are expected.

2.When students are asked a question orally, they do not necessarily produce a complete sentence in response. However, when you ask students a question calling for a written answer, you do expect a complete sentence in response. You expect the written answer to be different, grammatically, than a spoken answer would be to the same question. For example, you orally ask this question: “Why does Cassius persuade Brutus to join the conspiracy?” A few hands go up. You call on a student. She responds, “Because Brutus had a lot of influence in Rome, and they could never get away with the assassination unless Brutus was in on it.” You would not tell the student that she cannot begin a sentence with because. Yet if the same question appears on a test, you would probably expect the written answer to incorporate the question: “Cassius persuades Brutus to join the conspiracy because . . .” However, the incorporation of the question within the answer is not a natural response. It is, in fact, an unnatural, contrived, and even strange response because the reader obviously knows what the question is. In informal written discourse, such as text-messaging, no one would expect answers to incorporate the wording of the questions that prompt them. The point is that because spoken Q&A is not carried on with complete sentences, teachers need to teach explicitly the counterintuitive convention of incorporating the question into a written answer. For the record, we think that insisting that students incorporate the question within their written answer is unnecessary. However, we support your efforts to teach them to do so if only because so many other teachers expect it. The larger point is that when students do something repeatedly and naturally, and teachers don’t like it, they need to think analytically about the difference between spoken and written English and how natural it is for students to want to reproduce spoken English on the page as closely as possible. After all, in their world of text messaging and social networking, that is exactly what they are doing . . . and successfully.

3.Subordinate clauses cause a lot of problems because they do have a subject and a predicate. Think about the kinds of sentence fragments that your students produce. We’re betting most of these sentence fragments begin with either a subordinating conjunction or a relative pronoun. In other words, the problem is usually that the sentence fragment is part of a complex sentence, a part that decided it was a sentence. Given that the subordinate clause does have a subject and a verb, and given that all you have to do to make it a complete sentence is delete its first word (subordinating conjunction or relative pronoun), it is a near-sentence, almost-a-sentence. It’s very easy for a novice writer to think a subordinate clause is a sentence. What the novice has to do is to be aware of the kinds of words that begin subordinate clauses (subordinating conjunctions and relative pronouns) and learn that almost-sentences that begin with these words should probably be attached to the previous sentence (the main clause).

You might ask your students to think of the situation metaphorically: Picture a child pulling another child in a wagon. The child in the wagon (subordinate clause) cannot move unless he is pulled by the child whose feet are on the ground (main clause).

4.When novice writers get warmed up, their fluency takes over. The expression of connected ideas is a stronger force than the need to separate those ideas into sentences. Hence, they write run-ons. We will address the problem of unintentional fragments first; then, we’ll talk about run-ons.

Addressing the Problem of Fragments

Here we give you four alternative ways of getting students to recognize a complete (declarative) sentence beyond the traditional “complete thought” definition.

1.The “Guess what?” test: If you say “Guess what?” and a group of words makes sense after that, then that group of words is a complete (declarative) sentence. The “Guess what?” test should be used as your default technique for determining whether a group of words is a complete (declarative) sentence. The reason it works is that saying “Guess what?” sets up the expectation that a complete sentence is about to be spoken or read. Use the other three tests only if the “Guess what?” test does not work for a particular student or group of students.

2.The “sentence thud”: What we are calling the sentence thud does have a fancier name: Linguists call it the terminal fall, the drop in pitch and halt in pace that English speakers use at the end of a sentence. We’re using the inelegant term sentence thud rather than terminal fall because we think an accessible, memorable, descriptive term is more likely to work with students than a term they would probably never again hear outside the field of linguistics.

From a very early age (infa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the Author
• Free Downloads
• Introduction: Seeing Grammar with New Eyes
• Part One: The Fundamental Things Apply
• Part Two: Embedding Grammar in Writing Instruction
• Conclusion
• References