I wrote a brief narrative of my experience with learning grammar. I revised my paper by using one of the lessons that I posted. The teacher gives the students a list of about 5 things to look for in their paper and revise: 1)writing an appositive before a noun and/or writing an appositive after a noun 2) using adjectives before a noun 3) absolute phrases to communicate body language 4) participial phrases to communicate body language 5) using no more than 3- 5 “be” verbs.
Here is my paper. I left the original sentence in the paper and put the revised sentence in bold and highlighted. The green highlighted words are “be” verbs. I had 13, but I probably missed some!
There is one thing that I will never forget about my year in eighth grade language arts- daily oral language warm-ups. Even though the activity is “daily oral language”, students copied two sentences from the board onto a sheet of notebook paper and corrected the grammar, mechanics and spelling. Then the teacher would send a student to the board to make corrections to the sentences while the other students made corrections on their paper. This activity went on everyday for the first twenty minutes of class. Not only was this activity boring, but it seemed to be an artificial way to learn grammar. (Boring and artificial, daily oral language, is an ineffective way to learn grammar.) Students should learn grammar in the context of writing tasks (Dean 20-26).
One of the earliest grammar skills that I learned was to identify the subject and predicate in a sentence. I was given worksheet after worksheet and instructed to “underline the subject once and underline the predicate twice”. The worksheets became a little more difficult when the instructions were to “underline the simple subject once and underline the simple predicate twice”. I could usually pick out the subject; most of the time it was a noun and sometimes a pronoun. (I could usually pick out the subject, always a noun or a pronoun, but picking out the simple predicate presented a challenge because of the “be” verbs or the helping verbs.) Picking out the simple predicate presented a challenge because of the “be” verbs or the helping verbs, which form a verb phrase. (Complicating things further, some sentences had a compound subject or a compound predicate.) To complicate things further, some sentences had a compound subject or a compound predicate.
By the time I got to high school, I knew a lot of grammar rules and was fairly proficient at identifying the subject and predicate of a sentence. I did not realize until much later that the objective of learning grammar is to use it correctly in writing. There is a definite “disconnect between knowing the rules of grammar and being able to apply those rules” in the context of writing (“Essentials of Language Teaching”).
Given my personal experience learning grammar (out of context so to speak), I ask myself the question, “How can I teach students to identify and use subjects and predicates appropriately and follow grammar rules so that “their personal writing [is] taken seriously in the wider social environment” (Dean 20-26)? After reading the book, Mechanically Inclined, by Jeff Anderson, I have learned several great ideas for engaging students in learning grammar and linking their learning to writing. Anderson’s idea of using authentic texts to teach grammar is one that I believe will appeal to students and will make grammar more meaningful. For example, he asks students to write a sentence in their journals and then calls on volunteers to share their sentences. He asks the students how they know they have written a sentence. He questions them until they arrive at the fact that every sentence has a subject and a predicate. Then Anderson uses sentences from a novel that is the class read-aloud to further practice identifying the subject and predicate (Anderson). His book is full of other strategies that engage students in learning grammar skills that are far more interesting than daily oral language warm-ups.
Another resource that I find helpful and inspiring is Harry Noden’s Image Grammar: Using Grammatical Structures to Teach Writing. He suggests that “nouns [subjects] flash slide shows of still images, [while] verbs [predicates] project motion pictures”.Mr. Noden compares the writer to a painter stating that, “just as the painter combines… brush stroke techniques to create an image, the writer chooses from a repertoire of sentence structures” and he gives a plethora of ideas for teaching grammar in context. To turn writing, which seems to be a daunting mental task, into a visual concept is definitely an approach that I will implement in my classroom.
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