Get Your Grammar On

This was one of my assignments in eighth grade English. It was for bonus points/extra credit and no one got it right. But we all tried ;).

I love grammar. I admit it.

I think I trace this love back to eighth grade. We read some stories and poems--I especially remember climbing down into the dark sub basement to listen to “The Tell Tale Heart” on a scratchy old record player in pitch black darkness—but mostly, we did grammar. Over and over and over . . . diagramming, exercises, sentence combining, labeling. And I loved it.

The only thing I didn’t love was our final project. We had to find examples off all kinds of sentences--ones with compound subjects, ones with three prepositional phrases, ones with two independent clauses and two dependent clauses . . . it was madness. I remember staying up way past my bedtime, paging through every magazine we owned, frustrated by the lack of complexity of the sentences. Finally, exhausted and frustrated, I turned to books and found almost every single one. What I didn’t find, I made up.

I never remember getting that project back or getting a grade for it.

I didn’t hate it—I was challenged by it. I remember being sad in high school that we wouldn’t get to study grammar anymore . . . my teacher’s told me I was expected to know it all and if I didn’t, check the textbook and figure it out. I was happy to find that in college, I could take a grammar course.

Maybe it’s something weird in my DNA, but I studying the language, taking the sentences apart, and diagramming them in my head (yes, I really do that). At the same time, I realize not everyone shares my love.

When I started teaching, the kids told me they hated grammar. They also weren’t very good at it . . . I had students who couldn’t identify the verb in a sentence. As I taught, I realized it was because many of them were taught in younger grades to look at WORDS to determine what part of speech they were. I struggled to show my students that often, you have to look at the whole sentence and see the words function instead.

Bored myself by the textbook, I rarely used it. I made up what I called “kinesthetic grammar” exercises and in class, I got the kids up and moving. They became the sentence, holding prepositional phrases and adverbs and moving themselves around with their friends to create sentences that spanned the front of the room. We talked about the sentences and what made them work, how all the parts functioned, and finally—how we could transfer that knowledge to our writing to revise and make better use of our words.

Though I tried to avoid the book, we did do exercises. I had kids find direct objects, prepositional phrases, and—much to the amazement of my colleagues—diagram sentences. I tried to mix up my instruction as much as I could so it was never rote or boring . . . though the students loved reciting the helping verbs as we memorized them. They loved writing huge sentences for me—I encouraged them to make them as complex as they could) and then timing me as I diagrammed them. As I diagrammed, I also verbalized what each part of the sentence was and how it related. We laughed at my misplaced modifiers lesson, and I hope students enjoyed the freedom they had as adverbs, who could walk around to different parts in the sentence moreso than adjectives.



(When I taught, we watched Grammar Rock for fun. I don't know that it actually taught the students anything, but it was very amusing to see them strutting down the hallway singing the songs.)

I will never forgot the day a student brought me a complex sentence and asked me if I could show her how they were diagrammed. Could I? (I could, and did. Could I know without review? No. But I could with some review ;)). I don’t know if I would teach diagramming to all my students in depth, but sometimes it’s helpful for students to look at sentences in a more graphic way (and I think diagramming challenging sentences is good enrichment for students who are interested).

As I read through the readings, I got a better picture of why so many people dislike grammar. It was interesting to see how for so many years now, grammar instruction has focused on error—finding what’s wrong and fixing it. Memorize those definitions. Circle and label the pronouns. I almost cried for the professors that had over 200 student each. I was overwhelmed grading the writing of 110 students at a time . . . it’s no wonder they tended to focus on correcting rather than responding. I also think that the traditional teaching of grammar was prominent for so long because it’s east to teach and score . . . much more so than assessing actual writing.

But the traditional manner of teaching (that I had and loved) just doesn’t do what it should. As Hartwell points out, research supports that having formal grammar instruction has no impact on the ability to write well. Much of the research I’ve been reading lately says the same thing . . . and it has for years. Grammar should be taught in context. Some think it shouldn’t be taught at all. To a degree, I agree. I think the task we have as teachers is figuring out a way to infuse the grammar in when it’s needed . . . teach it in context. Use students’ writing. Use authentic texts. Get the students up and moving. Reading Jeff Anderson’s book Mechanically Inclined shows how to get students involved in the discovering of grammar and mechanics and using skills to better their writing—in authentic ways that never need a textbook. I loved every page of his book, and he shows how to tie grammar into context in ways that work and encourage higher level discovery and thinking.

I still maintain that it’s important to have some basic understanding of how language works in order to effectively use it in your writing. It’s hard to tell students that their subject-verb agreement is incorrect and makes the writing hard to follow if they don’t know what a verb is or understand verb forms. But I think there are dynamic and vibrant ways to teach grammatical concepts that, mixed in with some rote memorization here and there when needed, give students tools they can use in their writing rather than 10 sentence homework assignments in the grammar book they refuse to do (and I’d like to think I can squeeze a little diagramming in here and there just for fun).