Dreaded Grammar!!!

[Allie Eckert]

Hello!  My name is Allie Eckert and I am a 6th grade English/Language Arts teacher at Traner Middle School.  I am currently in my third year teaching, however this is my first year in a middle school setting.  While I thought that I couldn't love anything more than teaching my sweet sixth graders and Bernice Mathews, I learned quickly that middle school was my niche.  My students are incredibly driven, and are still at the point in their adolescence where they strive to please.  I have quite the mixture of students running anyhwere from Kindergarten reading level, well through high school, so this year has deemed a challenge.  During the day, I focus on every aspect of reading and writing through song, visual arts, short stories, gripping novels, and poetry.  My goal this year was to engage the students in the English language in a way that didn't leave them thinking, "ah, this is so boring!" I feel that I have been quite successful with breaking the "boring" trend that students expect, and in this my students have taken off running.  Many times, I have to remind them that the bell has rung as they want to keep reading and writing.  If all else fails, the fact that they are learning to love books and words, makes feel like I have done my job.

 

While my student's writing is full of figurative language, emotion, sensory images, and passion, when I began looking deeper into the structure of their writing, I realized that all of my students had somewhat of a problem in their sentence structure- Convetions & Grammar!! Like some teachers and students alike, when I hear the word grammar, my palms begin to sweat and I can feel my head start to pound.  As I had been so focused this year on having my students express themselves, I realized that I had left out a very essential part of the writing process, and that is grammar.  While I had given them tips in their writing along the way, and taught them a few tricks of the trade, most of my time was spent asking the question, "how does this make you feel," rather than focusing on, "why isn't there a comma in this sentence?"

Therefore, I decided that while my passion lies in the expression of writing, I would be cheating my students if I didn't also teach them the grammar aspect.  As the instruction of grammar is not my best practice, I am doing an inquiry based action research looking at the most effective way to teach grammar.  I will be looking at the effectiveness of teaching grammar in isolation (D.O.L, grammar worksheets, etc.) vs. teaching grammar in context (mini-lessons, conferencing, etc.) In order to do this, I am using my kiddos as guinea pigs in an action research.  I have split the students up in to two seperate groups, and upon looking at their pre-assessments and determining areas of weakness, I will be focusing on explicit grammar instrcution in the two aforementioned ways.  I will then look at which group made the most growth.  When referring to the research, it states that teaching grammar in context is far more beneficial in terms of seeing the carry over to the student's writing.  I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that my action research further proves the current school of thought!  I'm keeping my fingers crossed!

 

The good news is that a week in to my action research, my attitude towards grammar instruction is improving- its definitely not as bad as I thought! :)

[Jennifer Reynolds]

Allie-

I look foward to your demonstration (considering that I really dislike teaching grammar myself and have had to find ways to make it exciting so that I don't fall asleep.) As you mentioned with the research that you have done about grammar being much more effective when taught in context, I think that I disapprove of explicit grammar lessons because I feel like I have internalized grammar through reading and writing. While teaching, I find myself looking back to find the exact rules of a gerund and the like. There are times when I don't know all the rules. This makes me wonder if it is possible that grammar can be taught without teaching it.

I remember learning Adam's writing method as a freshman, but I never really paid attention. Somehow I have managed to make it through 28 years without embarrassment (PS . . . please don't check my grammar in this blog.) I have never had a student who is amazing at grammar and despises reading, so I think it is safe to say that there is quite a correlation between reading grammar in context and writing grammar.

Good luck,
Jenny Reynolds

[Sara Kwasna]

I agree with Jenny that people learn how to use proper grammar through their exposure to reading and writing, but mostly reading. I have also used DOL's, but found that while students could fix grammatical errors in isolated incidents during our DOL warm-ups, they would still make the same mistakes in their writing and have more trouble fixing these mistakes when they were in their own writing.

We rarely make students fix these errors after they hand in their published pieces. If they haven't caught these mistakes during the editing phase of the writing process, they get marked in red pen and points may be deducted from their score, but do we ever have them work on handing in a "perfect" piece?

I think that in today's society, we rely heavily on spell-check to fix our mistakes, or we are so caught up in text language that we have a hard time identifying when something isn't correct to begin with. Students especially don't see the correlation between how well one communicates to how intelligent they are perceived by others. I'm increasingly shocked at how many of my own adult friends can't use the proper form of your or you're, there, their, or they're.

I look forward to seeing how your case study works out. It is a valuable topic and one that I don't think I have the guts to pursue! Good luck to you.

-Sara

[Nicole Marvin]

It is great that you have two groups to use as comparisons. I too see that students have a hard time transitioning their grammar knowledge from isolated activities to their own work. Grammar is absorbed in so many ways. Grammar is tricky because some students have a great grasp of usage naturally. Others absorb what they see and hear which can often result in bad habits. With the influx of the advertising world, creativity with word usage is often valued resulting in a lot of bad examples!

Grammar instruction is difficult as a whole class lesson because this is truly where the gaps between students who are strong coherent writers expand. For a student to improve their grammar, it certainly must be in practice and individual conferencing. I am very excited for your demonstration and to see the outcome of your experiment. I am sure that what you learn can benefit my older students who often have bad habits that are incredibly difficult to break!