Thoughts on Teaching Grammar

When reading Smagorinsky’s discussion about the difficulties of teaching grammar, I immediately thought of my niece.  Last Thursday, she called me requesting help with homework.  When I arrived, there she was with a grammar worksheet working on commas.  I gave the best advice I could, but I was uncertain if I was correct on all of the sentences.   After reading Smagorinsky’s discussion on the difficulty of teaching grammar and his examples about how the MLA and the Harvard comma rule differ, I couldn’t help but think that this is precisely why I was uncertain and have anxiety about teaching grammar.  Our texts this week cause me to be further sympathetic to my niece, because she has the misfortune of being in an English class with a 35 year veteran teacher who definitely has some “old school” ideas and is clearly teaching grammar in isolation and exclusively from worksheets.  I probably shouldn’t voice this opinion, but I hope the teacher retires soon.  On a more positive note, when discussing the problems of grammar with my cooperating teacher, he reassured me that he tries to apply grammar lessons when he sees problems, in much the way that Smagorinsky recommends.  Hearing that was a relief to me.  I know I can teach grammar, but the question of “whose standard is it?” makes it so difficult.  I keep imagining a student’s English teacher parent or grandparent coming in and telling me I’m teaching their child incorrect grammar!

            Smagorinsky’s idea of teaching grammar as a tool is spot on.  That analogy is wonderful, because the challenge will be to get students to see grammar as something useful that can be used to increase their writing ability rather than a “subject” in which they are going to do poorly.  Further, it’s really interesting that Smagorinsky quotes a man named Pooley from 1954—often considered dated by today’s standards.  However, the points outlined by Pooley are clear and to the point for improving grammar instruction, and it demonstrates how slowly change takes place in academia and grammar instruction.  In the spirit of Smagorinsky’s points, if I should get stumped on a grammar convention, I hope I can model for my students—or model strategy skills—that demonstrate how to go about correcting grammar errors.

            “The English Teacher’s Red Pen:  History of an Obsession” is a thought-provoking article.  Considering the historical reasons of why English teachers are obsessed with error correction is worthwhile and brings up an important point.  The authors note that in spoken language we don’t systematically and constantly correct incorrect grammar and yet young people learn to speak correctly over time is well taken and they are right that too much emphasis placed on error correction causes students to not care.  However, this puts even more emphasis on the problem of making writing relevant.  Student’s overlook many errors often because they don’t care.  (I need to be careful here, because I have turned in papers that I care about very much and then have been embarrassed at how many grammatical and structural errors I miss!)  But, the larger issue is to get student’s to see the relevance of writing.

 Zemelman and Daniels discuss a “paradigm shift” in which good writing is process writing.  I agree with them and certainly think that with increased means of communication and the internet, the need for clear, coherent writing is more important than ever.  I think they are correct that it is unnecessary to “bleed” all over a paper, but for English teachers the difficult part is restraining the impulse to "mark" every mistake.  Maybe I am out on a limb, but it seems to me that English teachers excessively mark a paper because that is the easy part.  Over time an English teacher becomes exceptionally skilled at spotting grammar mistakes and they are easily and quickly marked.  The slow part of the process is marking the paper for content and quality.  It is a challenge to respond to a student’s writing in clear language that gives them opportunity to learn from your comments.  Students that care definitely read these comments and it is essential that a teacher takes care to evaluate fairly and respond in a manner that provides guidance and therefore a learning opportunity.  Maybe I am demonstrating my lack of knowledge and that I haven’t yet learned the skill of accurately assessing and responding well without it taking hours of time.

Overall, I agree with Zemelman and Daniels article.   It is essential that we evaluate fairly and accurately without penalizing a student with excessive attention on minute grammar infractions.  Doing this well does and will require different ways of evaluating.  At this point, for me, the best way of doing this is to go back to the rubric.  There is great value in giving students a rubric before or with an assessment so that it is clear to them exactly what is going to be graded and how we are going to factor in the components of quality writing.