Topic: Teaching Problem-Centered Grammar

10-second review: Base the teaching of grammar on problems that can be predictably expected in compositions. These problems involve sentence structure, punctuation and usage. Composition should be taught at the same time as grammar so that students can apply their knowledge of grammar to their compositions. The purpose for a knowledge of grammar in composition? To polish writing.

Title: “Grammar and Composition.” Teaching English, How To…. Raymond Stopper. Xlibris, 2004. pp. 164-206.

Teaching Problem-Centered Grammar

Research seems to indicate that teaching grammar to improve writing does not happen. As a result, many teachers stopped teaching grammar. But a little common sense shows that composition and grammar have two very different emphases. Composition involves ideas and arrangement of paragraphs. Grammar focuses on the sentence. When compositions are graded holistically, raters are warned not to focus unduly on mistakes in grammar, but on the composition as a whole, involving unity and coherence.

Grammar does have its purposes. A knowledge of grammar allows students to polish their prose.

Since the purpose of grammar is to untangle problems in writing, I suggest a problem-centered approach to teaching grammar, while, at the same time, I am teaching composition, so that students can apply their knowledge of grammar to their writing. I begin with the problem in the students’ writing and then teach the grammar needed to understand and correct the problem. Most of my teaching is practiced in the first ten minutes of class.

1. Students identify mistakes in grammar in the format of the SAT.

2. Students use the textbook to solve problems in grammar.

3. 10-minute essays. Finally, students write as well as they can for ten minutes and then I correct their mistakes, not by labeling them, but by actually making the corrections on their original 10-minute essays. Students compare their originals with my corrections and write a clean copy to develop a visual concept of their writing as clear and correct writing.

I use only the grammatical terminology necessary to help students understand the particular problems in their writing.

I try to do with teaching grammar what I try to do with everything I teach. I assume that students are asking, “Why do I need to know this stuff?” My answer? I predict that you will have a problem in writing and here is how to solve that problem.

I welcome any and all questions concerning my problem-centered teaching of grammar: raystop2@comcast.net. RayS.

Topic: Teaching Problem-Centered Grammar in the First Ten Minutes of Class (3)

10-second review: Base the teaching of grammar on problems that can be predictably expected in compositions. These problems involve sentence structure, punctuation and usage. Composition should be taught at the same time as grammar so that students can apply their knowledge of grammar to their compositions. The purpose for a knowledge of grammar in composition? To polish writing.

Title: “Grammar and Composition.” Teaching English, How To…. Raymond Stopper. Xlibris, 2004. pp. 164-206.

Teaching Problem-Centered Grammar in the First Ten Minutes of Class (3).

10-minute Essays

The idea of the ten-minute essays, occurring in the first ten minutes of class, came from a research study that I read in Research in the Teaching of English, a publication of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). Unfortunately, I have lost that particular research study.

In it, two authors had ninth-grade students write for ten minutes during their classes. They labeled the students’ mistakes—sp., r-o sentence, frag., etc.—and they found that students’ grammatical mistakes began to diminish with time. I decided to go one step further under the following assumptions:

1. Students do not know how to revise and edit. I decided to provide models of how to revise and edit.

2. Most students do not understand the labels teachers put on grammatical mistakes.

3. Students do not have a visual model of how their writing will look if it is a clean and corrected copy.

So, in the first ten minutes of class, students wrote as well as they could on any topic they chose. At the end of exactly ten minutes, students stopped writing, even in mid-sentence. That night, I went through their papers and corrected grammatical mistakes. I really corrected them. I did not label them. I re-wrote the mistakes.

“I like to hunt and fishing” became “I like to hunt and fish” or “I like hunting and fishing.” Of course, I used cross-outs and red ink to make the corrections.

When I returned the papers the next day, students reviewed my corrections and then, outside of class, rewrote their 10-minute essays from the previous day, incorporating my corrections. If the students were interested, I took time to explain changes that students did not understand. As a result they had a clean copy of their corrected 10-minute essays. They were able to compare the clean copy with their originals that had been corrected in red by me, the teacher.

It was a good system. It worked. Most of the students said to me that they had gained confidence in their writing from comparing their originals with their corrected copy. Furthermore, their 10-minute essays, relatively quickly, began to be turned in with NO grammatical mistakes.

To survive, I used the ten-minute essays for one class for three weeks, then began the ten-minute essays with a second class for three weeks and so on through the five classes. At the end of the first semester, I began again with the first class for three weeks.

Next Blog: Summary of my approach to problem-centered grammar.

Topic: Teaching Problem-Centered Grammar in the First Ten Minutes of Class (2)

10-second review: Base the teaching of grammar on problems that can be predictably expected in compositions. These problems involve sentence structure, punctuation and usage. Composition should be taught at the same time as grammar so that students can apply their knowledge of grammar to their compositions. The purpose for a knowledge of grammar in composition? To polish writing.

Title: “Grammar and Composition.” Teaching English, How To…. Raymond Stopper. Xlibris, 2004. pp. 164-206.

Teaching Problem-Centered Grammar in the First Ten Minutes of Class (2).

Textbook as Reference.

Simply labeling a students’ compositions with grammatical mistakes does not help them to find and correct the mistake, using their textbooks. When I label mistakes in major compositions, I use the label as it is found in the index. This helps students to become familiar with the textbook as a reference.

On the board, I write a sentence with a mistake. Next to it, I label the problem as it appears in the index of the grammar textbook. Students are, in ten minutes, to look up the mistake from the index, read the examples of how to correct it, and then make the correction. Again, I award an extra point for the students’ written correction.

Example:

Mistake: “The team both felt the joy of victory and the sting of defeat.” (Completed Parallelism)

Corrected: The team felt both the joy of victory and the sting of defeat.”

The label in the parentheses is the label in the index, pointing students to where to find the correction. The given sentence is different, and usually much more difficult, from the examples in the textbook.

If students can find and correct the mistake without resorting to the text, they are awarded the extra point.

Next Blog: Ten-Minute Essays

Topic: Teaching Problem-Centered Grammar in the First Ten Minutes of Class (1)

10-second review: Base the teaching of grammar on problems that can be predictably expected in compositions. These problems involve sentence structure, punctuation and usage. Composition should be taught at the same time as grammar so that students can apply their knowledge of grammar to their compositions. The purpose for a knowledge of grammar in composition? To polish writing.

Title: “Grammar and Composition.” Teaching English, How To…. Raymond Stopper. Xlibris, 2004. pp. 164-206.

Teaching Problem-Centered Grammar in the First Ten Minutes of Class (1).

For new teachers: The first ten minutes in class are crucial. You need to put the students to work immediately. While the students are working, you can check roll. But put them immediately to work. I have used a spelling test for the first ten minutes. But I mainly used those first ten minutes for one of two exercises. The first is to give practice in grammar and style in a format similar to the SAT objective test.

I put on the board something like the following:

“Coming up the street, the flowers in the window looked colorful.”

The students label the problem and then correct the sentence: In this case, the sentence is a dangling modifier. Corrected sentence: “Coming up the street, I saw that the flowers in the window looked colorful.” Any other variation of the sentence that corrected the dangling modifier would be acceptable.

In this way, I can note how many students recognize the problem, how many could identify the problem and how many could correct the problem.

If the students complete all three parts of the problem—recognize, label and correct—I award them a point for extra credit. The accumulation of points is added to the student’s final grade points for the quarter.

Next Blog: Teaching Grammar in the First Ten Minutes of Class (2)

Topic: Problems in Teaching Grammar--Purpose

10-second review: Base the teaching of grammar on problems that can be predictably expected in compositions. These problems involve sentence structure, punctuation and usage. Composition should be taught at the same time as grammar so that students can apply their knowledge of grammar to their compositions. The purpose for a knowledge of grammar in composition? To polish writing.

Title: “Grammar and Composition.” Teaching English, How To…. Raymond Stopper. Xlibris, 2004. pp. 164-206.

Problem: Purpose

If you’re an English teacher, how many times have you heard your students say that they really learned English grammar in a foreign language? Do you know why they say that? Because in the foreign language almost every grammatical concept is applied. The grammar is needed to make sense of the sentence structure in the foreign language. In English, very few grammatical concepts can be applied with any frequency. And the only opportunity to apply them is in exercises that have very little carryover into composition which is where grammar needs to be applied.

In my classroom, while grammar is being taught, so, too, is writing. I think in the past teachers thought they needed to teach grammar before they taught writing, just as the sentence precedes the paragraph, which, in turn, precedes the whole composition. As a consequence, many teachers in my days as a student never went beyond grammar, thus postponing the teaching of writing.

First I teach writing. I teach students how to brainstorm a topic, how to write a thesis sentence, how to write a quick first draft consisting of middle paragraphs that support the thesis sentence, a final, summarizing paragraph, and conclude, although it seems far out of sequence, with writing the introduction. Then we revise and edit. And with the revising and editing come problems in grammar. That’s when I teach grammar. And that’s when students learn how to apply their knowledge of grammar.

I start with the problem and I use grammar to help students resolve the problem. In teaching grammar, I use all of the resources available to me: the text book, text book exercises, even diagramming. But the focus of all this instruction in grammar is on resolving the problem.

Next Blog: The first ten minutes in class.

Topic: Problems in Teaching Grammar--Terminology

10-second review: Base the teaching of grammar on problems that can be predictably expected in compositions. These problems involve sentence structure, punctuation and usage. Composition should be taught at the same time as grammar so that students can apply their knowledge of grammar to their compositions. The purpose for a knowledge of grammar in composition? To polish writing.

Title: “Grammar and Composition.” Teaching English, How To…. Raymond Stopper. Xlibris, 2004. pp. 164-206.

Problem: Terminology

In my experience, teachers have spent too much time teaching terminology and not enough time on the problems which the terminology is supposed to help students resolve. Imagine yourself as a student facing the following terms:

appositive, case, nominative, objective, participle, gerund, absolute, conjugation, dangling modifier, declarative, predicate, expletive, future perfect, ablative, past perfect, indicative, subjunctive, linking verb, restrictive, nonrestrictive, object complement, pluperfect, predicate adjective, relative pronoun, transitive, intransitive, voice, infinitive.

What sense would you make of these terms?

With my approach, teachers spend most of their time resolving problems in expression and teach terminology only when it helps students understand the problems. For example, in teaching the important reasons for using commas—after introductory expressions, around “interrupters” and before “afterthoughts”—I dispense with formal terminology together. Those three plain statements of the reasons for commas involve the following grammatical terms: “direct address,” “prepositional phrases,” “verbal/gerundial/participial phrases,” "infinitive phrases,” “subordinate clauses,” “appositive” “relative” or “parenthetical” clauses, and “absolutes.”

Next Blog: Problems in Teaching Grammar--Purpose.

Topic: Grammar with a Purpose

10-second review: Base the teaching of grammar on problems that can be predictably expected in compositions. These problems involve sentence structure, punctuation and usage. Composition should be taught at the same time as grammar so that students can apply their knowledge of grammar to their compositions. The purpose for a knowledge of grammar in composition? To polish writing.

Title: “Grammar and Composition.” Teaching English, How To…. Raymond Stopper. Xlibris, 2004. pp. 164-206.

Grammar with a Purpose.

Grammar and Usage

Grammar seems to have its greatest effect in helping students learn correct usage. Should the pronoun be “he” or “him”? What about the expressions used by that famous all-star, millionaire basketball player Allen Iverson, “I should have went to practice”? Subject-verb agreement: “Each of the kids have one” (from a Cellular One TV ad). Formation of the possessive. How many people confuse “it’s” the contraction with “its” the possessive form of “it”? Comparison of adjectives and adverbs: “She was the younger sister” (of two sisters), but “She was the youngest child” (of three or more children). Confusion of adverbs and adjectives as in “You did real good.” The confusion between “lie” and “lay” as in “I’m going to go lay in the sun” or “Fido, lay down” or “The building is laying in ruins” (recent Action News WPVI local newscast). Some of these points of usage may seem “nit-picky,” but, fair or not, people are judged by their language and mistakes in usage can bring judgments of “uneducated” and “illiterate” from employers and colleagues who respect the correct use of language.

Beyond usage, punctuation and basic problems like run-on sentences and sentence fragments, a knowledge of grammar is useful for resolving problems in coherence, the flow of expression: active and passive voice; dangling and misplaced modifiers; parallel structure and faulty coordination; sexist language; style—needless repetition of words like “it,” “thing,” “get,” and “there”; clear reference between pronouns and antecedents; consistent tense in the use of verbs in complex sentences; and clear and awkward expression, all of which interfere with coherence, the ability of the reader to start at the beginning and to read through to the end without distraction.

Avoiding distractions and achieving “flow”: they are two effects of a knowledge of grammar on writing. They help writers polish their prose.

Next Blog: Problems in Teaching Grammar.