Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Reteaching Grammar
I teach EL, but I co-teach with a language arts teacher for a few periods of the day. Today we were going over pronouns--subjective, objective, possessive. As we all know, students need to have a basis of grammar in order to understand the types of pronouns we were teaching. So when we asked, "what is a pronoun?" we found that we had to re-teach noun. With subjective and objective, we had to reteach verb. There were only a few students who felt confident enough to say what a verb is. I know the days of the old grammar packet or grammar unit in isolation are over. However, it seems that when you don't spend a focused time on grammar, then students don't learn it in a context of grammar. It seems to be haphazardly taught and included in the curriculum. In my opinion, if I asked 7th graders, "What is a verb?" they should all shoot their hands up and be able to tell me that is is a state of action or being. At least the state of action should come to their minds--or even just "doing something." I understand that much of teaching grammar in isolation was redundant. However, we may need to rethink our idea of scrapping grammar and then just teaching bits and pieces--because grammar is interconnected and concepts build on each other. So it doesn't just spiral--it is an intricate part of good communication, reading and writing. It is an ongoing skill that should be practiced--even in isolation at first for mastery, then touched on in contexts of reading and writing projects. Then we don't have to have these mouth-dropping realizations that the 7th graders don't know what verbs are!
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I think that this is the challenge we face as we enter the world of embedded grammar instruction. I would like to say that I was taught with packets and many of my friends cannot remember what a verb is now. So I know that packets are not a good way to go. I wonder if it isn't just the time we spend teaching grammar. When we did packet work with grammar (at least what I remember from school)it was a unit or at least a day of the week every week. That is a significant amount of time. I don't know if we spend the same amount of time teaching grammar when it is in context because it gets pushed to the back of our minds or the lesson. As an English teacher I know that is something easy to take out of a lesson.
ReplyDeleteI know that it is fundamental to teach grammar, especially in a time when texting and autocorrect makes our students not want to double check their writing. I just think it needs to take an equally important place in the English classroom to reading stories and writing first drafts. I don't think there is an easy way to remedy the problem, but perhaps time and focus is on part of the solution.
Thanks for your comment, Connie. The time and focus piece would be part of the solution, but it does seem like for grammer, we likely have neither. Maybe it is working in vertical team to find out what time and focus is put on younger grades--then by 7th grade, there wouldn't be as much time needed to be spent--when there is so much more information that needs to be taught.
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