akashiver: (Default)
akashiver ([personal profile] akashiver) wrote2011-05-18 09:12 pm
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Back to teaching...

This Death to High School English has received a lot of flack from my Facebook f-list. I agree with its basic, agonized complaint: I see an appalling number of college students who can't write a basic sentence, and I've now been around long enough to see that there's a correlation between Bad Writing and Joblessness After Graduation.

If I had to choose between having high school students a) know how to write and having high school students b) know the plot of a Shakespeare play, I'd go with option A any day.

But teaching grammar does not guarantee that students will learn it.

As many commentators on this post point out, teaching the basic elements of grammar should not be a high school teacher's job. Nouns & verbs can and are taught in Grade 1 in many schools. If a student had access to a "decent" (whatever that is in the USA) education and attended classes in which these rules were taught, then teaching those rules again, using the same methods of instruction, is unlikely to produce different results.

The most difficult part of teaching grammar, I find, is getting students to transfer the skill to their writing. You can teach students a rule and then test them on it, and have them get 100% of their answers correct. But when you look at their writing the next day, there's no transfer of knowledge. The same student that could put a comma in the right place on a worksheet will show absolutely no improvement in comma-placement in their independent writing.



This is the real challenge of teaching grammar, and it's one I have no clue how to solve.

Penalizing students for grammatical errors in writing can go some way towards producing results, but all too frequently it just encourages students to only write in simple sentences. If they never need to use a conjunction, I cannot possibly mark them down for using it incorrectly. And realistically, much of the teaching philosophy of recent years has advocated ignoring grammar and focusing on students' development of ideas. This sounds silly if you're focused on teaching grammar, but at higher levels of education students are supposed to have mastered grammar and instead be working on things like how to construct a persuasive argument. If you aren't teaching students how to construct an argument in Grade 8, and that's the curriculum, then as a teacher you aren't doing your job.

The other, obvious factor in students' ability to use grammar is reading. Students who learn grammar but don't read might as well be learning a foreign language that they have never heard spoken and  for which they have no use. Students who read usually have good grammar, even if they've never seen a worksheet in their lives.

Would teaching things other than Shakespeare improve students' grammar? Yes. But most students aren't reading Shakespeare in their grammar-learning years: they're reading books like James and the Giant Peach and Underground to Canada. "Too much Shakespeare" is not the problem here. 

The fact is, reading in school is not enough. Students need to be reading a lot of books -- and hearing good grammar used in the speech that surrounds them -- to pick up an intuitive sense of the language.

Maybe even that isn't enough. Some people just don't have a facility with language -- any language. And I'm not sure how I can turn those students into "good writers."

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