Peterson+and+Weaver

When it comes to teaching grammar, I think that it is something that should be taken in to careful consideration amongst teachers. When I was in middle school, I was at a private school for grades 6 and 7. This private school had a strong emphasis on grammar, and so in grades 6 and 7 I had vocabulary workbooks and grammar books that were over 100 pages long. We learned how to diagram sentences, and to identify every single word in a complex sentence. I memorized all of the helping verbs and every preposition that I may ever encounter. It was all bookwork though, and to this day I can probably only diagram a basic sentence, and can recite the list of helping verbs. While parts of this could be useful to students, I don’t think that it should be the only thing their grammar lessons consist of. I really liked the idea presented in Peterson’s article about having students actively use grammar skills rather than teaching them from a book. The activity that he presented with the Titanic is a great example of how teachers can implement a project that is interesting to students and gets them actively involved while still putting to use the various grammar skills needed to become proficient readers and writers. By creating activities such as the one mentioned, students learn their skills in context. What this means is that they are learning what to use and when based on the context that they are currently engaged in. Weaver’s article essentially reiterated Peterson’s and seemed to be a synthesis article where other findings about learning grammar in context are compiled in to one document. I did think that it had some nice examples of the concept though.