Teaching+Grammar+in+Context+Reponse


 * Teaching Grammar in Context**

I have never had an experience with grammar I could describe as pleasant. What little experience I had in school was like pulling teeth (because it was so boring and/or confusing), then I would always pay for this lack of instruction later when teachers or professors expected me to know certain rules or avoid certain mistakes I had never been taught. My first such experience was in tenth grade, when I was first asked to write a formal writing assignment in my school career (an essay about our lives to that point) for, strangely enough, my Civics and Economics teacher. A few days later mine and my peers papers were returned followed by a stern lecture about how none of us knew how to write properly, and I got a D, the lowest grade I've ever gotten on a paper. I received writing but no direct grammar instruction throughout high school, and continued to pay for this once I reached college when my English professors started admonishing me for my passive sentences and split infinitives and instructed me to edit my papers, and I had to go to my peers to get help to figure out what those terms even meant. My largest misgiving about teaching English was teaching grammar, partially because I feel very incompetent at it and also because it seems so arbitrary.

I enjoyed reading the first article because it affirmed what I have already learned in several other classes, including Dr. Reaser's, that really helped guide me in how I could teach grammar without overwhelming or stifling students. Teaching within the context of something the students are already interested in or you are already talking about in class, such as a novel or other literary work, won't make grammar seem so random and useless. Students will be able to see how someone writes or speaks matters to the people reading or listening. Also the activities described in the article were great, because just as good instruction should, it taught students skills along the way while they also got to have some freedom to learn about something they were interested in. The ideas presented in the other article are similar but more related to writing. I know that if a teacher had explained (individually or to the whole class) about our grammar mistakes on a recent assignment and how to avoid them in the future rather than just marking them and then expecting us to figure it out on our own from now on, I would have learned a lot more. By also teaching as teachers see mistakes being made and recognizing students now need to know the correct process, students will be much more likely to really remember. The most significant thing I took away from this article was that research shows grammar is most effectively taught in small doses in relation to other topics, rather than in isolation.