Western Michigan University professors Constance Weaver and Jonathan Bushs’ work, titled Grammar intertwined throughout the writing process: An “inch deep and a mile wide”, sets forth a plan to teach grammar to students. The article examines traditional approaches to teaching grammar, and argues that, by focusing on a clear set of key points, students can more successfully integrate grammatical concepts into their usable skill set. Their plan, however, is not only concerned with strictly theoretical education, their method is very much tied to maintaining classroom management as well. Though the authors do provide a model which could improve the results of many teachers, their recommendations are often idealistic, and many instructors would have difficulty fully applying the plan to certain classroom environments. What they do not address, however, is the necessity of encouraging language diversity.
Doing so, while simultaneously mandating that students must speak Standard American English seems to be a contradiction. One would be hard pressed to tell a student that their language is special and has many unique things to offer, but can’t be recognized officially. Simple ways to maintain a tone of respect for, and utilize a students’ L1, can yield significantly deep results. By combining these tactics, every teacher will be able to at least make gains in both student retention, engagement, and parent involvement, ultimately creating a more successful environment for their students.
Weaver and Bush argue that most every failed grammar lesson can be attributed to one of two possible reasons. The first possibility is that the lesson is taught as a single event, with follow up exercises or not, and is not related to a meaningful skill that the student may possess, stating that “there was little connection to the reasons for the skill, or a larger understanding of how those skills can be useful and used in actual writing,”(Weaver & Bush, 2006, p. 78). Any classroom teacher can see how a lesson with almost no practical or applicable value will do absolutely nothing to engage students. And disengaged students are the ones who will make effective classroom management an issue. The second source of fault in grammar lessons, they argue, is the lack of follow up lessons or other “integrating” (p. 78) activities to show students the ways that grammar rules can be utilized in their own writing. Both of these commonly made faults, the authors assert, contribute to the lack of student investment in learning grammar, and lack of student investment is a sure contributor to ineffective classroom management.
The aspects of ineffective lesson case studies that the authors point out were quite obvious, though other factors surely contributed to the disconnect between the students and teacher. The closure offered by one teacher is cited as follows: “The teacher then passed out the students’ ‘grammar’ homework: a sheet containing 25 sets of sentences ready to be combined. He then said, ‘OK, enough grammar. Open up your literature texts….’” It is clear to see that, besides the previous grievances, the teacher openly regarded grammar as a subject that the students should be relieved to get away from, not to mention that the homework assignment required little more than basic recall of previously learned facts. By failing to challenge students beyond the base levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy, comprehension and application, the teacher has left them with a knowledge that is much more transient than if he had required them to synthesize or evaluate the information presented. The fact that becomes apparent is that, while many things could have been applied better, the authors are only interested in presenting the flaws that they are most readily able to address. Regardless, they do accurately point out flaws in many teachers lessons, flaws that directly lead to students becoming distracted and disengaged, rather an actively learning.
When the authors have the opportunity to present their ideal method in action, they do so through case studies from two middle-school teachers who have made use of grammar instruction in a way that leads to long-term retention and repeated use by students in future assignments. The two key methods they employ are integration of grammar concepts into useful activities and prolonged reinforcement of those skills in the students writing. During the writing process, Weaver and Bush argue, is one of the key opportunities to teach grammar skills, to minimize the disconnect between the lesson and it’s application (2006, p. 79). Another aspect of this model is to teach grammar, not as lengthy discussions, but as “mini-lessons”, which are could be as short as 5 minutes, but not longer than 20 minutes. This minimization of lecture time alone would do wonders to keep the students on track. The teacher must explain the grammar material in the context of the writing process to encourage and clarify use. To encourage teacher’s use of these teaching precepts, the authors present a basic framework for implementation of any specific grammar skill, as well as for providing ongoing assessment of students ability to make use of them. This framework begins with a model of the skill, as used in literature or other sources, follows with creating a new model, which the teacher may create alone or with student involvement. The students then apply the concept in sample sentences, allowing for the teacher to assess their grasp, and then are instructed to apply the concept to their own writing. The remaining steps provide for a checklist of skills that the students are expected to use in their writing, feedback from peers or teacher, a revisited lesson of the concept as needed, and finally the promise that the skill will be continually touched upon in future writing exercises (Weaver & Bush, 2006, p.87). The aforementioned model is not set in stone. It is instead a foundation to allow teachers the most opportunity possible to provide further depth to the students’ understanding.
This foundation, as solid as it may seem, will not be properly set unless students are engaged as part of the larger view of their lives in general. In just the same way that a skill cannot be readily learned in isolation of other knowledge, a lack of support at home compartmentalizes their English learning to a small segment of their day. Parents who come from cultures that don’t practice Anglo-European schooling methods often have very different ideas about the role of the teacher, specifically. Compound onto that the inherent difficulty of explaining a situation to someone who is potentially unfamiliar with the language, and it’s easy to see why parent support is sometimes difficult to rely on. Parental support, however, will be unattainable without expressing a significant respect for L1. One such way to show this cultural understanding would be to provide a “Word of the Day,” with the word written in several different languages. A teacher could ask a student who speaks a particular language, “How would you use this word in a sentence in (L1)?” That way students will have direct examples, not only of a word that they are supposed to learn, but maybe able to draw connections with their L1, which should help reinforce the word in their vocabulary.
If you can ensure that your classroom expectations are going to be enforced at home as well, you will spend less time on classroom management, have higher assignment turn-in rates, and students who are confident because they have undivided support in their efforts to succeed. That, I would imagine, is worth the time and cost of a parent meeting and a translator.
Being able to use SAE in one situation and their native dialect in another would be a great skill. The main example that I think of is parent involvement. If parents see their child going to school and being taught that their native dialect or language is “wrong” or “incorrect,” I can imagine it would be all the more difficult to convince parents that schooling is really as important as we say it is. If parents know, however, that the teachers are understanding of diverse cultural backgrounds, they might be more inclined to provide help where it’s needed.
Ultimately, as with any teaching method, the determining factor is the teacher. Some may find that this approach to teaching grammar and managing the classroom is worth the extra work involved for the potential benefits, while others may have comparable success with their own methods. Many of the aspects mentioned earlier can be implemented on their own, to further personalize the learning environment. If nothing else, it is clear that “there are many opportunities for knowledgeable and prepared teachers to intervene with…conscious knowledge of certain aspects of grammar, along with the ability to use and manipulate them” (2006, p.100).
TESOL Viewpoint brings alumni essays on teaching English as a second language. This viewpoint focuses on how to successfully teach grammar.